Some weeks ago, I was invited to use this new service in its alpha phase. SocialSpark is a new service of the IZEA’s people, who we know because of services like PayPerPost or RealRank, but what they are offering with this service? Let’s find it out.

SocialSpark, with the tagline “Get Everyone Talking”, is a new service very similar to payperpost because you can make money by blogging about opportunities, created by advertisers. But it has the difference that it is more social, you can interact with all the members, adding them as your friends, voting for posts, recommending a blogger and another interesting features that I will let you to explore.

This is a little screenshot of the main panel, where you can find the most popular opportunities, feature posts and other things.

As you can see, SocialSpark is a kind of blogging community, where you can make friends at the same time you can make money by writing about those opportunities. The best thing is that by this way, you can meet potential partners to work with, because you can “Prop” the users, which is the new way of giving someone your vote of confidence or high rating. You have the choice, in many areas, to offer a “prop” or “drop” to other users, opportunities, blogs, etc. Basically, a prop is a positive vote, and a drop a negative one. And how these props will help you to find potential partners? Simple, because you can search members by filtering their information, as number of props, views and friends, which could let you to determine who is an active blogger, and who is not.

Also, beside to searching members, you can search blogs by average pageviews a month, real rank, blog props, and other factors which let you to know, as in the case of users, which are the active or inactive blogs.

Conclusion

SocialSpark seems like a great place to be, I have made a couple of friends through this way and taken a couple of opportunities. The only question I have is about the payments. I don’t know how I’m going to be paid, because they never asked me anything related to that. Effectively, the payments are made through paypal, as they does at PayPerPost. However don’t wait more and join to this social network, which also brings you the chance to make some money!

Request an invitation

Hey there, recently some many bloggers have being asking me to exchange textlinks. Unfortunately, I have rejected all these requests because I’ll be giving many text links this month, in some sponsored contests. You have to understand that I don’t want to overload the sidebar of textlinks.

However, I want to tell them that I’m happy to receive these requests, and I could give you some backlinks through my posts if you want.

Anyways, in this post I want to tell you the importance of socializing and be friendly with the people who visit your blog. This is very important for a simple reason, 6 degrees.

What is Six Degrees?

This is a law which talk about the connectivity between the people. Following the definition of wikipedia:

Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person he or she knows and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six “steps” away from each person on Earth. Is a little hard to understand, I recommend you to visit the link to wikipedia and read the law with more details.

Never happened to you that you find a connection between you and another person through a familiar or friend, but you never thought they know themselves? Well, this is because the law of 6 degrees. Basically, you are connected with every person on the world through a patch created for 6 persons. Everything is connected, and as you can imagine, you should never reject a business opportunity, because you don’t know the turns the world can give.

Also, by the same way you should never be disagreeable with anybody, because tomorrow that person can help you, specially if we talk about business. Every single blogger, can be a potential partner in the future, following the six degrees law.

To conclude this post, I recommend avoiding underestimate every opportunity you get. That insignificant idea, could be the one which explode your blog, giving you thousand readers, improving you revenue and all the things every blogger want to have.

This also apply to everything on the life, don’t forget it

On Internet, there are several blogs about making money online. Many people who manage this kind of blogs, do it for the money they can earn with them. But definitively, the most sad is that they dislike blogging, but their avarice motive them to write, though they dislike to blog.

This people, has a series of particular characteristics which expose them. The following is a list of symptoms that relates these people, this way you can discover if you are (or not) someone who blog for money. The symptoms are the following:

1. You Have not Passion: May be you have passion to the money, but not to write or interact in social networks… Basically, you hate to blog. Primordially, if you want to create a blog, no matter the niches you want to blog about, you should like (or at least not to hate) to write and make all those actions made daily by bloggers.
2. You Have not Ideas: Commonly, the people blog about a loved niche. In these case, no matter how bored or tired you are, you could think at least on one topic to write about on your blog. In the worst case, you could not think a topic, may be you had a bad day and you don’t want to think about blogging. But what if every single day you are without ideas? This indicate that you dislike to blog.
3. You Don’t Care About Your Blog: If you don’t care about your blog, why do you still having it? If you will not maintain your blog, is better to deleted it! If you have a month without writing, it is because you never cared about blogging.
4. You Don’t Post Your Own Content: May be you are not neglected with your blog. You can publish posts everyday, but if these posts are not yours, this mean that you are not interested on managing a blog, and you really care about the business behind it.

There are another symptoms. There are people who have many adsense codes in your blog, but that is not so relevant. The most of these people, blog about 2 months and then, leave it. That is because they are not making money online as they say they do, or simply they bored about the topic.

Do you blog for money? I hope you don’t!

Yesterday in the morning, I upgraded my wordpress from 2.3.3 to the new WordPress 2.5. Easy as the preview WordPress’s versions, I finished to upgrade my WP in a couple of minutes. To enter the admin panel, I had to update my database with a simple click.

