Archive: November 2007
<loud_yell>Whoooooooo!</loud_yell>
We rolled out RealRank last Wednesday and crossed our fingers. I had a pretty good feeling that we created something that our advertisers would find value in, but you never know until you see the numbers. The first few days were admittedly slow (and scary). Opp creation was down in general during the Thanksgiving holiday, but since then utilization of RR has picked up a bit. Well, I'm lying. More than a bit.
In fact 60% of all Opps created since Thanksgiving day have used the RealRank requirement. I am both excited and relieved. I truly believe that this the path towards higher quality bloggers in our system...leading to better ROI for advertisers...leading to more advertisers..leading to better pay for bloggers and so on. I am hoping to see that RR utilization number climb over time as we have more blogger adoption.
No-Follow Option Coming
By weeks end we will roll out a new No-follow option for advertisers in PayPerPost. No-follow has always been something that advertisers could specifically ask for, now we have made it as easy as clicking a button. Bloggers that are more comfortable with no-follow sponsored posts should hopefully see more and more opportunities over time.
We had already committed to required no-follow in SocialSpark (prior to the Google Blogosphere Rampage), now advertisers will have the option to easily do so in PayPerPost.
We are experiencing some slow downs with PayPerPost.com at the moment. We're aware of the cause of the problem and are working to resolve this now.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: Sitemaintenance slow
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of meeting Postie Drew face-to-face when he was selected to be a Postie Reporter for CollegeFest 2007. We'd communicated several times prior to that, but only via e-mail. After spending two days watching Drew blog, live vlog, and interact with those attending the tradeshow, I truly realized what a talented, passionate blogger he is. If you know Drew I am confident you share my perspective.
So when Drew started telling me about a special "project" he was working on, I told him I would do whatever I could to help him with it. Here's an overview of what I'm talking about:
Drew is putting together a calendar compiled of photos he's taken for his blog BenSpark.com. Inspired by the Green Fingered Photographer, Drew put together a calendar of his own and began selling them through Lulu.
"I loved his photos and figured that I could do the same thing," states Drew. "I'd been working for the past year on getting my 15th high school reunion planned. We were running the event as a reunion as well as a fundraiser for a former classmate, Becky, and her family. They have an online journal of Mike's progress: http://www.caringbridge.org/pa/machinski/index.htm. Becky had thyroid cancer and many treatments, her Cancer went into remission. Her husband Mike then got Cancer and has had over 120 chemo treatments in his lifetime. He had Hodgkins lymphoma that returned twice, and is now in Stage 4. He cannot get insurance and neither can his wife. They have three beautiful daughters and financially life is kicking them around.
But at the same time they are optimistic and very involved as a family. The three girls are really involved in sports and despite his disease and pain Mike coaches the girls teams. Becky runs a store where she makes custom jewelery. Her website is www.hopecreationsjewelry.com. The income that they make is not enough and I wanted to help however I could so I decided to dedicate the full amount of my profit on each calendar to the Machinski family. I make $2.97 per calendar sold. All of it was donated to the Machinskis at my 15 year High School reunion. At that time I had only sold 12 calendars. I did however put up a donation button and got almost $100 in donations for the Machinskis form Posties and other people I had met online."
"At the reunion we raised (along with the calendar and online donations) over $1600 (from a silent auction and the tickets sold to the reunion itself) for the family. They were very very excited but I know that it can't possibly be even near enough for them and I wish I could do more. So I'm donating the profit from each calendar sold to the Machinksi's until January 1, 2008 and then I'm retiring the
calendar."
I think this is a fantastic cause, and a great story. I know Ted loves charity storis as well, so I wanted to help Drew out. If you're interested you can contribute here: http://www.benspark.com/2008calendar.html. And if you have any similar stories I'd love to hear them. Please feel free to share them either via the comments feature here on this post, or directly with me at ashley[at]izea[dot]com.
Shaun and I have spent a few cycles coming up with a plan for promoting RealRank to the general blogosphere. I think we have some pretty solid concepts but I can't help but wonder if one of you has a brilliant little gem just waiting to be heard. Think you can out market us? Let's here it! If you had $20k to spend on a marketing effort in December what would you do with it?
I have seen a few questions (Tim from Bloggerista.net) floating out there in regards to the importance and scoring of links in RealRank. We have committed to being open about the system and how it works, so I want to take some time to explain. We assign link scores based on ACTIVE links. We define an active link as a link that has been clicked that day. Google (as far as anyone knows) treats all links as active, regardless of whether they have been clicked or not. I call these dead links.
Why don't we count dead links? We all know that link building is a common practice in the blogoshpere and the web in general. Bloggers and companies alike can build up links over time, regardless of whether or not they have quality content and an actual reader base. You can wind up with hundreds or thousands of links to a site buried in directories, infinitely long blog rolls, comment streams and so on. The bottom line is links without clicks don't really mean much - "dead to me".
