Today at PostieCon Ted Murphy and Pete announced an amazing new product called SocialSpark. This has been in over 6 month of research and development and is now in a private alpha.
There is just so much to say about this massive undertaking that I simply haven’t the time to do it complete justice. I will tomorrow and on subsequent days but for now I think that you will be very very pleased with SocialSpark and what it will bring you in terms of word of mouth advertising. There is no one way to completely describe this new venture from Ted Murphy and IZEA. Simply something that cannot be completely defined in a word unless that word is WHOOOOOO!
You can go to SocialSpark right away and sign up to be notified when it launches to the world in January 2008.
In the meantime take a look at an awesome Cake Plow!
This one looks pretty interesting- if there is one thing that my beloved blog sorely needs right now, it is more advertising! I will make a mental note to follow up on Social Spark and begin tracking its progress after the launch.
Karl, hold on till January and the world of online advertising is going to be blow right apart with socialspark, it is going to be amazing. In the meantime you should sign up with PPP and get your feet wet, you have a great writing style and good content. I think you would make a great Postie.
Well, I went ahead and subscribed to the Social Spark mailing list, so I will probably be receiving information about what they have planned. I’ve been around long enough to know that most Internet advertising programs never quite live up to the hype, but perhaps this one will be different.
The PPP mention was interesting; you just happened to hit upon the topic of the fiercest debate going on in Karlonia right now- whether or not to get involved in paid posting programs. I have spent many hours over the last few months at the PPP forums, learning their rules and reading up on the latest PageRank buzz. Now that I actually have a non-zero PageRank, this opens up the possibility of earning some significant revenue here. Right now, actual revenues from Karlonia.com are practically nil; in fact, my largest income source at this point is paid surveys (pretty embarrassing, I know…), so the PPP opportunity is quite tempting.
However, from everything that I have read, the whole idea of PPP (and other similar programs) is very controversial, as many people frown on the commercialization aspects of sponsored posting and have even stated that they do not take PPP types of blogs seriously.
There is also the whole selling/buying links issue; Google reportedly has been cracking down on paid link schemes lately, and I really don’t want to worry about having my PageRank and search traffic potential penalized just because I wrote a few sponsored posts to bring in some much-needed revenue.
Therefore, at this point I am reluctant to become associated with the paid posting industry unless I manage to obtain enough regular readers that would approve of the idea or at least be OK with it.
Karl,
Those are fantastic points to consider. I think that when you see the model for SocialSpark many of those fears will go away. You might want to read up on what people are saying about SocialSpark and what it will do. One major thing is transparency to your users. Making your readers aware that posts are sponsored is being as honest and forthright as possible and SocialSpark encourages that.