Archive: February 2008
The last home I lived in before I moved away from Louisiana was a tiny cottage attached at one corner to my landlord's house. His wife became my best friend over the years that I lived there. I watched their family grow, shared meals and holidays with them, babysat and sometimes provided an "emergency" bathroom when their youngsters just couldn't wait in line behind their brothers and sisters. Danny had built my rental cottage on their over-sized lot to supplement his income as a plumber. Mira stayed home with the kids and they were idyllically happy except for the financial stress of raising five kids. They were counting on the increased income that would come when Danny got his plumbing license and would be able to start his own business. I'd been living there about three years when he finally felt prepared to take the license exam. He took it and failed. He studied some more and took the exam a second time. Once again he failed. When he failed it a third time he was crushed and wanted to give up. It was only then that Mira confided in me that Danny couldn't read. He'd never been much of a student as a child and had dropped out of school as soon as the law allowed. Danny was a brilliant conversationalist, had designed and built a home by himself and provided an income for his family, but his reading skills had never progressed beyond about a second grade level. He was the first functionally illiterate adult I'd ever known, though I've met others in the years since.
The ability to read and write is a common bond we all share, in addition to being bloggers and members of the Izea team. Most of us probably don't spend much time thinking about those abilities. Reading and writing are just something we do, something that comes almost as naturally to us as breathing. Statistics tell us, though, that there are illiterate adults in most of our communities. Some, like my friend Danny, were disinterested in school and didn't see much point in learning things they thought they'd never need. Others may have had undiagnosed learning disabilities. Whatever the path that brought them there, their adult lives have been difficult as they've striven to fit into a literate society.
I recently blogged about volunteering for environmental causes and provided you with a few links to organizations that could use your help. While there are national and international literacy programs, I'm not going to link you up this time. Most of those programs provide support and structure to local literacy programs, and it's on the local level where we are most likely to be useful. My local library and school system offer adult literacy programs and are constantly seeking volunteers. Yours probably have the same needs. Volunteers are matched with adults who want to learn to read and write, each party agreeing to commit their time to one-on-one tutoring sessions. Support, training and materials are provided, but it's the personal input that makes these programs work. If you can read you probably qualify to be a volunteer. Check out your local literacy programs and pitch in if you're interested in helping an adult learn to read.
My local school system also regularly recruits volunteers to read to and with children, especially during the summer months. Kids who are struggling with their lessons or not getting encouragement at home can become enthusiastic students with just a little extra attention. There may be similar programs in your own community that could use your help.
If you're not confident of your own reading and writing skills, help yourself first. Here are some tips to help you get started:
1. It's never too late to become an enthusiastic reader. Find a genre and subject matter that already interest you and seek out books to match. They don't have to be "great classics," they just need to be interesting to you. Reading what other people have written is a pretty painless way to absorb better vocabulary and grammar, which will translate to better writing skills.
2.Keep a dictionary and thesaurus handy. They'll help you build your confidence in word usage.
3.I've seen some fun "word of the day" widgets on a few blogs lately - another easy way to increase your own vocabulary while providing a bonus for your readers.
4. If you think you could use some help with grammar and sentence structure, here's a great Guide to Grammar and Writing, one of many you'll find if you do a search. I like this one because you can select the category and level of learning that most interest you.
5. Play word games and solve crossword puzzles. They'll provide a challenge and help you keep your enthusiasm up.
Social Spark will soon be providing us with new ways to showcase our blogs. Your new-found confidence in your writing skills will be reflected in your blogging and make you a more attractive candidate for opportunities when advertisers use Social Spark to select the bloggers they want. I hope it will also give you the confidence to volunteer. My friend Mira taught her husband to read and he did eventually get his plumbing license and open his own business. We can help other people achieve similar goals. All it takes is the desire to share our abilities. Give it some thought, please?
It's time for that time-honored tradition of spring cleaning. What's that you say? It's still cold out? There is still snow on the ground where you live? Hey, it's not my fault you don't live in Florida. The calendar doesn't lie: tomorrow is March 1st. In my mind, the first day of March is the first day of spring.
Oh, I know that the purists will tell you that March 20 is the official first day of spring. I say vernal equinox, vernal shmequinox. I like my seasons neat and orderly, and as far as I am concerned spring runs from March 1 until May 31. So there.
In any event, spring means spring cleaning. I'm not talking about your house or your yard. I don't know anything about that stuff. I mean, my house gets cleaned and my yard gets spruced up, but it's a mystery to me how that happens. Gremlins, maybe?
I'm talking about spring cleaning for your blog. This is the perfect time to take a look around your site with an eye toward tightening, tweaking, organizing, and making sure everything is crisp, clean, uncluttered, and attractive. And it's especially important this year because of what lies just around the corner...
