Welcome to Smuggle Me

I’m sure that many of you know by now that I have been with PayPerPost since nearly the beginning of Ted’s journey to make money for bloggers. It’s been quite the adventure for me and a true learning process. I’ve met hundreds of amazing bloggers and learned a ton about blogging. Oh yeah, and I made a bunch of cash along the way too. I personally call it my “date” money.

Well, back in November I attended Postie Con where SocialSpark was announced for the first time. It was a very exciting time to see what Ted and crew had been working on for so long.

I was invited into the alpha version of Social Spark and it’s been quite the experience. My favorite part has been the blog sponsorships. I can see why this might not fit right for many of the bloggers out there, but it’s perfect for a number of my blogs. In fact, I’d like to automate the blog sponsorship so that my blog always has a sponsorship with the highest paying sponsor (possibly with the option for me to block certain sponsors). Overall though, sponsorships are really neat and I haven’t heard any complaints from my blog readers. Granted I understand how I generate traffic to my blog and these type of sponsorships aren’t a problem. I’m still generating just as much traffic as before.

The next best part of social spark is the transparency and disclosure (ie. no follow). Here’s what social spark offers (which quite frankly was a problem with PayPerPost):
-100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure
-100% Transparency
-100% Real Opinions
-100% Search Engine Friendly

Now that those problems are out of the way, I think that Social Spark can bring in some really large brands. Hopefully that means more revenue for us bloggers.

I think the most disappointing part of Social Spark to me has been the method of filtering, organizing and finding blog opportunities. It was bad in PayPerPost and is still bad in Social Spark. It should be much easier for me to know what opportunities are available and a way to sort them the way I want to see them. Plus, if I no longer want to see an opportunity, then give me an option to hide that opportunity forever.

Some of the social aspects of the site are interesting, but I would have preferred if Social Spark would have focused on more of the functional parts of the site and less on the look and feel of it all. I’m sure that hundreds of hours of design and development time were spent making it look pretty. When the reality is that functionality would have been more beneficial to all involved.

In the end, this is still the beginning of social spark, but I honestly had hoped for a little more after all the delays. However, it’s a good foundation for making bloggers a good amount of money. Especially with blog sponsorships. Let’s just hope the market will pay well for those blog sponsorships. They definitely can’t be missed by blog readers.

A little while back Ted asked the PayPerPost community if their blog sucks? I actually avoided saying much at the time. However, I think that it’s pretty clear what’s happened to the PPP blog. They stopped announcing almost anything!

There has been months and months of marketing hype over Argus which turned out to be Izea and SocialSpark. That’s the best way to kill a corporate blog. Spend months and months and making only superficial changes and not announce anything that significant.

When PayPerPost first launched the blog was hoping with new features and exciting announcements. In fact, I seem to remember someone even sarcastically complaining that it had gone 3 days since a major announcement. It was really exciting to be apart of a dynamic organization that was changing weekly.

It amazes me that this all occurred almost a year and a half ago. Well, times have changed. PayPerPost has an incredibly large community and too many employees to keep track of them all. No more videos of stressed out employees getting vitamin water. No more $10 million funding announcements. However, most significantly very few feature releases in MONTHS!!

The worst part of it all is that the Argus announcement at PostieCon was a big disappointment. Not because the changes weren’t good. The quick information that was given at Postie Con has potential. However, no one would ever know it, because nothing has been released. No one has access to argus Social Spark. The PPP community was left waiting for months for the holy grail they called Argus only to receive a rushed announcement and now over a month of waiting (and no end in sight) for the actual release.

I’m sure that someone will come and say that the release of Social Spark was delayed because of the release of RealRank. This argument misses my point that PayPerPost has released very few interesting features in months.

This isn’t to say that PayPerPost isn’t thriving and that it isn’t going to be huge. I’m just saying that’s why the PayPerPost blog sucks and has definitely affected the community around it. It may have been the best corporate decision for PayPerPost to take these months and rebuild PayPerPost from the ground up. However, I think you could make a good argument about why it would have been better for PayPerPost to release features early and often. Wordpress learned this lesson which they took from Ubuntu.

I think it’s also worth mentioning Christopher Herot’s recent post explaining how he wasted much of his now failed startups time discussing and implementing features that users didn’t care about. Sure makes a compelling argument for an agile development environment with frequent releases of features. I guess we’ll see if the months of rebuilding PayPerPost and adding new features suffers the same unneeded feature fate that Christopher Herot experienced.

I hope this post isn’t seen as complaining. PayPerPost is welcome to do whatever they want with their product. I couldn’t care much either way. Although, I do appreciate them offering me a front row seat as I watch and learn from their experience building their company.