Is EntreCard A Bust?

This is a serious question for other bloggers and web people. I want to know your real experiences with EntreCard. For those of you who don’t know, you can see the EntreCard widget off on the left-hand side of my page. It is the square box with a picture in it and a yellowish gold bar across the bottom and an “E” in the corner. Think of it as a business card fishbowl for bloggers, much like the business card fishbowl at your local restaurant. Is EntreCard a Bust?

Now, my question for the EntreCard members out there is this – has it done you any good? Have you looked at your traffic or income since you started using it and done any analysis. For my part, I have made a couple of interesting acquaintances through it, seen far too many “Make Money Now” and “Help Me Make A Fortune” websites, seen a lot of widgets with half naked girls on them that have nothing to do with the content of the blog, and gotten a small but non-sustainable bump in traffic. That is about it unfortunately. I was really hoping it would turn into something more, and maybe it will over time, but right now it seems to be just so much spinning of the wheels.

When I go back and really analyze the traffic I am getting from EntreCard most of it is a quick hit for someone to drop their card and move on. They don’t go to multiple pages. They don’t comment. They don’t click on ads or subscribe to my RSS feed. The EntreCard traffic is empty calories. In other words, I get a nice rush that gets my traffic stats up a bit, but no lasting nutritional value.

So, when I compare both the value to my site and the value to myself of EntreCard versus searching out other people’s blogs and leaving serious comments, the result is obvious. Instead of clicking through EntreCard and going to hundreds of blogs per day that aren’t really of interest or in my subject area, I need to go through and only hit the ones in my group that I would have wanted to find without EntreCard. Steve Whitehead’s Inspiring Quotes is one of those. So are ProBlogger, Eavesdropping On Life, and a few others. But in general, the whole drop 300 cards per day just doesn’t seem to work for me.

As always, that is just my opinion and I could be wrong. And things may change over time too. So please, let me know what you think and what you advice is. Is EntreCard working for you?