SocialSpark! Whoo-hoo!
I've already done my cleaning over at Pointless Directives. I've got a nifty new template, my sidebar is cleaned up and orderly, my blogrolls and categories and other lists and rolled up and floobled, and everything is right where it belongs. I've never felt so pretty!
Oh. In the interests of full disclosure, my sister Shelli actually did all that stuff for me. But it still counts.
I've also joined a couple of new enterprises, Entrecard, an ad exchange network, and Blog Writers, a networking site for bloggers. Both are working out very well for me.
So take a look around your blog. I bet your blogroll needs updating. There are always links to add and links to drop. Does your sidebar need some tidying up? Can some of those lists be floobled? Do you really need all those badges and signs and graphics and awards on the front page?
Cast a critical eye toward your blog. Look at it from a brand new reader's point of view. Or better yet, look at it through the eyes of an advertiser. That's what I tried to do, and that's why I came to the conclusion that I need to make some changes in order to make my site as appealing as possible.
Hey, don't get me wrong. Content is still king. But a pretty package doesn't hurt, either!
I'll try to keep it brief 'cause I don't want you to miss the awesome post below by Drew.
Apparently Ted thinks I've been getting too much sleep because $1K Tuesday continues this week!!! The Opp's will be released from midnight, beginning of Tuesday through 11:59 pm, end of Tuesday, all times are Eastern Standard Time. We will release 11 non-segmented Opp's, with offer amounts totaling $1,000.00! That's 10 opp's at $50.00 each, and one big opp at $500.00!
Check out the specifics in last week's post if you need. Remember, grabbing one of the $1K's means you'll be briefly benched. So if you got one of the $1K's last week, you are benched for 30 days from the next $1K's to share the fun with as many Posties as possible.
Good luck, Posties!!!
Sometimes the stars align and you are able to do things that are pretty fantastic. Well, lucky for me the stars were lining up last night in Florida. I was able to spend time with not only two Posties but an IZEA team member and his wife. The third installment of my mini B.A.T. series is all about my meet up with Postie Courtney, Postie Alli, IZEA's Magical Code Guru Trevor and his wife, Mary.
You might have read that last Friday Courtney and Alli visited IZEA HQ and went on a scavenger hunt. They were in Florida because Courtney was riding in a Tour de Cure bike race to raise funds to help put and end to diabetes. A cause that is close to my heart as well as my blood sugar monitor. Alli came along as part of Courtney's support crew and personal photographer. She takes awesome photos. Who wouldn't want her as the personal photographer?
After the race Courtney, Alli, Trevor and Mary went to Animal Kingdom. I sat in a convention center testing things for my conference. All through the day however I received twitter updates on the race, animal kingdom and then text messages about our dinner plans. We were to meet at Downtown Disney for dinner at the Rainforest Cafe. Our reservation wasn't until 9:00pm but that was okay we had plenty of time to explore the different shops. Thankfully they picked me up at my hotel as I have no rental car this week.
If you have never met Courtney before you will be overwhelmed by the frenetic energy that she has. I met her at PostieCon and was already aware of what a fun energy filled night was ahead. No sign or placard held sway over her as you will see in the photographic evidence. We talked about our blogs, the race, photography and a ton of other things. Much of it a blur because you have to keep up with Courtney, no napping allowed. As we walked the streets of Downtown Disney conversations would flare up, die down be picked up later switched for other ones and the like. I was kept on my toes.
Alli and I share a common thread in photography. I noticed that at PostieCon. We both enjoy taking pictures. Alli actually takes even more photos than I do. We talked about some great photography blogs (you have to send me the links Alli) for all sorts of photography challenges. I need to be more challenged to get better. I did one challenge this past year for portraits and I think that my skill for that has really gotten better.
I met Trevor at PostieCon and we have many interests in common. I even won an Awesome contest last year that involved Trevor. The prize was Awesome. What you might not know is that Trevor and his wife Mary are virtual walking encyclopedias of Disney knowledge. Go ahead test them, they will easily defeat you with their Disney-ology skills. We learned many great secrets from them to use the next time we go to the parks.
The evening was very awesome. We found so many fun things to do, the conversation never waned and the photos are pretty funny. You can take a walk through our night on my Downtown Disney Flickr Set. Alli, Courtney and Trevor if you would like me to share your photo galleries too, leave a comment and I will add links to them to this post. Here is a Flickr badge of my Downtown Disney Set. I will cover how to make these in a future post.
You might notice a photo that comes up that looks like a map. I used a little gadget of mine called the GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr. This little device is a portable GPS that synchronizes the satellite time with your camera time. Then you run your photos through some software that takes the GPS data and writes it to your image's EXIF data (info on EXIF in future post). Then when you upload the images to a site like Flickr, they are geotagged automatically. So I can now follow our path along downtown Disney, you will notice that it zigs and zags, that is us following Courtney.
