By now you must have seen the Entrecard widget on many sites around the net.

I won’t get into the details of how this blog resource works but basically you create a 125×125 card (think of it as a business card or calling card) and drop it onto the entrecard widgets on other people’s sites. You get entrecard points for every card you drop and I think for cards that are dropped onto your widget (?). You can use these points to buy the ability to display your card on someone else’s widget for a 24 hour period. The amount of points this advertising costs depends on how many cards are queued up waiting to be displayed.

Some people think the whole process is a waste of time. After all, many people just go a-card-dropping without staying to read your content. I do it. This drives up your page impressions and if you are using adsense it will decrease your click through rate.

On the other hand I like Entrecard because I have discovered some new sites who are (surprise, surprise!) interested in networking and are very open to blogroll link exchanges. The increased traffic has not hurt my overall click through rate yet.

I started out with the intention of just having an Entrecard. I figured I would just drop it whenever I naturally came across a site that displayed the Entrecard widget. But what I discovered was the “you drop, I follow” movement. Sounds kind of creepy, doesn’t it? Actually, it is rather addicting. When someone drops a card on you, you drop one back as a sign of reciprocation and appreciation.

After doing this for a week or so, I am finding this to be a bit of a time commitment. I have it down to a science though. Once a day I go to my drops inbox for the previous day. I click “open in a new tab” on each drop from the previous day and return all my drops. Very tedious. I wish there was a way to just select all the previous days Entrecard drops and then click open in new tab and all of the sites would open up. Maybe there is and I just don’t know how to do it yet.

Any time saving insights when it comes to Entrecard would be helpful!

Update: for you eagle eyed visitors, I don’t have the Entrecard widget on this site but rather display it on my parenting advice site. You can now have more than one Entrecard but one is all that I can handle at this point in time.