Wednesday, April 09, 2008

IZEA Launches Social Spark...Great for Stay-At-Home Moooommmy Bloggers

Moooooooooooooommmmmy, this one is for you! And, whether or not you qualify as a mommy blogger, I know that almost all of you like to make a little extra money with your blog.

As most of my loyal Roxiticus Desperate Housewives readers know, I am neither a housewife nor desperate. Go ahead, turn me in to the truth in blogvertising police. I am lucky to be a full-time investment banker, a full-time moooommmmy (that is the sound my children make when our nanny needs a day off, I am on an important conference call with a client, and Zack and Cody comes to a screeching halt), and a haphazard blogger.

IZEA, the most excellent people who brought us PayPerPost, have launched a new service called SocialSpark. It feels to me like a combination of the social networking sites, where you "make friends" and can read each other's blogs, and the advertising sites like Izea's PayPerPost that match sponsors with bloggers who write about or review the advertisers' services. The SocialSpark service is still in beta, but bloggers can sign up and receive an invitation to join. There are Googlish aspects too, in that you can search SocialSpark for Roxiticus Desperate Housewives and find me!

There are at least three ways to advertise or promote your brand via SocialSpark:
  • For advertisers paying for unique sponsored posts, IZEA and Social Spark promise to deliver campaign analytics, buzz monitoring, and blog targeting.
  • An alternative to Google's AdSense or the typical pay-per-post approach, Blog Sponsorships, which also offer an adveriser campaign analytics and blog targeting, utilize SocialSpark's unique technlogy to create a "Welcome Mat" and persistent sponsorship banner. Sponsorhsips can consist of text, images or video. I ran into one on another blog that "RickRolled" me the other day. The advertiser pays per day that a select blog runs a Blog Sponsorship.
  • Sparks are free opportunities that serve as ideas for blog posts....even a blogger like Bree can create a spark to help out another blogger with writer's block.
I'm still getting used to SocialSpark's layout/web design, but the site is fun to surf around, and appears to offer bloggers like me plenty of opportunities to make a few bucks. I like this Izea company so much I had hoped to buy stock, but they don't appear to be public....then again, maybe next month you'll find me blogging about their IPO.

Sponsored by SocialSpark

3 comments:

Mariuca said...

Hey Roxy! I didn't know u're an investment banker, that sounds so cool! You must be really busy then, how do u manage ur blog? :)

LadyJava said...

Hi Roxy.. saw this post from SocialSpark.. Yeay.. I've been invited to join the program as well...yihaaa...

Matthew S. Urdan said...

I'll have to check it out. What do you think of my ecard?