Yesterday, I posted
a review of Entrecard strategies as described by other bloggers. There is very little said about how to increase your reciprocal drops. I present here a simple system. Please help your fellow Entrecarders by letting them know about this guide by linking to
http://tech.islesv.net/2008/05/how-to-increase-entrecard-reciprocal.htmlThe goals of dropping
Entrecards this way are the following:
- gain maximum credit increase from dropping cards (thus we must be able to do 300 drops)
- gain maximum credit increase from reciprocal drops (thus we must eliminate from the system those who are just there for the view and won't reciprocate: ideally we should get a return drop for every drop that we make)
These two goals must be achieved within a reasonable length of time, and with the twin stipulations that we do not violate
Entrecard's TOS and we maintain the idea of Entrecard as Business Card 2.0: although our main goal is increasing credits, community is more important.
The process may take a long time because of slow page loading, intrusive scripts, or misplacement of widget. Slow loading could be caused by any or all of the following: slow server, excessive size of page, high number of called external scripts, and use of music. Intrusive scripts could include interstitial ads, popups, and popunders. Misplacement of the widget could either be wrong placement so that it is below the fold and the visitor must scroll down or placing it along other 125x125 ads thus making it harder to see readily.
For sites which always reciprocate, we may excuse some of the failures enumerated in the previous paragraph. For sites which do not reciprocate, we do not see any use for continuing to visit the site if it will just make our life more difficult.
Definitely we need the technique outlined
here: we have to use Firefox bookmarks. Opening pages from the Entrecard drops inbox would simply be too time consuming.
The basic problem is how to efficiently determine who had returned your drop. There is no programmatic way to retrieve your droppers for a given day, except perhaps to create a Python script which will log in to your Entrecard account and download and parse your drops inbox page by scraping (which I suspect is a violation of Entrecard's TOS). Although you can
get a list of your latest Entrecard droppers via an RSS feed, only the last 50 droppers are included in the feed.
My strategy here is not to test everybody everyday (thus I shelved the idea of having a checklist that this site had reciprocated today, and this did not, with the stipulation that after three days of nonreciprocal dropping I will stop dropping on the site). We only need to test a portion of
our drop list each day. The strategy can be described as follows:
- Divide your drop list into groups with each group having the same number of sites. The issue to focus on this decision is the maximum number of sites which your Firefox installation could open still efficiently. A typical value is 6 to 10 sites in a bookmark folder; below 6 there are too few, above 10 there are too many.
- Delete the sites in the first group. The second group now becomes the first group, the third group second, etc. (But read below.)
- Drop on all sites in your drop list.
- The next day, look at your unreciprocated drops in your inbox ("Cards you haven't drop on"). Put all these sites in the last group.
- Repeat steps 2-4.
Using this method, we are able to get rid of those who won't reciprocate and retain those which do. However, the strategy is far from perfect. For example, a nonreciprocating site will enjoy drops for some days, until its group is up for review. Also, a wise Entrecarder who knows that an Entrecarder is using this strategy will know when his group is up for review: his drop is not reciprocated.
The first concern can be addressed by having a shorter review cycle, that is, a site in the drop list must be reviewed within a time long enough for the strategy to be worth keeping but short enough that the site does not enjoy too much free drops. I set seven days as my review cycle - this means that if you drop on me, and you are not really a reciprocating dropper, you will receive six more drops from me before I discover that you are a fraud :) If you set a shorter review cycle, you need to review more groups per day; the number of groups that you have to review each day is equal to the number of groups divided by the length of the review cycle, rounded up.
The second concern is actually a good indicator that that Entrecarder is consistently dropping his card on you: how could he have known that his drop is not reciprocated?
If you have questions and clarifications regarding this strategy, feel free to comment.
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) and dropping your card on them (i.e. clicking on their Entrecard widget). You also earn credits when other bloggers go to you and drop their cards on you.
