Last week I wrote about why the Inbox is bad for Entrecard. What I didn’t talk about is what should replace it. Sure, lists of bookmarks like mine work great, but what about bloggers without lists? People have come to expect some type of guide on whom to drop. Read on for my solution.
Currently the inbox shows who recently dropped cards on your site. Bad, Bad, Bad. Why not replace it with the last 300 people who updated their blog? WTF? Yes, overwhelming, isn’t it? What difference would this have?
- Sploggers would have to actually update their content. Tough to do when you haven’t updated in months and have multiple blogs. Drop all you want, but no more reciprocating.
- Those who blog regularly will receive the most clicks. Hopefully it will be quality articles and not mindless 1 sentence updates. I see people whining about being “forced to blog”, but shouldn’t you be blogging regularly anyway?
- It gives you a reason to visit blogs other than credits. If you haven’t added new content, what’s the point of visiting your blog? Oh that’s right, we established a mindless traffic exchange; Now I remember. You drop on me, I drop on you, and nobody reads.
- I don’t really care who dropped on me. As long as a considerable amount of people do, I’m happy. I’m even happier when I recognize the names and they leave a comment. No forced comments, that’s stupid, just honest comments.
- You could rank the order of each niche on a scale of 1-10. Then recent updates in your favorite niche would appear first, and your least favorite niche last. This way you get to read more targeted articles.
- If actually having to write sucks that badly, you can still advertise to get hits. Oh yeah, we still get those credits, right?
Those who really want to know who visits and who doesn’t, look at your comments! :) You could check profiles of members to see how often they visited you in the last 30 days. Maybe Entrecard could even expand the list of top droppers, so you don’t have to go through all the labor I do to see how often people stop by. If your RSS feed doesn’t work quite right, or you have none, there could be a manual way to enter your latest headline. So how about it? Better, worse, or you don’t care? Just make sure the gold box says “Thanks!” before closing this page.
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23 users commented in " Entrecard’s Stinky Inbox: Part 2 "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback **********Yes, I agree. I did read your post and I see that so many “bloggers” are just making a place to put adds and saying nothing. I find this irritating.
You have really great suggestions, especially #1 on your list (I hate sploggers!).
Excellent posts Turnip, both part one and part two. You brought some fantastic points, I hadn’t thought about until now.
I think I may have played into the “guilt factor” and frankly it’s been killing me. Then my computer went haywire and I lost all of my bookmarks. I’m presently working on another one, so I read your post in the nick of time.
Thanks again, as always, for your help~
I hope you’re having a nice evening. :))
Ann
I like it. I could see people complaining that it’s not updating but it would get out splogs so that’s great.
Great post. I am new to entrecard and although I do drops regularly I alos comment on a few blogs daily and click the odd ad I find interesting as I know the work involved for everyone.
OMG! what a concept — drop on blogs that have updated content!!??!! How revolutionary! That means I might be at the top of a list and we could NEVER have that!
Unfortunately, my perception of Entrecard’s golden morals has tarnished over the past few months. I’m hanging in because I do get traffic from it which helps me bring in a few dollars a month to offset my gas and electric bills, but do I foresee them embracing this idea and running with it? No. I don’t.
Sploggers have too much influence with Graham — as long as they aren’t trying to game the system, they have the upper hand. He mentions someone with 20+ blogs listed on a fairly regular basis and that person posts in the forums pretty regularly.
While it’s a wonderful idea, and one that I would embrace wholeheartedly, I am so doubtful it would ever happen.
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Turnip, there are many things that entrecard could do. I agree about the in box. I too doubt that this would happen. I have my lists of blogs I not only drop on but actually read. Imagine that concept. There are things Graham could do. This may be free as far as money goes, but what about the sweat equity?
I can certainly see something like a list of updated blogs as a useful tool, but only if they paired it with the niche ranking you suggested. If they intend on keeping the inbox, I would like to see a mouseover function where it automatically displays how many times in the past 30 days that blogger has dropped on you. It would save some time and grief and help me to better distinguish between regular visitors and sploggers.
What kind of record does EC have with regards to taking suggestions offered by their users?
