Goodbye Blogrush, Hello Entrecard!

(Edited to add: this empty space is where the Blogrush widget was supposed to appear, but apparently refuses to unless it is on the sidebar... I even tried turning it back on in the sidebar and it still didn't appear in the post. Plus it added crap to the feed, doesn't pass my SQA standards!)

Last year when Blogrush debuted, the blogosphere was all abuzz with excitement about a blog promotion program aimed at increasing traffic through their widget. John Reese had a bit of a heavy handed approach where you had to place the widget high up on your site and create traffic for other blogs in order for you to get credits for your posts to run. I felt obligated to click on posts in my own widget to see what was out there and keep my credits up. And then we got a pat on our backs for making it past the 10,000 blog sweep of low quality blogs. But the proof is in the traffic. For a while, I got a few hits on my posts, but lately there has been a lot of "ice" in the buzz column. And I was getting tired coming up with killer post titles to catch people's attention. Really, I'm not about self-promotion all the time.

Mo at It's a Blog Eat Blog World recently put up a great Thursday Thirteen post about Entrecard. I had heard of it through contests where people were giving away Entrecard credits, but I just didn't get what it was all about. Mo really put it in terms that I understood and so I finally took the plunge. The first obstacle was coming up with the 125 x 125 pixel banner for the blog which I finally produced (looks easy, but trust me, was painstaking). And since I've joined, there has been at least 25 times more traffic from Entrecard than I ever got from Blogrush. Sure, people are just stopping by to drop their card, but I'm sure there are some that are taking in the sights. Plus it is a ton of fun. You get what you put into it, not what some heavy handed founder tells you should do. So come join Entrecard and check out who's featured in my queue which is always full (I feel so popular!).