I thought to write this post yesterday, but I wait another day to test the new platform and give you my report:

The Sections

The main change is the new structure of the wordpress panel. It is very cleanest, easy to navigate and beautiful than the preview version. The new dashboard is not so far to the preview version, though it is more organized, those boxes make easiest to check the recent backlinks, the comments, the statistics and everything you have there.

Also I like how you can jump between different sections through the Related links. You can see this box in every section of the new panel.

About the widgets, I think the old way to place them on the sidebar was a little more easy. They implemented 1-click to add the widgets, which is easiest than Drag and drop. But to remove a widget, you need to click Edit>Remove. Two clicks vs One Drag and Drop, D&D wins. However, still being very easy to place widgets on the sidebar.

The Writing Experience

There are new features which really improve the writing experience. Now, you can write in fullscreen, something good that help you to concentrate and don’t lose the focus on what you are writing about. Something interesting is that now you can add media as images, videos and audio, uploading them from your pc.

There are more technical features, but I will let you to discover them by yourself, upgrade to WordPress 2.5 now!

Writing is the essence of bloggers. Besides the knowledge of HTML code, the participation in social networks or building a marketplace at their blog, writing is the basic of every blogger, making us writers.

I have read about some ideas to organize your thoughts before to write a post. From making drawings, I will give you my techniques to organize my ideas before to write a post:

• Making Mind Maps: A mind map is a visual representation of chunks of information and the relationships between those chunks. Starting with a central idea, you would create a basic mind map by writing a phrase that identifies the central idea in a piece of paper. Then, you should write keywords based on the main idea, linking them with lines. By following the lines, you will be able to visualize how you can detach the topic. After that, the ideas will start to drain through your neurons and you will write without problems. The concept of mind maps, is to connect the general idea with the most detailed ones.
• Writing Keywords: This can be or not, part of the Mind Maps. Writing many keywords will help you to have an idea about the things you can mention in your post. Once you wrote a keyword, is good to write a little text or whatever you have in mind, relating the keyword and the main topic. Sometimes, I use Google Sets, which automatically create sets of items from a few examples.
• FreeWriting: Sometimes, when you want to write something, you get stuck thinking in front the screen, trying to get something good. After a moment, you still thinking and having nothing of your post, something that can be frustrating. In these cases, you should write everything you think, being good or bad. You have not the need to write it with sense, the order doesn’t matter here, just write all the ideas that crosses your mind. Then, read and underline the good things you can use on your post, and your mind will link all the ideas automatically. Generally, I do this in a paper, and not in the computer.
• Setting Categories: Before to write about a topic, you should think big. More general than the idea itself, the category is an important factor which can help you to canalize your idea. In fact, the category is the major keyword of your post.

I know that sometimes, many bloggers get stuck writing a post, it happens to all us eventually. By following the four things listed above, you could easily organize and environment your post. If you have another way to organize your ideas before to write, comment it here, will be fine to hear other voices.

Hey bloggers, today I asked me if my blog is really having the success that I think. Many people in the life, think that they are having success with all what they do, although they don’t. Why they think that? Because they are afraid to fail on what they want and like to do. Of the same way, there are many bloggers who are not sure about their success, and they blind themselves for that fear to fail.

I don’t pretend to offend someone, on the contrary, I want to help you. So in this post, I will give you the tips to be successful with your blog. It is a lie that I can give you all the tips, but I will do my best to give you what I consider important to achieve the success.

Meet Your Competitors

When you manage a blog, you need to meet your competitors to try to do it best than they. Sorry me, I don’t know what I wrote, I said competitors? Certainly, I’m using a bad term, what competitors? Don’t think that blogging is about a race that must be won. I tried to say, that you need to meet who are around you writing about the same topics than you. Meeting the other bloggers who have the same interest like you, is the first step to be successful.

Socialize With “Your Competitors”

Once you know who in the blogosphere are blogging about your blog’s niche, you need to socialize with them. A big common mistake is to think that they are your enemies. Error! Think again, remember that the blogosphere is a huge community. You can’t pretend to be successful if you don’t socialize with the people around you. Commenting on related blogs and having contact with the fellow bloggers, by chat, phone or personally, is a great way to start to be successful. You can have a great content on your blog, but if you are not friend of the surrounding bloggers, you are lost.

Analyzing Your Statistics

In the last week, I talk about How To Measure Your Blog’s Success, where I talked about how to interpret your statistics. The point of this post is not that, is not focused on the numbers. The numbers are important, that is truth, but you can’t think that you are having success if you have pagerank 5, because that does mean nothing.

Forget the statistics, all these numbers that every blogger (including me) check everyday. Don’t worry for the statistics and chill out because here, what really matters is if your content is being read. You can have pagerank 5 because you got thousand backlinks through TNX, but these number worth nothing if 20 persons read your blog daily.

What I Recommend

Based on the paragraphs above, I can tell you that you should not worry at all for the statistics. Blogging is all about be social, you need to focus primordially on meeting the people around you and be their friend. This way, your blog will have the success, even more than you want. Remember what I said about the blogosphere, it is pure social! If you don’t have contacts, you will achieve nothing.