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!

Page Popularity for Site: 22% [?]

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.

1. 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. 
2. 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.

Page Popularity for Site: 24% [?]

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  . . .

Page Popularity for Site: 20% [?]

I have been using a number of tools to test my websites, web pages and web designs for several years now.  I keep a long list of these tools in my bookmarks in my browser.

For about a year now I have been meaning to organize these bookmarks and write up an article to share the list and the tools with other web designers, programmers, web masters and or bloggers.  I just never got around to it.

Fortunately, on the internet no great idea remains unique for very long.

Aviva Directory put together a list of 31 website tools that happens to include all of the tools on my goto list plus a half dozen more that I wish I had had a year ago.

Accessibility

In particular they have an excellent section of tools listed covering accessibility.  In the United States website accessibility has not been a major concern.  However, in the United Kingdom its actually the law.

I have a number of readers and visitors from the UK and upgrading and improving my sites to comply with accessibilty requirements is one of my major goals for 2007.

Not only is it good for SEO and good for compliance, but its good for your readers.  I don’t think any website owner or bloggers wakes up and thinks to themselves, “I’d like to make my site less accessible today.”

Browser Simulators

I’ve used a number of browser simulators over the years but I also really liked the concept of Browsershots, which takes snapshots of your website rendered on several different browsers.

Missing Tools

The article definitely covers its bases, but I’d probably also throw in some type of keyword density tool.  I’m always looking for a better tool in this regard, but I do regularly use a tool from SearchEnginePromotionHelp.com (yeah its a long domain name, but that doesn’t bother me if the tools work).

Page Popularity for Site: 19% [?]

Recently Mindjet announced the upcoming release of their latest MindManager Version, MindManager Pro 7. MindManager has been utilizing beta testers for the last several months. I queried the MindManager Group at Yahoo! to ask how many people from this group had participated in the beta program.
Several of the responses from members indicated that they had agreed to an NDA with Mindjet that they understood would prevent them from confirming or denying their participation in the beta program. At first I took that for what it was and recognized that these members did not want to harm Mindjet nor breach the NDA. That is very positive and speaks to the loyalty of MindManager users to Mindjet, a loyalty that I share I might add.

I then considered that Mindjet is working very hard, now, to generate buzz about their new version and simultaneously push sales for the Month of May on their old version. People that buy now will get an upgrade to the new version when its available at the end of May.

***Please note I am a MindManager reseller, but I do not advise that you buy it from me. You can get better buys elsewhere on the internet. The channel pricing structure in place does not allow me to be competitive in my pricing of MindManager products any longer. I am considering the removal of these products from my own business, but have not done that yet.

Beta Testing Confidentiality Vs. Rollout Promotion of New Product

It would seem that Mindjet has come to be in a position where their loyal beta testers are attempting to protect the company based on an NDA that Mindjet required. These same beta testers would normally be the promoters and evangelists and word of mouth front line for the product. However, they now have the perception that they are legally compelled not to discuss the new product! That could be great from an information control perspective but its definitely not good from a marketing perspective.

So I re-read the NDA and it does not prevent participants from stating that they were involved in the Beta testing. It does prevent people from sharing their experiences or knowledge gained from the beta participation.

As the MM7 release was built for the Office 2007 standard (essentially a beta itself), I would think that Mindjet would want to utilize as many beta testers as possible and especially those from the Yahoo! MindManager Group community that is one of the largest mindmapping communities open to the public. As Mindjet has essentially a beta(MM7) to work with a beta(Office 2007) on an existing OS and on a beta OS (Vista), it would seem that they could use all the beta testing help they could get. This prompted my initial question to the group.

Therefore, as I read everyone’s responses regarding the NDA, it struck me that Mindjet’s beta testing for MM7 and the perceptions that beta testers were not allowed to discuss MM7 may have had a chilling effect on the Yahoo MindManager forum over the last few months. If forum members engage in a project that does not allow them to discuss the topic of the forum, that seems to harm the community a bit. As this community involves the sharing of best practices and many other nuances of mindmapping and MindManager in particular, it strikes me that this same movement has probably harmed Mindjet as well. Essentially, Mindjet’s beta program has served to halt conversation about Mindjet products as it relates to knew innovations and possibly new best practices.

Transparency vs Secrecy in Business

Now, anyone that reads my blog probably is aware that I do not subscribe to the Apple theory of doing business in an information void contained by complete and total secrecy. I think that business is best served when people and stakeholders operate transparently and communicate.

In fact, this is one of the great benefits of mindmapping. It helps people to share information transparently faster, easier, more efficiently and with less obfuscation by data or lists of facts. So it strikes me, that our group has essentially been silenced a bit by the company we all evangelize and promote at a time when they need us to talk about their product and share more information with each other and with new potential users.

Please understand I am not trying to be critical of any members in the Yahoo! MindManager group. I can definitely understand the perception around the NDA, but I did want to remark on the unintended consequences of the beta program. There are some very good reasons why a beta program might be covered under an NDA, some of which have been mentioned in recent replies such as

• Helping to set user expectations for the actual product to be rolled out as opposed to options tested and held back
• Not airing complaints about bugs identified during testing that may have not been fixed in the beta testers desired way in the final version
• Not sharing information that might be used or stolen by competitors

These are all important items to manage during a beta program. However, these items should not not take place in a way that

• Silences product evangelists from discussing the product
• Stops or hinders product buzz and word of mouth promotion
• Prevents collaborative discussion of the beta such that users can share insights into the product providing Mindjet with a better understanding of the scope of an issue or opportunity
• Creates an artificially created information void at the time the product is launched or announced by silencing beta users from sharing their experience (As an example consider how compelling some ‘behind the scenes’ features are for some movies, and how these are used to market a movie product and get people to buy or watch a movie.)

At a minimum it would seem that Mindjet needs to find a middle ground on this issue either now or in the future. If they must operate in secrecy behind an NDA, then they need to balance that with the ability to allow their beta testers to transform from a free testing resource over to a free marketing and word of mouth evangelism resource. They could attempt to prevent product evangelists from participating in the beta program, but that would remove some of the most experienced MindManager gurus from providing help and guidance in developing a better product. They need the beta testing help of this community, but they also need the voice of the community.

I’d suggest that they would even benefit from the perceived behind the scenes look about the development of the product. Mindjet was founded by Mike and Betina Jetter. Together, they provided an extremely compelling story about the early development of MindManager 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 in a book that featured Mike’s battle against cancer. That behind the scenes connection to the creators and the creative process is extremely compelling. If Mindjet were to open up their beta testing program and allow beta testers to share their beta testing stories after Mindjet announces the eminent launch of the product, Mindjet could benefit from the experiences and voice of their beta testers. Essentially, they benefit from free testing services provided by beta testers and this free beta testing experience then becomes feature rich content to help communicate the journey of MindManager from version 6.0 to 7.0.

Its notable that mindmaps help people see the connections and relationships between one topic and another. If Mindjet were to show the developmental relationship from 6.0 to 7.0 via their own developers and their network of beta testers, they would essentially benefit that much more. They would help potential buyers make the connection between 6.0 and 7.0 and that information could make the difference in a purchase decision or in the speed of a purchase decision!

Page Popularity for Site: 19% [?]