I have to say after meeting up with all these Posties and IZEA team members, I'd love to make that a full time job. Just hanging out with bloggers from all over. Because bloggers are RockStars. Ted, do you need a Director of Postie Patrols on staff?
Drew writes five blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also does a mean cake plow. He recently completed taking 1000 consecutive photos in 1000 days. You can visit him at The BenSpark, The Wired Kayaker, Read To Me, Dad, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech and The BenSpark Utterz
As we've been mentioning on our Twitter profile all this past week, two of our Posties visited the IZEA office this past Friday afternoon. They were excited to see our new offices, meet the IZEA team in person, and catch a sneek peek of the next episode of RockStartUp (this was a surprise for them).
Now what Postie Alli and Postie Courtney didn't know was that I had an hour-long scavenger hunt around downtown Orlando planned for them. It all ended-up with Ted getting covered in silly string! Good for me I knew both of the Posties--and Ted--would be perfectly willing.
So I recruited some of my colleagues to join-in on the "mission," and at 3:45 pm we hit the pavement. The teams were as follows:
Team Alli
Britt
Carri
David
Luke
Team Courtney
Ashley
Crystal
Marty
Veronique
(Jenni helped out as well, since I was one of the ones to help create the scavenger hunt clues)
Of course, Travis and Scott filmed everything. I'm sure the footage will show-up at some point!
I've created a photo album here with some of the pictures we took. You can also visit our Flickr profile for more.
Just a reminder that if you plan on submitting a post for round four of Blog Battle Royale, the "charity edition," it is due by 6pm EST this coming Monday (2/25). We've already received a couple of good ones, and I know of several others that are "in the works." This is a great opportunity to show others if you use your blog to champion for a specific cause, and to get others involved in your cause as well.
With the launch of IzeaRanks we all have a renewed interest in finding ways to promote our blogs and increase traffic. The Marketing & Promotion forum on the PayPerPost message boards is a great place to start. Posties have come up with some creative ways to lure us to their blogs, including niche blogrolls, memes, contests and giveaways. The Stumble request thread is hot, hot, hot and guaranteed to bring visitors when you link your best posts there. Let the forums serve as a springboard for your own creative ways of promoting your blog. Take a look at blog carnivals, too. They're another great way to entice new readers to your blog.
What is a Blog Carnival?
A blog carnival is a collection of posts on a common theme from different blogs. I like to compare blog carnivals to short story anthologies that collect the best writing contributions from different authors. The theme may be consistent in each edition of a carnival (ie: a carnival that is always devoted to making money on your blog) or may vary from one edition to the next (the Postie Carnival is a good example.) Some carnivals are always hosted on the same site, while others rotate to different hosts with each edition.
Sounds great! How do I get started?
Find a carnival with a theme appropriate to your blog. There are travel carnivals, pet carnivals, political carnivals - browse the topics and find one that suits your blog theme or the topic of the post you want to submit. Some carnivals will accept older posts from your archives, so you may already have a suitable submission on hand. If not, write a new post once you've found a carnival or topic that interests you. Make sure you read the guidelines for the specific carnival you've selected. Inappropriate submissions will be rejected by most carnival hosts.
I've found a carnival and submitted my post. What's next?
Participating in a carnival carries some obligations. Good carnival etiquette requires you to help with promotion. Write a post on your blog announcing that the carnival is coming. Include a link to the carnival sign-up form and encourage others to join the fun. When the carnival is published, link to it with another post to help stimulate traffic. Visit all of your fellow contributors' posts and leave comments. Give them feedback about their posts and make sure you let them know that you're a carnival visitor. This helps everyone gauge the effectiveness of the carnival in bringing traffic to them.
Tell me more about the Postie Carnival.
I'm so glad you asked. The Postie Carnival is special because it features us - bloggers who post for PayPerPost. You can submit posts from any blog registered with PPP. The next edition will be on March 1st. The beginning of Spring is in March and so is Easter, so you can submit a post on either theme. The deadline for submission is February 29th at 6 p.m. but submit your post as soon as you have it ready so your host (um, that would be me for this edition) will have time to write a stimulating teaser to direct traffic to your blog. The Postie Carnival also needs future hosts. You can contact Lisa, the carnival organizer, if you'd like to volunteer.
I still have questions!
I've tried to give you the basics, but you may want to know more before you participate in your first blog carnival. Post your questions in the comments below. I'll do my best to provide the answers you need if other posties don't beat me to the punch!
Nice grammar, huh? It might interest you to know that I was an English major in college. Well, before they threw me out. I was not thrown out for poor grammar, though. I wish I could tell you why I was thown out, but those records are sealed.
