Spark Your Connection While Getting Paid Legally – Social Spark!
June 4, 2008, filed under News and Rumors
This article will lead you to a safer way of monetizing your blog and expanding your blogging network effectively.
SocialSpark is a powerful combo as a result of social networking features, blog monetization and traffic building mash up. Social Spark’s features allow its members to contact and comment each other, prop or drop profiles, have their latest blog post publicized in addition to various chances available to monetize their blog and gain traffic.
How does Social Spark handle all those things?
Let’s get jump to signing up to know how Social Spark does a good job managing all the features.
You can start your membership…
…as a blogger or an advertiser. Signing up is easy and you’ll be the member of the community in no time. As soon as you’re registered, you’ll have your blogger account page looks like this:
Section 1 is where people see your details. It lists all the things you’ve written about yourself for other members to know you better.
Section 2 expands to your network. Your friends are featured here as well as your most recent visitors, your last activity and other members you fave to.
Section 3 shows what other members of Social Spark have to say about you.
Section 4 contains your online assets, i.e. your blogs, your blog posts and how people can refer you to other members. To have your blog registered and available to take opportunities, you need to copy an ITK code into your blog which is a piece of cake. Then you’ll need to waut for the Social Spark staff to approve and validate your blog.
When you visit others’ profiles, you also have a choice to prop/drop their profiles and blogs. Propping is represented by a thumb up which is self explanatory to what it does, while dropping a profile/blog does vice versa. As usual, you can add other members as a friend through their profile page.
Now for the monetization part
Instead of only an additional feature, it packs as powerful as the networking feature. In fact, these opportunities are the first thing you see on the homepage, but still making the use of networking prominent.
You may want to enlarge the picture though, but here are some points that are presented on each spot:
- an opportunity section – this is where available opportunities are displayed. They are broken down to featured opportunity, the most recent and popular opportunities.
- your profile page – gives you a brief information about your profile and message notifications.
- recent comments on opportunities – the last members who left comments on opportunities are displayed here.
- last members who took opportunities – presents the last members who took an opportunity.
- featured blog and hot blogs this week – puts on show members’ blogs and lists the most visited, propped and viewed blogs.
- spotlight and IZEA’s blog post - displays a part of IZEA’s blog post as well as an opportunity.
What kinds of opportunities are there on Social Spark?
In the Sponsored Post Opportunity, a Blogger will create a unique sponsored post on his/her blog based on the guidance the Advertiser provides. The Advertiser can choose to have each Blogger include an image, video or press release along with the Blogger’s own text. The Advertiser pays per unique blog post that is created on each unique blog.
Blog sponsorships are a means by which the Advertisers to utilize SocialSpark’s unique technology to create a ‘welcome mat’ and persistent sponsorship banner on blogs. Sponsorships can consist of text, images or video. The advertiser pays per day that a select blog runs the Blog Sponsorship.
Sparks are free Opportunities that serve as ideas for blog posts. Sparks are utilized primarily by Bloggers, but may also be used by Advertisers. They offer no tracking or segmentation options.
As the article is written there are more-less 300 opportunities (30 pages with 10 opps on each page) from Sponsored Post to Sparks available for bloggers. You can get a decent amount of income through Sponsored Post and Blog Sponsorship as well as extra traffic and exposure from Spark opportunities.
Sponsored Post Dilemma
The system is good, the network works and the opportunities are endless. But those aren’t all. Social Spark recognizes the common problems with sponsored posts. Search engines hate them and blog readers loath them (unless they fall into the readers’ topic). That’s why Social Spark has their own “Code of Ethics” to maintain the relationship between bloggers, readers, search engines and advertisers. Here are their Codes taken from their page:
100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure
Your readers trust you. SocialSpark is committed to keeping it that way. That’s why we insist on a strict policy of full in-post disclosure for all sponsored posts. By receiving payment for blogging about a certain topic, even if you would have written about that topic anyway, you run the risk of giving the impression of a conflict of interest. By showing your audience, in a very visible and proactive manner, that you are being paid for that content, you will maintain the trust of your readers and avoid any appearance of impropriety.
Each sponsored post opportunity within the SocialSpark marketplace provides the blogger a small snippet of code for a Disclosure Badge. This badge protects both you and the advertiser, providing an audit-able disclosure trail that exceeds compliance standards based on FTC and WOMMA guidelines.
100% Transparency
Every participant in SocialSpark is made viewable to the public. The public can also see which bloggers are working with which advertisers on which opportunities. This is designed to keep the community honest and open about the transactions that occur. If you don’t want someone to know you are doing business with a particular advertiser or blogger, chances are you should reconsider.
100% Real Opinions
Subject to the specific agreement you form with an advertiser, you are free to write or say whatever you want. It’s up to you to pick the Opportunities that best suit you and your blog. If it doesn’t feel right, if you don’t own the product, or if you can’t be honest we ask you to pass on the Opportunity.
100% Search Engine Friendly
Each sponsored link in SocialSpark automatically carries the “no-follow” attribute so as not to affect search engine rankings. This is designed to protect bloggers and advertisers from search engine penalties based on paid linking.
So What Now?
Sign up to SocialSpark and give it a try! Make friends with bloggers and advertisers, change Sparks and reward your blog a new source of income!
Technorati Tags: social spark,paid to post,paid to blog
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