I’ve already talked long ago of how awesome I think Entrecard is.  Any free traffic source is great, let alone a free advertising medium as well.  A couple weeks ago, they got even more awesome in my eyes with the launch of their Entrecard Toolbar.

Similar to what SiteHoppin’ was offering, Entrecard has taken it upon themselves to offer a tool to allow EC users to jump from blog to blog within different categories to see what else is out there – and efficiently drop your EC card to receive credits.  I really enjoy being able to use the “Next Ten Sites” button within the toolbar to have 10 tabs open up in Firefox and be able to wander through them as I desire.

Yes, it’s great for effectively dropping ECs, but I’ve always said that I actually LIKE going around to different blogs and checking out their content, site design, what ads they’re running, etc.  So this serves that purpose as well.

This is a screen shot of my toolbar right now – I just went and spent all my saved EC’s on ads so I’m starting from scratch.  It doesn’t take up a lot of room at all, and offers you different choices of category to browse within and different ways to order the results: Most popular, Newest, Cheapest, Most expensive, Most advertised, and Random.  The final benefit – and best – is that while you’re surfing these blogs the toolbar updates to tell you how many ECs an ad on that site costs, if you already have an advert in the queue for that site, and allows you to purchase adverts by clicking on the button that shows the price.  You can also add the blog to your favorites site by clicking on the heart.

The only downside to the toolbar is that it’s a toolbar.  Sounds weird, I know, but what I mean is that I have two other toolbars and I can’t toggle this one on or off like the StumbleUpon toolbar to save screen space.  This isn’t a problem for me, but currently the toolbar only runs on Firefox 3 as an add-on, so anyone still using Internet Explorer to switching over to Google’s new browser Chrome will have to do things the old fashion way!  This is the first release of the toolbar with a second beta release out now, so hopefully in future releases they’ll address the browser compatibility issue.

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First, the history. If you’ve listened to my evangelism regarding Entrecard, you’ve signed up. No doubt, you’ve looked around and perhaps stumbled upon a site called SiteHoppin – View the web like an iPod. When I first found this site, they enabled visitors to quickly browse websites by categories and offered various Entrecard categories that included only websites that were members of the Entrecard network. There were other “Entrecard browers” out there that did similar things, but the feature that set SiteHoppin on my favorites list was the slideshow feature. You set how many seconds you want to view each page for then hit go – the page automatically refreshed after that time to another random website within that same category.

Clearly, the main goal of a service like this is to drop Entrecards on other blogger’s widgets as efficiently as possible to rack up Entrecredits to advertise on more blogs. But I saw a less selfish goal of this as well – expanding my horizons within the blogosphere. Sure I saw a lot of the same websites day after day to drop my card at, but more often than not I found new blog that I could learn from. Whether or not the blog actually interested me, I could learn through their experiences. I’d look at their site designs, how they used links, what widgets or gadgets they used (heck, that’s how I found Entrecard in the first place), and also paid close attention to their coding flaws to pick up some “don’ts” for my mental blog SOP.

The best part about the slideshow feature was that I could set it for a decent time (15 seconds was my average) and just hit GO and let the blogs refresh over my lunch hour as I sat in front of the computer with one hand near the mouse to click on the drop widget and my lunch in the other. Multitasking is a wonderful thing. I could always hit the stop button if there was something that caught my interest enough to read longer than 15 seconds.

Those days, apparently, have come to an end.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that the slideshow feature was gone. Boo! It wouldn’t be nearly as efficient for me to continually have to click the TagHop button to refresh to another site every time, but it was better than nothing. After visiting their blog for more information, I’ve come to find that on 5/2 they removed it to assist with the beta testing of their new Firefox toolbar. Just the other day, I realized that from the main SiteHoppin’ page, the browser was still available but ALL the Entrecard categories were gone. I went to their blog for more information and all I found was a post on the 29th that the Entrecard categories were gone during some rebranding efforts they’re undertaking, but not mention as to whether or not they’d be back.

So for now, their efficiency is nil. The aforementioned toolbar is still in private beta testing, so until they’re done with the testing I can’t have the toolbar to increase efficiency and we’re not getting our slideslows back. I can’t even find anywhere to sign up to request an invite. According to their video posted on the 25th, they’re changing the focus to online bookmarking. They describe how the new and improved service will differ from del.icio.us by saying you can hop from one bookmark to another, one tag to another to browse your bookmarks. What the SiteHoppin’ team seems to forget is that StumbleUpon already has that capability, as well as the capability to browse random sites. The only thing they don’t have is an Entrecard category.

So ultimately, unless they bring the Entrecard categories back along with the slideshow feature, they’ll just be another StumbleUpon. And SU works fine all by itself for me.

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One of my favorite free tools ever sadly went down all weekend due to a fire at their host company The Planet, but they’re BACK! Surviving a shutdown of 9000+ servers, Entrecard is back up and running. Many veteran bloggers speculated that perhaps the users of Entrecard rely to heavily on the site for their traffic after traffic bottomed out with EC, as it’s lovingly known, went down. Old hat’s in this game will recognize that the key is moderation… EC is a terrific tool to assist in blog traffic, but it’s even better than that.

Creating their own currency called EntreCredits, creator Graham Langdon took the vCard to the next level. An Entrecard, for those not in the know, is a 125×125 advertisement displayed in a widget on a blog’s website. You purchase 24 hours of advertising space on the blog of your choice with entrecredits. You earn entrecredits by dropping your virtual business card on other blogs with the EC widget and by other users dropping their cards on your blog and purchasing ad space on your blog.

I can personally attest for the traffic driving power that is Entrecard. Not only will you receive traffic from other users coming to your site directly from the EC interface, but of course the visitors to the blogs you advertise on click on your ads there to go directly to your website. In the last month, Entrecard referrals directly from the ec website and from ad spots I’ve “purchased” are the top 2 traffic sources for this blog.

The second traffic source there is from the ad widgets that are on the member’s websites. This is a great traffic source that’s totally free. If you do want to invest some money into it, you can purchase entrecredits from other users. Rates are set by those members that choose to sell them. The easiest way to get entrecredits to purchase ad space is to drop your EC on other blogs. You can drop up to 300 per day, so get started and drop on my blog! Rack ‘em up.

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