Welcome to Smuggle Me

Ted Murphy, founder of IZEA recently launched a personal microblog. If you are part of the IZEA family or a fan or rockstartup this is your chance to interact with Ted. You can check out the site here.

I was the 61st member of PayPerPost when I joined 3 years ago. You can imagine that over the 3 years Ted, myself and PayPerPost (now IZEA) have been through so many interesting experiences. While I’m not nearly as active in IZEA now, I still follow them and am interested in what their doing. Ted’s one of the most creative people I know so it will be interesting to see what Ted does with his blog and if he’ll have the time to do much.

Someone emailed me about a website called Pick A Blogger. It’s a cheap attempt to compete with PayPerPost. I didn’t sign up, because it didn’t seem like there was really anyone on the site. It was like a ghost town. I’ve often said about PayPerPost that they needed to focus on advertisers and making sure there were plenty of ways for bloggers to make money. They’ve done that and done well. Unfortunately I don’t think that Pick a Blogger has done the same thing.

PPP/Izea has rolled out their new RealRank measure for blogs. Honestly I don’t personally believe that this rank will have much meaning outside of those blogs that participate in PayPerPost. However, it will have significant meaning to the 70,000 (or however many it is now) bloggers that use PayPerPost. Plus, it will be great for all of those stats addicts out there like me.

Of course, I’ve been in Hawaii and so I haven’t been able to check my PPP tools (now called ITK) to make sure it was installed properly. Looks like when I was trying out the Argus beta stats I messed up my PPP tools. I’ve fixed it now and tomorrow I’ll finally be able to see my RealRank.

If anyone else needs help with this let me know. I’m always happy to help people when I can. Even if it will be a bit busy over Thanksgiving.

Well, I must admit that I’m really tired right now and in a couple hours I’m getting on a red-eye flight with my wife and 2 children to go to Hawaii. Ok, I’m sure that no one will have sympathy for me going to Hawaii. However, I’m kind of dreading the flight. Hopefully I can sleep quite a bit.

I must also admit that I’m a little sad to be going to Hawaii now that PayPerPost announced SocialSpark. Well, Hawaii should be a lot of fun and it will be really interesting for me to present at the EMR conference I’m going to attend. Hopefully I can get on in the evenings when the kids are asleep.

Update: TechCrunch finally put up their coverage of SocialSpark. Pretty weak coverage since Mike didn’t cover much of the announcement at all. Maybe he was busy since it’s the weekend.

I’m currently sitting at PayPerPost/Izea’s user conference called PostieCon. In 30 minutes we’ll be seeing the unveiling of Argus to the world. I’ve previously blogged about how Izea is planning to take on Google. We officially know that Argus is now called SocialSpark. I’ll place a screenshot of the new site at the bottom of this post.

I think the most groundbreaking feature they are announcing with SocialSpark is allowing advertisers to sponsor blogs.

In addition to sponsored posts, SocialSpark has created a viable alternative to traditional online display ads designed to provide a higher return on investment for both advertisers and bloggers. The revolutionary new form of advertising allows marketers to set a price range they are willing to pay to sponsor a blog via an interactive ad unit called a Blog Welcome™. The new unit welcomes a user when they visit a blog and then collapses into a small persistent sponsorship bar that remains at the bottom of a browser.

I’m not so sure about having a permanent bar at the bottom of a blog, but I guess I don’t see any reason why it’s a bad idea. I think I’ll have to see the full implementation before I make final judgment. Plus, I think it’s important to know how much that’s worth. Can you have multiple advertisers? Does the toolbar have a set price for a certain time frame? I think we’ll find out when Ted shows it in a few minutes.

As expected, Izea is going to have a whole group of stats.

Analytics tools installed on a blogger’s blog allow SocialSpark to provide traffic data on the blog’s public profile. Advertisers are provided with a complete picture of a blog’s influence including visits and page views, along with other demographic information such as aggregate gender, age, location, interest and other visitor information. That data allows advertisers to build their street teams based on the audience of the blogger. Once a campaign is launched, advertisers can monitor CPC and CPM as well as gauge brand awareness and campaign impact across the blogosphere.

Looks like SocialSpark should be pretty interesting. They are also unveiling a blogger’s social network. It doesn’t look that interesting to me. Although one feature I know about does look interesting. It’s essentially a way to manage your blog roll using PayPerPost SocialSpark. For advertisers the idea of creating your own niche social network of bloggers is a pretty unique way for advertisers to find their target market.

Another important part of this announcement is required in post disclosure. A great step forward.

30 minutes and we’ll be able to see it in action and I’ll be able to tell you more about what I think of SocialSpark.

Today I decided to re-watch the video that Ted from PayPerPost posted about Argus’s new stats program. I’m sure that all the people who participate in PayPerPost have been watching Argus closely to see what the next iteration of PayPerPost will look like. It has been months since any really major changes to the system have been implemented. I’d say we’re all getting a little antsy, but maybe a lot of people using PayPerPost don’t really care. They’re just enjoying the money they make from blogging. Either way, here’s the unfocused video that Ted posted to the PPP blog recently.

While re-watching this video, I listed off each of the tabs that are shown (and luckily I think I was able to make out). They included: vistors, page views, ppp rank, alexa rank, google pr.

The only one that is really that surprising to me is the PPP Rank. I can’t believe I haven’t heard more people raging about this PPP Rank. I wonder how PPP is going to handle this ranking system. Is it going to be like Alexa ranking where it is updated daily and is easily gamed? Will it become a filter that advertisers use a lot? I think that this is going to drive a lot of people nuts. I can already see the posts on the forum about someone’s PPP rank being low and how PPP is discriminating against small time bloggers. Let me just cut that off now. It’s not PPP that is discriminating against you. It’s advertisers and advertisers dollars that don’t like you. So, start putting the blame where blame is due.

Regardless of all the hooplah that will occur over the PPP rank, I’m interested to see where I rank amongst the approximately 60k bloggers on payperpost. It’s really hard to make a guess since there are a lot of factors that PPP could use to determine rank. If they just do traffic, then my prediction is as follows:

Smuggle Me Blog - 5,267 PPP Rank
Something for Nothing - 4,345 PPP Rank

What’s your prediction on where your blogs will rank amongst the 60k PPP bloggers?

I’m sure that Mike Arrington is going to have another heyday (however you spell that) when Argus comes out. I’m just surprised that Mike doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s already going on at PayPerPost with Argus.