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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I’m a pretty active blog reader, and I’ve been seeing this Entrecard stuff all over the web. I assumed for some reason it was a paid thing. Then Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger wrote up an interview with Entrecard’s Graham Langdon. It was a good read, and really explained what exactly Entrecard is and how it’s beneficial.

I’m a big fan of business cards in general, so the concept of online business cards intrigues me. The fact that Graham got the idea from the success of BlogRush fascinates me even more. They had a TON of problems in launching their second version and had a lot of people ditching them when no results came. I check my BlogRush almost every day, mostly out of my desire to understand the dang thing and how it’s syndicating what. I never can figure out why some posts are deemed hot and some aren’t. But I continue with the widget on my blog because I’d like to think it’s bringing me some traffic.

Entrecard, on the other hand, looks like it’s the real McCoy. It’s a pretty straightforward bartering system with Entrecard credits, and I’ve seen numerous blogs holding contests to give away points. So it’s clearly working enough for those bloggers to have so many credits that they can afford to just give them away for nothing. I also like the widget better… simple, smaller, and with the opportunity to drop your card off.

So, I’m trying out Entrecard for awhile, and I hope I will not be as disappointed with it as I was with BlogRush there for awhile. Right now I’m rockin’ a really thrown together Entrecard picture (left). I hope to put something together that really brands me once I finally find a better template for this blog.

Does anyone have any freebie Blogger templates for me?

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