I know what you all are saying. "Great, I got on all these blog rolls to pump up my PR and now you are telling me that they don't matter". No, that's not what I am saying. If people are actually clicking on those links then they will be counted. However, I will tell you that most people reading blogs don't click on blog rolls as much as they used to. Remember, RealRank is trying to determine reach and influence, not amount of inbound links. That is the beauty of having real stats.
"Ok, so how do I get active links?" Funny you should ask. I have a thought I'll share:
The Remora Effect
While putting a link in a sidebar may generate a few clicks here and there, the most active links in the blogoshpere are found in the body of a blog post itself. The biggest bloggers ("Whales") have known about the value of active links for quite some time and use this principle to generate blog traffic. The Whales create content so compelling that other bloggers write about it and link back to them ("Remoras"). The post from the Remora is then posted in a trackback, comment or within an update of the post itself. This creates what is called The Remora Effect, a symbiotic relationship creating active links for both the Whale and the Remora. This helps bolster each participant's reputation as an influencer and active participant in the conversation around a topic.
As Colleen proved with her post about the IZEA name change, anyone can be the Whale and anyone can be the Remora. In that case Colleen was the Whale and Robert Scoble was the Remora. The key is content. Great content usually equals great influence.
There are plenty of other ways of getting active links, some more effective than others. I invite you all to share your thoughts in the comments.
If you keep up with any of our blogs then you know a few weeks ago Ted, Travis and I Twittered from the road, on the Blog America Tour. We had a great time doing it, particularly because it kept us well-connected with our Posties...and let them know exactly what was going on with us at any given time. Not to mention it made it convenient for us to communicate with the Posties we were meeting-up with along the way.
Well, that seemed to be such a hit with bloggers that I decided to create a Twitter account for the newly launched IZEA. If you haven't noticed it, the widget is located over in the right rail of the blog homepage. It looks like this:
While I still maintain a PayPerPost Twitter, the one found on our blog homepage will cover everything IZEA (PayPerPost, Blogger's Choice Awards, Blog in Space, and more)! So if you're not following us go ahead now!
I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has helped make IZEA a success. Our advertisers, our posties, our investors, our vendors and our team members have all contributed to this wonderful company which I am so proud to be a part of. I would also like to thank our team members' friends, families and loved ones who have supported us through some very long and stressful days over the past year. Thank you for sharing our passion and believing in us, we are truly blessed to have you in our lives.
Enjoy this special day, be thankful for all you have and chow down on some turkey. Gobble Gobble!
Average Joe:
Joe goes on some outside sales calls in Texas. Ted joins him in Dallas to meet with the local Ad League.
Click here to see full post and video.
Also, be sure to check out RockStartup on MySpace.
Technorati Tags: documentary, izea, payperpost, rockstartup, socialspark, ted murphy, web reality
Now that the changes are in place to support RealRank within PayPerPost.com I wanted to take a moment to explain some aspects clearly.
First of all, the rank itself. You can see the RealRank for your blogs on the My Blogs page within the application, as shown below. If the system has not yet assigned you a rank, you'll see N/A. The Izea RealRank engine runs at 2am each morning (it's a slow time for the systems) and aggregates information from our Tracker system to come up with the RealRank for each of your blogs.
The key for this to happen, is to have the Izea Toolkit installed on your blog. Just click on the Get Code button on the My Blogs page. This will take you to an instructions page to walk you through getting the code and installing it on your blog. The Izea Toolkit sends data for each visitor to your blog to our Tracker systems - without it installed, we can't record your traffic data.
The RealRank is a flat rank. We calculate a score for each blog we track, and then sort the resulting scores to assign each blog a rank form 1 to n. For opportunity segmentation though we normalize the rank.
When creating an opportunity, advertisers are asked to select a rank from 1 through 9. This really equates to a percentage of the marketplace to exclude from an opportunity. If an advertiser chooses a 9, they are effectively excluding 90% of the marketplace and only allowing people in the top 10% of the ranks into the opportunity.
When a blogger looks at the opportunity details we show them the value the advertiser chose, and explain what it means. For example "9 (top 10%)".
Obviously if your rank improves (remember, we calculate it daily), you could find yourself qualifying into opportunities that you previously weren't eligible for. Similarly, if you find opportunities segmented based on RealRank that you do qualify for, it's in your interests to take that opportunity rapidly; you may get pipped to the post tomorrow by a more popular site.
We currently don't show you however where you are in the network. We don't for example show your rank and the total that it's out of. When the Izea RealRank site launches though we will expose a lot more information to you to let you accurately identify your place in the grand scheme of things.
And, that's all there is to it.
In order to roll out support for RealRank within PayPerPost, and of course to move the SocialSpark Tracker live (the bit that calculates your RealRanks), we will be taking PayPerPost.com offline at 3pm Eastern time for approx 15 minutes. It will probably be less than that actually.
Please bear in mind, as per my other posts on the subject, you will not have a RealRank assigned to your blogs at that point. We need to collect 1 day of data before we can calculate what a rank would be, so expect to see your ranks updating tomorrow in the early hours of the morning.
Thanks for your patience.
