Archive: December 2007
Friday, December 14 marks the conclusion of my first visit to New York City. The goal of this trip was to let Advertisers know that they have a partner in IZEA. Randy accompanied me on several meetings throughout New York City. Downtown, Midtown, SoHo, you name it, we were there! On our way to one meeting, New York's slippery sleet almost got the best of Randy...or rather his balance. He almost kissed the pavement! But to his credit, he maintained his balance and composure (as always).
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the agencies in New York who took time out of their VERY busy schedules to meet with Randy and myself. And of course to Randy for his great advice and insight.
If you are an Advertiser and have an interest in making IZEA's compelling offerings part of your marketing campaign, please reach out to the Sales Solutions Team. Don't let a golden opportunity to build your brand pass you by. Send your inquiries to randy(at)izea(dot)com.
Happy Holidays!
The times, the are a-changing...and so is our system! We've been working far harder than Santa's elves to help make the Opportunity creation process more streamlined and efficient. If you haven't had a chance to look over the new features and capabilities, I'd be honored if you join me for a brief walk-through.
Remember that creating an Opportunity in the Marketplace is typically meant to release your Opp to multiple people. If you'd like to create an Opportunity for just one blogger, you can use PayPerPostDirect and hand pick your blogger from the PPPDirect[ory].
First, the Disclosure Badge. Since we do require disclosure from our Posties, you can create your own Disclosure Badge for the blogger to place directly in their post! This is not a new feature, but it's a great way for bloggers to fulfill the Disclosure requirement, while adding an extra link for you! I encourage you to use the Disclosure Badge, as it has been shown to have great effects for Advertiser campaigns!
Here is a previous blog post that Ted wrote, about the advantages of using the Disclosure Badge: http://advertiser.izea.com/blog/2007/10/disclosure-badg.html
Second, let's take a look at some of the segmentation features. Segmentation is the ability to filter your Opportunity to a specified group of individuals by certain factors such as rankings, location, categories, and blog domain. You can read a little more about the segmentation features offered here.
Currently, an Advertiser can target his Opp to the right bloggers by specifying a minimum average tack rating, excluding free-hosted domains, categories, and by location [geo-targeting]. The newest capability is the ability to not only get your Opp to the right place, but help reach your own goal of focusing on either SEO or traffic by way of choosing either segmentation through PageRank or RealRank.
I'll highlight a couple of the most misunderstood features:
Tack rating: Advertisers are able to rate a blogger based on the quality of the post submitted, in correlation with the given Opportunity description. In other words, if you choose a 4-5, which are the highest scores, you will be receiving posts from bloggers that fellow Advertisers have rated highly.
Geo-targeting: When you select a region or a specific country, you are limiting your Opp to bloggers currently living in that area. This is incredibly helpful if your particular business is well-known in that region because then you have bloggers who are able to provide better content since your service directly relates to them!
RealRank: RealRank is our dev team's newest brainchild. Basically, RealRank snaps a far better reflection of a website's actual traffic, and influence. It's formula is quite simple and is easily explained here. RealRank is far more accurate that Alexa, and entirely more reliable than PageRank, it's really all you need!
Remember, when creating an Opp, you can choose either RealRank, if your goal is geared toward traffic and page visitors; or PageRank, if you're seeking SEO.
Third, we recently added the choice of making your required links either followed, or nofollowed. Simply, when requiring a link, if you do not wish for search engines to qualify the link, choose the nofollow option. This causes search engines to ignore the link, so it will not count toward SEO. The links section also has a field for you to enter any links from your own metrics/analytics accounts on third-party sites.
I hope this brief look at how you can better target your Opp to just the right blogger has been helpful. Last, there are plenty of areas to get help with the system and/or your campaign. Here are a few links to help guide you.
Advertiser FAQs: http://payperpost.com/advertisers/faq.html
Best Practices: http://www.payperpostu.com/bestpractices.html
Advertiser Tutorials: http://www.payperpostu.com/advertiser.html
And, if you have any questions, please feel free to send us a note by clicking on the 'Contact' link at the bottom of any page from within your account. Thank you!
