Gathering Information on Technology, Software & Processes making life Easier & Better. Extensive Reviews & tutorials on MindManager from Mindjet & Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 from Nuance, a great voice recognition program enabling me to type at 150 wpm! One helps me think & communicate, the other helps me document & communicate!
For publisher, web masters and blogger, it is easy to install a little bit of Adsense code and install it on a web page.
For advertisers its a different story. It takes a little more know how and experience to run a successful PPC campaign.
I personally advise that new advertisers start very small and get some experience with the system. Do not expect big results from starting small, look at it more like paying for a lesson in navigating Google’s Adwords program or Yahoo!’s publisher program.
Once you have a feel for how to navigate things and purchase advertising campaigns then you will be ready for some more advanced options.
In that regard I’d recommend doing some additional web research to get your bearings. A good place to start to get the overview is the Beginner’s Guide to PPC Management. Its a free white paper. Its not a download its just a web page
This guide can help you get started and focused in the right direction and you can expand from there. If you represent a large company looking to run a major advertising campaign, then I recommend hiring a Pro SEM marketing company that specifically specializes in PPC campaigns. Regardless, before you hire the pro I do think its good to get a feel for how these things work so that you can better understand the parameters and the work involved.
This understanding will help you ask better questions and scope out the job more appropriately.
Blogitive has been working on some upgrades to their system. Blogitive is one of the oldest paid to blog companies on the internet. They have been running for approximately 18 - 24 months, outdaing PayPerPost by an easy 6 months, possibly 12 months, despite PayPerPost’s achievements at attracting investment dollars.
Blogitive has been working to upgrade their system adding a directory to allow advertisers to pick bloggers, blog by blog (as best as I can understand this program that is). If this is truly how it works, then it will be somewhat similar to the business plans first offered by ReviewMe, and then emulated by SponsoredReviews. Blogitive launched their next, but PayPerPost followed a few weeks later and seems to have launched a little faster, that $10 million dollar of investor capital has to be good for something, right?
See How to Setup a Blogitive Directory
Blogitive’s upgrade has brought their operations to a slow down this week. Their ad placements came to a halt about 7 days ago. They were running an approval backlog with bloggers dating back 2-3 weeks at that time for most bloggers with a few bloggers claiming a backlog of over a month and one claiming a backlog dating back to March.
Without approvals there is no payment, and payments were delayed as well as a result. A few partial payments trickled out last Monday for some bloggers including myself. Then everything was silent for several days with rumors that payments would start again after the upgrade on Friday.
Friday was yesterday and the new rumor was that it would be the middle of next week.
Today we saw some progress. A few advertisements were approved. Payments have not gone out yet as its Saturday and the PayPal processing probably will not kick in until Monday. Some bloggers still have a backlog of approvals so maybe Blogitive will continue to put in some overtime this weekend. They have been known to work around the clock seven days a week.
Today also saw the launch of a new theme for the site, once you are logged in. The external theme remains the same. Internally you get the same data, but its overlayed within a new theme. The look and feel is nice but would look nicer without the backlog.
PayPerPost and PayU2Blog also both launched new themes on their sites as well within the last month. PayU2Blogs new theme came with new functionality, or maybe a better way to describe it is that it came with functionality as their online system had almost no functionality before (it was email based to the bloggers running on what appeared to be an Access database in the background).
PayPerPost rolled out new functionality including PayPerPost Direct and added in a number of upgrades to their system, which always causes a major production full of problems and stress. Watching PayPerPost go through an upgrade is very similar to watching Microsoft come out with a new Operating System upgrade. You know you will get more once its out, you know it will crash things initially and be full of bugs, but they are the 800 lb gorilla for now and so you go with the flow.
Another paid to blog company PayU2Blog experienced a slow down in payments this week as well. Their slow down only last about 3-4 days and related to an issue with PayPal that was rapidly resolved.
The key thing to note about this is that PayU2Blog was very agressive about keeping the blogging talent informed about the slow down, while Blogitive has barely provided a response to anyone, and nothing official published on their site nor any other forums or blogger hubs.
PayU2Blog, which is only a few months old as a paid to blog company, definitely gets an A for communications and is rapidly becoming one of Bloggers favorite paid to blog organizations, largely for utilizing a business model that is in fact a clone of Blogitive’s model from over a year ago. Blogitive used to pay bloggers to include a keyword and a link and the bloggers could write anything they liked. It was basically an inline text link ad inserted manually.
Blogitive now requires write ups that are focused on press release provided by their clients. These often get widely circulated and end up sounding very similar. PayU2Blog has revived the freeform inline keyword business model and is thriving.
PayPerPost has continued to evolve over the last few months continually adding things to meet advertiser demand. It has grown the company into something that is more and more corporate and less and less ‘blogger’. Its a similar path that the older but less funded Blogitive has traveled. PayPerPost and Blogitive could have learned a lesson from PayU2Blog.
When you start trying to please everyone, you please no one. When they try and be everything to every advertiser, they end up losing site of the important element in the equation. The blogger talent!
