Jamdo Marketing Blog

So I got some spam mail from the guys at SocialSpark inviting me to join their new social network for bloggers. I have no idea how they got my email, but it got through the filters and I opened it. It pissed me off enough to actually click on the link and try to figure out how they got my email.

Imagine my surprise at finding a very nice (and dare I say expensive) design on the offending website. So nice in fact, that I actually decided to try and figure out what it was all about.

In effect, SocialSpark seemed to be another PayPerPost type of service allowing both bloggers and advertisers to connect. Now, I did sign up with PayPerPost back in the day, but I never felt right about taking on any jobs there so I never actually accepted any jobs from them. They were pretty clearly designed to trick Google and they kind of got off on the wrong foot by not requiring disclosure straight from the beginning. It wasn’t the sort of company I was comfortable associating my blogs with and the recent Google slap against PPP and their network of bloggers pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

So back to the SocialSpark spammers and their offering. How was this going to be any different? Well for starters SocialSpark made a big thing on their site of requiring nofollow in any links (in fact they provide the linking code for links) and full disclosure about the nature of a paid post. This is heading in the right direction in my opinion, if you are trying to keep your blog nice and whitehat. It seems they care enough about their blogging partners to try to protect them from any slap similar to the one that PayPerPost suffered. In fact, it intrigued my enough to actually sign up in order to check it all out.

Now, once you’re signed up, SocialSpark asks you to verify the ownership of your blog by placing some code on it. You can also opt to have some extra code that takes your stats into account so potential advertisers can see what they are getting. Hmm, not something I am usually interested in offering up, but what the hell? It’s a good metric for advertisers to measure the true value of a blog and I have nothing to hide. SocialSpark then does a human review of your blog to give you final approval (which is currently where Jamdo is at at the time of writing this post).

You can also put up your profile on SocialSpark and include information and tags about your niches, brands you’re interested in etc etc which is a good little opportunity to really sell yourself. This allows advertisers to know a little more about you. It also offers you the chance to presell yourself and get put infront of a wide variety of potential advertisers.

After this, you can browse through the offerings of advertisers who are looking to create some blog buzz. Some payouts seemed reasonable and others were pretty shabby. No big surprises there.

The thing that really caught my attention what that there were also jobs on offer where the payment was a return blog post ie. you blog about me and I will blog about you. That seems like a pretty good way to find other bloggers to connect with. The problem as I see it would be the quality of bloggers who you were connecting with, but SocialSpark seems to have thought of that too. Advertisers can leave feedback about the quality of the posts they receive, meaning you can also leave feedback if you swap posts with another blogger. A great way to build up (or destroy) your reputation within that community. I nice little feature as one of the main problems with PayPerPost was the absolute attrocious quality of posts that advertisers received. It really was the detritus of the inernet in many cases. At least SocialSpark seems to have realised that problem and gone some of the way towards solving it.

Members can also leave comments under each of the jobs. I guess if they get a reasonable community happening then this will help police the quality (especially of the free jobs and reciprocal blogging) of the listings as members comment on their experiences of the job.

There were also some charities asking for posts which I thought was a nice touch.

I also noticed that under each job posting were links to blog posts that were done for the job. This might be a good little opportunity for a (dofollow) backlink to your blog post. It can also give you a bit of an indication of what the quality of your competition is (remember, advertisers can leave comments on your post’s quality) so you can beat it and establish a reputation as a blogger who offers real value to advertisers.

So what’s the verdict?

Well, we really got off on the wrong foot with the spam message. I would really like to know how they got my email. Perhaps I was on the list for another of their services or something, but some indication of that would have been nice in the original email.

On the other hand, SocialSpark seems to really address a lot of the negative issues that I had with other pay-per-post services and the whole promotion of the “web 2.0″ and “community” elements of their site is not the usual hollow BS. In fact, it is done a lot better than I would have thought possible and actually has a practical reasoning behind it.

Now, I am going to give these guys a chance. An initial look at the site has me tentatively positive about its potential and I will certainly be looking at how other bloggers react to the service. I especially like the social element of possibly connecting with other bloggers and knowing enough from their feedback to know I can expect some quality.

In short, it’s worth checking out. I won’t make a final recommendation for a few months, but have a look and let me know what you think too.

NOTE: This is NOT a paid review and all links are DOFOLLOW.

Edit: I just read that the parent company (Izea) of Social Spark is also the parent company of PayPerPost. I guess that means they are reformed spammers! It also explains where they got my email address.

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I haven’t scoured around for any new blogs lately, so I thought I should get out and do a bit of scouring and well, I was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of good new blogs on affiliate marketing, blogging, web geekiness and all those things I like.

