My guest this week is Carrie Lauth of Natural Moms Talk Radio and Carrie Lauth.com. Carrie has been blogging for several years now and earns a good income from her efforts in the Natural Mom market. Carrie has a lot of wisdom to share with other mommy bloggers. I’m positive that you’ll enjoy this interview 
Carrie offers an affiliate program with products you could recommend on your blog.
Don’t forget to pick up Carrie’s Natural Mom Guide to Blogging too!
My Entrecard Results…
As I shared last week I opened my mind up to Entrecard and gave it a go this week on Profitable Mommy Blogging. I placed the widget on my sidebar and spent about twenty minutes a day exploring the Entrecard site, dropping my card and buying/selling ads in the Entrecard economy.
The first few days I was a bit enamored. I found some new blogs – that was the best part of the whole experience. But after that, the shine wore off the apple pretty quickly.
Take a peek at my stats…
I hope you can read the graphic above. You can see that Entrecard came in #6 for my traffic referrals with 45 visitors. Having invested approximately three hours into Entrecard, that means I worked five minutes for each visitor.
Look at #8, Problogger.com. I received 31 visitors from leaving one single comment on Darren’s blog. Since that comment took me all of two minutes to leave, so I worked about four seconds for each visitor.
Coming in at #10 is TwitterMoms. I have spent about 30 minutes at this site with 26 visitors, my time cost per visitor is just over a minute.
At #1 and #2, Twitter and StumbleUpon generate a lot of traffic for us and produce a respectable bounce rate for social media traffic sources.
Interestingly, Entrecard traffic produced the highest bounce rate. (85% of Entrecard users left the site within 60 seconds.)
I know these aren’t highly scientific results. It is only one week’s experience on one new blog – but I’ve seen enough to know that I’ll always be working harder for a visitor at Entrecard than with other more targeted activities.
So, my decision was to turn away the last few advertisers and remove the Entrecard widget from out site. I just don’t see it as being a good use of my time.
About Kelly
That’s pretty much my thoughts on Entrecard. Sure, you’ll get a lot of visits but you won’t get very many readers. I prefer a more interactive, social approach to getting traffic, not the drive-by method of EC.
I have the EC widget on my blog because if others want to use it I don’t mind letting them advertise on my site for a day. But I rarely “drop” on sites unless I’m already there and they have a widget. I don’t go hunting them down or worrying about reciprocating for everyone who drops on me. And I hardly ever bother buying spots. In fact, I’m thinking about just having a giveaway to get rid of my EC credits and removing the widget.
April´s last blog post..Six year old NPR fan
Nice interview Kelly and Carrie! In fact ther first thing I had to overcome as a natural mom in business was the fear of promoting my products and work towards making money. It sounds nuts but I wanted to be in biz without having to behave as a business person.
Monica´s last blog post..How this Ecuadorian discovered Babywearing
That’s such a great idea to figure out the time invested per visitor! I’m going to do that today. I know that I must have a million time wasters that I think will bring me tons of traffic and never result in much. I’m going to go crunch some numbers now….
Kendra´s last blog post..International Babywearing Week
I don’t really have much thoughts on Entrecard because I haven’t personally used it but just from hearing your thoughts it doesn’t sound like something I’d be interested in anyways.
Great interview with Carrie!
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I like Entrecard it increased my traffic and followers. I found a lot of interesting blogs I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
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