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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