MediaScope is a new blog on the Japanese affiliate marketing industry by Tony Torres, who is the president of a company called MetaFlo Marketing out of Nagoya, Japan. One of the biggest opportunities in affiliate marketing at the moment rests with international markets (try out some foreign language ads using Adwords to see what I mean). If you are lucky enough to be bi-lingual (or have access to people who are) then you have a major advantage. Tony also offer some good advice for merchants on treating your affiliates right.This one will be worth keeping up with. (Ahem, second largest economy in the world.. ahem)

Existential Ventures is a blog by Broc Copeland which is also brand new. Broc dropped me an email last week (after reading my old post on emailing bloggers!) saying to check it out and it’s certainly worth a look. Broc has a pretty blunt way of writing that I like and he has certainly got a few interesting posts on promoting a blog like using MyBlogLog for promotion. I hope he can keep up his posting schedule and not get burnt out cos I think the blog has something good to offer.

JTJ Net is John Jordan’s blog about online marketing and is also worth a look. He is pretty frank and open about the advice he offers which is great. His advice on PPC bidding is spot on and he also has some other great posts about social bookmarking, getting traffic to your site and even incentivising affialite offers. The blog only started in February so is a little light on content, but let’s hope John keeps writing regularly.

Now, the downside of this post is that I spent a lot of time going through Technorati and only found a couple of blogs that I would bother reading again.

That is a sad thing for Technorati I guess, but damn there is some crap out there!

Let’s hope the above blogs keep you interested for a while!

Technorati Tags: blogging, affiliate marketing, marketing, blogs, marketing blogs

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Building an email list is one of the smartest things that any website owner can do.

A few weeks ago, I got in contact with an affiliate who owns a very large email list to ask her to promote one of the Merchant programs that I manage. Within 24 hours she had driven several thousand dollars in sales from a single product - all from a single email list.

I was impressed.

So impressed that it compelled me to take a closer look at one of the membership sites I belong to - one called “List and Traffic” which is run by a guy called Jimmy D. Brown.

As the name suggests, it is all about building an email list and subsequent website traffic and profitting from them both.

Now, I have been using the tips from this site for my own nefarious purposes for at least 6 months. To be blunt, Jimmy is a kickass copywriter and I regularly use tips from this site to generate my headlines for blogs and some of my Adwords campaigns. By using some of his headline tricks, I am generally able to significantly increase click through rates by around 50% on some of my Adwords campaigns (this wasn’t exactly what he had in mind when he wrote the tips, but it works for me).

Other gems on List and Traffic are geared towards building an email list quickly and effectively with small reports, incentives, paid and free traffic - in fact he seems to have a detailed system for just about every online marketing strategy I have ever used and a bunch that I haven’t. Most of these systems come in the form of unique written reports (which is what I prefer), but he also has a lot of video tutorials which seems to be what newbies prefer. There’s also a bunch of podcasts which suits me nicely so I can listen when I am on the move.

Some of the material, you will know the general principals of from reading quality sites like Copyblogger or Pay Per Click IQ, or even Jamdo, but this guy has narrowed its focus to email lists and promotion only (that’s not to say you can’t use his tips for other stuff like I have).

I must say, I would prefer to see him update the content a little more (usually it’s two or three times per week) but there are plently of archives to read through (and act on). Standards wise, I would rank him among the best for quality of written material (his writing reminds me a little of Brian from Copyblogger). The forum is not as good as some other forums, but it does have the advantage that Jimmy posts on it so you can differentiate between the experts and the loud-mouths.

All up, if you want to kickstart your list, I would say this one is worth checking out.

Further Resources:

List and Traffic

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Keeping track of your projects (blogging or otherwise) is something that is best done on a spreadsheet. Most people use Microsoft Excel, but I have taken a shine to using an online spreadsheet service called iRows.

It has most of the things you would expect in a spreadsheet program. You can lay out information complete with formulas and whatnot and each spreadsheet can have several worksheets etc. Now, if you are wondering if it is compatible with your own spreadsheet
programs then the answer is yes. iRows allows you to import xls files
and csv files which are formats that most spreadsheet programs can work
with. I tested it with some basic formulas too and there were no
problems - you can create them on iRows or import them from your
current spreadsheets.

What I like about it is the fact that it is an online application. This improves its utility for me. I can access my spreadsheets from any computer on the internet with a simple login. More importantly, I can share those spreadsheets with others and have them work on them as well by assigning access levels to specific users.

This really increases productivity for online collaborations. Used in conjunction with BaseCamp, you bassically now have the ability to have a complete online office.

I use iRows for keeping track of the finances of my blogs as well as to-do lists that I work on with my fellow blog co-owners. It is very handy, especially if you don’t want to be worrying about sending email attachments back and forth and worry about who got which version.

Some of the things I have used iRows for:

• Contact Lists
• To Do Lists
• Finance Tracking of Specific Sites
• Collaborating on all of the Above with Blogging Partners

Now, the guys at iRows also back up data everday and save it to several different machines with data encryption. That can give security freaks peace of mind.

As I said, if you use spreadsheets a lot to organise yourself (like I do),  and you would like the utility of being abl eto share real time updates with your colaborators, then this is something worth checking out.

Resources:

iRows
Basecamp

Technorati Tags: iRows, Base Camp, Web 2.0

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