There is a fine line between a talented blogger and a person running a program to randomly generate blog posts to throw them out on the web and provide one way links. When you do not cater to the talent, you are left with the robots.
PayPerPost is not in trouble yet. Blogitive is not in trouble yet either. However, both are missing their potential if they do not take note of this lesson and act on it. Its very important to listen to advertisers as they are the ones buying the service. The thing is blogging is more art than service, more freeform than reporting, and when you attempt to regiment that type of thing, you lose the art, you lose the freeform, you lose the interest of the talent, and eventually you lose the advertisers all together.
Then there is the LinkyLoveArmy. What they are doing is anybody’s guess, but it looks like they are going to try and sell 1 million Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows books amng other things, oh and of course, they launched a new theme for their site too!
Payperpost recently announced that they have initiated a new program that allows advertisers to go directly to bloggers and solicit sponsored articles. PayPerPost is essentially emulating a line of business that already exists with several payperpost competitors such as Reviewme and Sponsoredreviews, even Blogitive has a mechanism now that enables a more direct approach between advertisers and bloggers.
This new line of business is not a replacement of the old Payperpost line of business and it shouldn’t be viewed as such.
There are times when advertisers needed and want to selectively pick individual blogs or bloggers to cover an article or a website or a product with a sponsored review. There are also times when advertisers do not want to waste the time hunting through individual websites looking for just the right match.
There’s two ways to build buzz.
The first way is to utilize a shotgun approach and blast out a sponsored review request across multiple categories of blogs. This opens up things to all comers and you don’t always get exactly what you looking for in the final blog. However you don’t have to spend much time organizing the campaign and you do get immediate benefits and page rank and in traffic. Plus, the results are almost immediate as the first bloggers available typically pick up these requests and write them.
The second way is to go selectively find those exact blogs that contain either the readers or the writing perspective that you looking for. You can then choose like an ala carte menu each blog that you would like to solicit to write a sponsored review. This is excellent if you have a very tight niche and you want to focus only on that niche and you don’t want to stray from the path. This does take more time to find the blogs and more times for the bloggers to complete the articles as they may not be ready to write when you first place an order. However you will stand a better chance of reaching the ears and eyes of specific consumers that you’re hoping to attract or impress.
Payperpost definitely offers a discounted opportunity to reach bloggers utilizing their tools. Their rates are some of the lowest in the industry and with this new direct model probably the lowest in the industry outside of individual contractors in the SEO field. Payperpost basically only takes 5% on the transaction for a direct purchase, that means when you purchase a campaign to payperpost direct the lion share of the fund your pain are going to bloggers that are writing your sponsored review.
It’s a very efficient model and payperpost is definitely benefiting from their large economy of scale. Regardless this is a separate line of business and will probably not reach the level of success but payperpost has attained when they allow advertisers to reach out in a shotgun fashion across multiple categories. That is still the fastest way to generate buzz rapidly and benefits through search engine optimization results.
Together both of these lines of business will help make payperpost stronger.
For many months now I have been counseling, coaching, mentoring, recruiting and acting as a guru for people that are looking to learn how to Make Money Blogging. Initially when I started blogging, I started blogging to learn how to perform several different web design functions. I used some of my early blogs to express myself in writing in part and in part to use some of my blogs that are no longer in existence as guinea pigs to learn and do new web design things.
I rapidly learned that many people make a very good living from running websites. Initially I started utilizing Google adsense and I thought, “Could it be possible that I can make money from Google ads and actually fund a company?”
The answer is that you could, but you could also possibly get rich selling Amway. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s probable or that it’s going to work for most people.
Not too long later I found several ways that people can earn money by blogging that are relatively easy and fairly straight forward. Plus, they do not require a great deal of time to transpire before you earn money for your efforts.
Back in the days of three television networks, TV announcers and hosts like Johnny Carson would provide product endorsements. Bloggers today can provide endorsements or even provide anti-endorsements and earn money from their efforts. On the Internet the axiom that all publicity is good publicity definitely holds true in the blogosphere. A single mention of a company or website that includes the URL to their website is valuable.
From that simple concept, an industry has been growing and growing that helps bloggers earn money up front for creating value by writing on their blogs and developing their blogs in exchanging links and references for cash. It’s very simple it’s very straightforward and it allows almost anyone to start writing a blog as a hobby and rapidly fund their hobby. Eventually they might even choose to turn a hobby into a business but in the meantime you can definitely pay for the gas in your car or pay for dinner at a fancy restaurant several times a week.
No one has figured out this conundrum yet, but everyone is chasing after the new holy grail of Internet 2.0 Advertising, the contextually placed video advertisement.
What is it?
Basically, a computer program that would be able to view a video online, and Figure out what that video is about and then place a relevant advertisement in, below, before, after or in the middle of that video automatically.
No one has figured it out, not even those supposed genious types at Google. They just don’t make PhD’s the way they used to . . .