Gargantua, Excellent idea. That way people that “update for the sake of the inbox” wouldn’t get very far either. As for them taking suggestions, they used to have open chats where suggestions were implimented on the spot. Then they had a controversy by changing the amount of drops spammers could drop per day per account.
The gold box says “Awesome” right now.
You’ve made some fine suggestions! I am so sick and tired of reciprocating on splogs just because they are in my inbox. The porny “blogs” are disgusting, too.
For some reason, I’m not too fond of drop lists. I like to explore new blogs, and don’t want to get into a drop-list rut. But I love the idea of a list that shows updated blogs!
yep, the guilt factor kept me from doing what I thought of doing when I first saw the campaigns screen on entrecard. this was a more interesting alternative to the inbox — how did these blogs get to be so popular and so expensive to advertise on? maybe I can learn something from them … I do my first drops on my top ten because they’re already linked on my sidebar, but after that I head off to the campaigns page.
Love love love your ideas! I actually love to read blogs, so I’d LOVE a way to have blogs with fresh content without having to hunt them down. And I update nearly every day, so it would be nice to have some “reward” for that.
your right on about the entrecard inbox. before I used to regularly drop from the my inbox but i wasn’t getting much from it.. and i’ve almost memorized those who don’t bother updating in weeks..
im now going with my own bookmarks and drop from the campaigns tab. brings more results for me and more interesting things to see..
nice post! cheers!
I’m with pinaywife. Much better results with my own bookmarks and there are much more interesting places to visit. Entrecard is not the way to go. Not for me anyway.
Well, the inbox has always been my least favorite feature of Entrecard only because it was never view-friendly from the beginning. Early on, I just ignored it and, instead, dropped via bookmarks and chain dropping.
Your suggestion, my friend, is a good BAND-AID to the current setup but it doesn’t strike me as a full-fledged solution because it’s pretty well known to me, and in certain circles, that sploggers have ridiculously easy access to auto-post scripts.
Faster than you can blink an eye, they’ll be auto-updating faster than you, me or anyone else properly updates and things will be even worse off than before.
Want me to prove it?
I suppose, since those blogs that have new content are fed to the welcome page, we could all drop from there……
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Margaret: I do get caught up sometimes in reading the entry page before the forums. But there are only 10 blogs there, from all categories.
Sam: I’m aware it’s only a bandaid, but sometimes a bandaid is what is needed. Mods could catch the obvious autoposters if that became an issue. The main goal of my suggestion was to free members of the guilt created from not reciprocating, not to eliminate splogs. The fact my idea might force them to do more work may even discourage some of them.
I have been trying to think of ways to improve Entrecard and this is one of the best solutions I have heard. I think it is stupid that I have to feel obligated to drop on another blog just because someone dropped on me.
Why are you in Entrecard? Is it to get new traffic or to get exposure to your blog or to get the same 300 visitors every single day?
As Sam says you can always game a computer system, but then again the system is being gamed right now, too.
Hey Sir Turnip! I think your 125×125 will look quite nice on my blog. Thanks for advertising. I had steamed turnip for dinner last night and thought of you.
I really like the idea you have. I’ve never been a power dropper and not really even a reciprocal dropper, I have the blogs I like over time.
So when is this big EC change going down???
Your suggestions would be great to implement. Hmm, anyone know any coding?
I haven’t been a regular dropper in quite some time now because it was taking too much time away from other activities that were earning money.
I like the idea of seeing recently updated blogs. As I return drops from the in box, I notice a lot that aren’t updated. It seems this would be a good way to encourage regular blogging.
I think this is a great idea, although I worry about spammers catching on. You’d need someone to stomp on the automatic post generators hard.
And then there are sites that do nothing more than scrape the RSS from other sites… I don’t think I’ve seen those on EC however. Although sometimes they are quite sneaky….
I drop from the campaign section of the site because it offers the largest variety in search options. When I drop from my inbox, I feel bad that I’m not exploring new blogs, just dropping cards on the same blogs that I always do… blah… no fun in that. I am starting to shift more in dropping in blogs that I like and refraining from doing so in blogs that just plain “don’t have it.”
I am always using the search feature to find something new!
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