Hi everyone, since 1 hour ago I have the WordPress manager openned, but I just couldn’t start my post before… I wasted some time reading some great feeds, news, articles and looking stupid videos on youtube, as the following one:

That was funny huh? Well, what’s this post about? This could be named an experiment, to see if it’s possible to create any kind of reactions by writing something real quick, and without sense at all. Some minutes ago, I had not idea about what was I writing, but now I find a little path among this randomness.

What should you make in order to get reactions?

With the passing of time, I have seen viral things being spread through the web, and they didn’t have sense at all. So I was thinking about it, and I have listed some things that I think you can generate some buzz from:

• Craziness: The most of the viral videos have a little of craziness, shocking you the first time you see it. That’s why they are viral, because many people get shocked and then, when the video ends, they decided to share it with friends, just because they cannot believe it!.
• Professionalism: When something is very very impressive because of its quality, it will generate buzz without any doubt. This factor cannot be combined with the last one, perhaps you can add a bit of amusement in order to make it more fun and enjoyable.
• Charisma: You can suck at what you are doing, but if you have the gift to manipulate and convince people about what you are saying, certainly you will impact them.

Also, by doing something really terrible/bored you can attract the people attention, but this is a harder task.

Now, let’s take this 3 elements and let’s put them together focused in a blog. Blogs depend of the personality of the blogger, but there is something that can affect this behavior, and this thing is the niche. You cannot act like a crazy if you are blogging about something important, something related with your business for example… But instead, if you are blogging about your life, you can do it so crazy as you want.

There is a balance?

Of course! You can blog about something relatively serious but giving it a touch of your personality, being funny sometimes… But watch out! You need to measure this kind of behaviors because not everybody likes them. May be, you can start losing readers because of that.

Moral

Every story has a moral, and this post also has one. You won’t always know what will cause reactions on your readers. What many bloggers do is to stick to things/methods that have worked for them before. That’s a good idea, but also could be a bad one. What I recommend is to experiment! You can’t know if something will work if you don’t try it.

Don’t be afraid of trying new things, perhaps you discover a non wise potential that tapeworms . Wow! I got over 500 words in this real quick post which I wrote it in less than 30 minutes, what do you think about it?

Since I started this blog, many useful tools have been born: Entrecard, Spottt, BlogRush….. Now it is the time of Plurk!

What is Plurk?

Well Plurk is a pretty tool similar to Twitter. It is a site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life, in a dynamic screen where you can see every event posted by your friends. So as you can imagine, it is a great tool to expand your network, make more friends and get new readers!

I signed up two days ago, and I have received hundred friendship requests. Actually, I have 209 people who follow my events, making it a great broadcasting tool for bloggers.

Why to Use It?

When someone invited me to this new community, I reject the invitation. I thought that it was a totally waste of time, but after a minutes I reconsidered the idea and I visited the link. I liked how it looks and I could appreciated the potential for us, the bloggers! So, I signed up, receiving instantaneously several friend requests ( of course, I shared my profile’s link through twitter ).

the following one is a little list of reasons you should use Plurk:

• It Works As A Broadcasting Station: Due to the big amount of people in this community, it is perfect to broadcast your blog events. It’s perfect to promote a contest, polls, new posts and these kind of things.
• Brand Extender: As a good blogger, you need to expand your brand if you want to be easily recognizable in the web. By signing up in Plurk, your name will be spread between many people, who probably will be bloggers or internet marketers. In conclusion, it’s perfect to make new partnerships.
• Traffic Maker: For the same reasons commented above, it can be a new source of traffic. I have received some emails from people congratulating me for my blog, and then they made a little reference telling me that they saw my profile at Plurk. It works? I think so!

Basically, Plurk is a new social network which you can extend your brand through other bloggers, getting more traffic to your blog, increasing your readers and subscribers.

Add me at Plurk!
Do you haven’t an account? Sign up here

What do you think about Plurk? Share your opinions or tips here to feed this community…. By the way, don’t forget to participate in the Poll, which you can find in the sidebar, bellow the Skribit widget.

Bye Bye!

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!

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

Hello bloggers, I have something for you. This morning I have found a new site which brings free blog promotion, with a voting system where you can submit your posts and start climbing to reach the top.

Blogsvine, in addition to provide you the resources to promote your blog, also it brings free traffic for blogs. You know how work this type of services, at the beginning they are not so popular, but after a time, they are a big community with several members. This mean the more people in the community, the more will be the traffic that you will get from it.

Although Blogsvine still being beta, it provides a good platform which you can interact with the other members of the community.

You can use this service to link the content that really matters to the other members. There is several information out there, and you don’t have all day to find the good stuff because many people work, study or simply don’t waste all their time blogging and researching the web . With categories from TV/Movies to Health, at Blogsvine you can add and share all these useful stuff to the network in the right place.

WordPress Support

Also, they provide support for wordpress blogs with their vote button plugin, which you can submit/rate any post externally.

Blogsvine could be another Digg or Mixx, who knows? You could try it and see how it works. Anyways, surely it will give you a good amount traffic and backlinks .

Yesterday I received an email from BlogCatalog notifying me about a new idea that they had. What would you happen if your newest post was Dugg and all your friends at BlogCatalog knew about it? And then what would happen if they Dugg it too, letting all of their friends know it. That would be pretty powerful, right?

Well in the next couple of days, BlogCatalog will launch Social Dashboard beta, a new feature that displays your latest activities across many social networks — Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others . That means automatic cross-networking and promotion right from your personal profile page. It also means that the your post updates, Twitter comments, Digg submissions, and other activities will appear on the Social Dashboard of all your BlogCatalog friends, and maybe their friends too. This is the kind of networking that can make posts go viral. And that’s just for starters.

Their Dashboard will help you keep up on the activities of your friends. It’s almost like having the ultimate social network feed reader made up of your friends, it’s absolutely awesome don’t you think?? It will help you streamline networking and stay up to date with friends across the Web. When they upload a new Flickr photo or submit a new article to Digg, you will know and you can then share it with your friends.

Use it promote your activities. Use it to keep up on friends.

They also think Social Dashboard will strengthen the BlogCatalog community for you. It helps make profile pages much more dynamic, giving people a reason to visit them again and again. I was waiting something like this since too many time ago, now we can share all our network links across the web in a single place  :twisted: .