Hello people, as you may know I signed up to SocialSpark some weeks ago and since then, I have been testing this new service/community.

The last week when I posted about this community, I don’t knew it at all, and I skipped some good points which I want to mention this time. I’m talking about the types of marketplace opportunities you have, by signing up as blogger:

1. Sponsored Post: In the Sponsored Post Opportunity, you will create a unique sponsored post on your 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, basically you need to meet the terms. The advertiser will pay per unique blog post that is created on each unique blog.
2. Blog Sponsorship: Blog sponsorships are a way which the advertisers promote their website or blog, by utilizing SocialSpark’s unique technology to create a persistent sponsorship banner on blogs. Sponsorships can consist of texts, images or videos. The advertiser pays per day that a select blog runs the Blog Sponsorship. I could notice the advertisers pay between $0.5 and $1.5 a day.
3. Sparks: Sparks are free opportunities that serve as ideas for blog posts. Sparks are utilized primarily by bloggers, but may also be used by advertisers. These “Sparks” are a great way to start making post if you are new on the blogging business. Also, many bloggers create sparks to get reviews, by offering to blog about you on their blogs. This offer is called BlogYouBack™.

So as you can see, there are many ways to earn some bucks with this community. And talking about Marketplace, I want to talk you about the Code of Ethics.

What is this code?

• 100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure: This post is a perfect example to explain this point. Why? because I posted about socialspark the last week. By getting paid 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. That is the reason they give you a code which set a small box in your post, to let your readers know you are getting paid for that content.

• 100% Transparency: I love this, because you can know who is working and who’s not. Every single profile, as advertiser or blogger, is public to every person in the community, and if you visit my blogger profile for example, you could see that I’m working with IZEA with this opportunity. There is not secrets!.

• 100% Real Opinions: At SocialSpark, there is not restrictions when you are going to post. I’m referring to the opinions, if you dislike a service, you can write it, and if you love it too! SocialSpark has no restrictions on how you express your genuine thoughts on an advertiser’s product or service.

• 100% Search Engine Friendly: As you may know, Google was penalizing bloggers who used PayPerPost. SocialSpark set all your sponsored links with the attribute no-follow, so they are not affecting the search engine’s ranking. This is designed to protect bloggers and advertisers from search engine penalties based on paid linking.

See my public Blogger Profile

I have to say I got some opportunities, and all them has being approved very quick. The only thing I don’t like at all, is the fact you need to write about the opportunity in the next 12 hours after you reserved the opportunity. Is kinda forced!!!

Anyways, they are very conscious because they asked me to resubmit a post without showing advertising on it. This goes against their policy, so I removed the Kontera content links to resubmit my post, which was approved without problems… They could reject my post by they didn’t, they just contact me and noticed me about the issue, letting me to resubmit the post once again.

So If you are not part of this community, I recommend you to join right know. Really worth to be there!

Hello my fellow bloggers, first at all I want to say sorry because the last week I wrote 2 or 3 articles, vs my usual daily writing. Also, these articles were not too informative, but you need to understand I have being very busy with my studies, robotics and other things I do, parallel to blogging.

I had this topic about 2 weeks ago, but I had not the opportunity to post it before . The big question of this post is what motivate you to blog? That is a good question that many people don’t have a clear idea.

The last month, I saw how my subscribers increased daily, and that was something I liked very much. But as well as my subscribers increased, decreased my daily visits. In addition of this, I stopped to blog for a week and I saw my visit’s chart with a negative slope, and I have to say that I felt bad.

In addition of that, many of my readers sent me an e-mail, asking me why I stopped to blog. I received like 20 emails, and I thank you to everybody who wrote me, because that gave me the force to keep doing what I do here.

About two weeks ago, I was invited to use SocialSpark in its alpha phase (now beta), which made me feel important in the blogging community . However, I joined to the new IZEA’s program, and I have to say I found it very cool. I have took a couple of opportunities, being approved quickly.

But although I could not write daily, I kept checking my statistics, rankings and comments in every community. When I saw my rankings after the week I stopped to blog, Mr. Javo dot Com dropped some positions. That, combined with the other factors I mentioned above, motivated me to write again .

I thought on what I have being doing here, and how I was progressing with the pass of the months. I thought I was dropping all my work through the window, and immediately I start to write again . I talked with fellow bloggers, and they told me that happens, so I took it easy.

Do you have experimented something like that? Feel free to share your story with everybody in this community.

Hello new bloggers, if you use wordpress to manage your blog and you are thinking on monetize your blog, this offer is for you.

To monetize your blog, I recommend you to use OIOPublisher Plugin for wordpress, which you can easily manage your advertising and sales. OIOpublisher is aimed at blog owners and webmasters. It is being continually developed into a complete advertising solution. That means not only creating the ultimate sales solution, but also focusing on traffic and content development.

This plugin has the advantage that you don’t need to pay a commission for sale, with this you are your own boss. This mean you will have full control over what and how you sell, and you will keep 100% of your earnings.

So this month, at Mr. Javo dot Com you can get 2 discounts by introducing the following codes:

• $5 off code: QWERTY-5 (expires 30 days from now)
• $17 off code: QWERTY-17 (expires 15 days from now)

This plugin, normally has a cost of $39, but you can get it for less with these coupons! So what are you waiting for? Start to monetize your blog with OIOPublisher Plugin and take full control of your sales, turn on the auto-pilot!

Hey there my readers, two weeks ago John Cow moved their blog, from Micfo to Top Hosting Center. And due to this, THC contacted him to sponsor a contest on his blog, and guess which is the prize? Yeah! as you read it in the title, the prize will be an Xbox 360 Elite and a copy of the new Grand Theft Auto IV.

There is the specifications:

Xbox 360 Elite console: The console is equipped with an HDMI port, HDMI cable, a black wireless controller and black Xbox LIVE® headset. It also comes with three powerful core processors, 16:9 cinematic aspect ratio, anti-aliasing for smooth textures, full surround sound, and DVD playback with upscaling capabilities right out of the box.

This version can’t be better, it has a 120GB Hard Drive, in addition to a HDMI cable to hook it up to your HD TV to experience the best gaming experience.

How to enter?

The winner will be picked via a lottery and you can choose how many tickets that you have in the draw! The more tickets that you have, the greater chance of winning! Here’s how to get your tickets:

• 250 tickets – Write a small blurb about this contest on your blog, 100 words minimum. Please make sure you linkback to our sponsor and to this post so your readers can find it.
• 250 tickets – Become an affiliate with THC for free. This is really a no-brainer as Top Hosting Center offers 50% commission for each sale you make for them! Within a few sales you can buy your own 360 if you don’t win this one! (We’ll check if you have one of their banners on your blog!)
• 25 tickets – Every comment, about this contest, you leave on another blog’s latest post will get you 25 tickets, as will leaving this link in a new forum thread somewhere, or when you mass message your myspace or facebook friends. Perhaps even use Twitter to let all your followers know
• 25 tickets – Subscribe to our RSS feed and THC’s blog feed.

Deadline

The Contest will run until the 30th of this month, that’s when GTA4 is scheduled for release. So what are you waiting for? You should not miss this .

Good luck!

Yesterday I noticed my I went from 80k to 230k in Alexa, how was that possible? Well, I went to alexa.com and effectively, something has changed.

But these new rankings are better than the old ones? I think nobody can answer that question, because for someone, “better” can be to have a higher rank to its site. But for the people who develop Alexa Rankings, the best is to give us the most accurate information.

See image in its original size

They have optimized their code to provide to all internet community, the best rankings they can give. This don’t want to say that your old ranking was bad, it was just different. In my case, my ranking dropped from 80k to 230k, but I have not bad feelings about that. In fact, I have read that many rankings (specially of blogs) has decreased, but that is because their new algorithm.

For the new code, now they aggregate data from multiple sources, to give us a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

With this change, there are another changes you should know. For example, now you can only see the last 9 months data, but that’s for a mistake that they are working to fix in the next weeks. In their blog, they said they going to add new features in the coming weeks and months, but they keep them in secret.

What do you think about the new ranking? For me it is ok, you know I don’t really care about the rankings…

Our March hundred dollar contest was a little delayed, but we can now finally announce our winner. This month, the winning entry came in the form of a comment posted on GorillaSushi.com.

After gathering up all 1,740 entries, we drew our seed numbers and averaged them to find the winning entry, which was entry #606. That entry belongs to diggnfordiamonds.com. Who will be getting $100 cold, hard PayPal from me as soon as he or she replies to my email.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering where your hundred bucks is, right? Keep entering and we’ll keep handing out money. April is already half over, so we’re gonna give out another wad of cash in just a few weeks.

TIP: The posts people make about the contest usually make up around half of the entries. Write a post about the contest and drastically increase your odds of winning.

This prize was provided by:

- JoeTech.com

- Link Bait

- Gorilla Sushi

- CK Marketing

- The Big Bald Blog
- Jason Boom
- Mr Javo