Last Saturday I was down in Orlando for the SocialSpark Focus Group at the IZEA offices. I thought I'd tell you a little bit about it. I'm not sure how much I am actually allowed to talk about. Last time I was there for a focus group they had us sign all kinds of papers, and they took blood and urine samples and our fingerprints. I gave a stool sample, too. They didn't ask for one, but I figured better safe than sorry, right?
Then I am pretty sure that Ted warned us that if we breathed a word of what was discussed in the focus group, that we would wake up with a Google executive's head in our bed.
There was none of that last Saturday. Ted wasn't even there. I think he was out in California decapitating some Google executives.
The first thing you notice when you get to the IZEA offices is that you can't get into the building. You have to call and someone has to let you in. I thought about buying some suction cups and wall-climbing my way up the side of the building to the fourth floor, but I left my Spiderman Underoos at home, and I am just not comfortable scaling a building unless I am wearing my lucky Spiderman Underoos.
I better cut to the chase or you won't finish this post before your boss catches you reading blogs at work.
Again, I don't know what I can say, so I'll keep it vague. SocialSpark is awesome. I am very excited about it. First of all, it has a huge social component, and I all about the social networking. I am MySpaced and Facebooked and Twittered up to my eyeballs. I belong to social networks that I don't even know I belong to.
We went through a number of exercises designed to gauge how easy it was to navigate around the site and I am pleased to say that I had no trouble at all. That's significant because believe me, when it comes to that sort of thing, I am the lowest common denominator. It takes me a long time to learn something new. I generally do not like change. But I like this change. I am salivating as I wait for this change.
We will be able to do so much more with SocialSpark. I should have asked about what I could and couldn't talk about. I can tell you that the new IZEA offices are really cool. I can tell you that Gordon, the new Manager of Customer Love is a fine fellow, despite having gone to the University of Central Florida. I can tell you that the sandwiches they had brought in for lunch were delicious.
I could probably tell you more. But I really don't want to end up with someone's noggin tangled up in my bedsheets.
I probably can tell you that it will probably only be another month or two before SocialSpark becomes reality.
And I can tell you to prepare to be VERY excited.
You want to use your blog to make money. Plain and simple. That's why you're here and have become part of the PPP community. Well, did you know we provide many tools and resources that can help you earn more money? That's right, we do! They exist, and they've been here for months and months. You just may not know about them.
We want to help bloggers and advertisers maximize their opportunities across all our properties. That's one of the reasons Carri & I started the "weekly tips" series. Some of the topics might seem a little basic, but it's all important to everyone -- from the blogger who's just been accepted into our network to the more seasoned bloggers, to our new and repeat advertisers.
If you're not familiar, I want to introduce you to the valuable resource we call PayPerPost University. While there are advertiser tutorials, blogger tutorials, and postie service announcements, I personally feel one of the most relevant areas is "Best Practices." Think of it as "the basics" or "things you need to know." And while these certainly are things to help you be considered for more marketplace opportunities, they are also tips for anyone who blogs. Things like:
• Choosing appropriate categories
• Word count
• Relevance
• Look and feel
• Maintaining balance (between sponsored and non-sponsored content)
• Looking at your blog(s) from an Advertiser’s perspective
Like I already mentioned, some of this is certainly considered the basics, but if you continuously keep these things top-of-mind you'll not only find greater success within PayPerPost...you'll also become better at your craft.
If you want to have PayPerPost University as a handy reference tool, bookmark http://payperpostuniversity.com/.
More to come but in the meantime take this with you:
Blog because you have something to share with your readers. Make sure your blog contains enough non-sponsored elements to give it a strong presence.
Part IV: In-line Ad and Links
We know that there are many ways to monetize your blog. Some are as simple as adding text links to key words or ad units to unused space while others rely on sponsored content to help get the word out about products, sites and services. The following are a few tips on the best way to optimize your links in the PayPerPost Marketplace to ensure each sponsored post submitted to us can be accepted.
What do you mean by In-line Ads and Links?
Any link that does not lead to the advertiser’s site, or that has not been requested by the advertiser to be included in your post would cause your post to remain unapproved in our system. This would include Google Ads as well as content link ads and hyperlinks to sites other than that of the advertiser. Within the PayPerPost guidelines this also means links to Wikipedia as well links to other posts on your own blog.
Here is an example of an in-line ad:
Why am I not allowed to include these links in my sponsored post?
When you accept a sponsored post, that advertiser is paying you to create content about their sites, products and services. If you link to sites other than that particular advertiser, you are detracting from their site and diverting attention away from the subject of your post. This particular topic is addressed in the PayPerPost Terms of Service ("TOS"). Click here if you need to familiarize yourself with them.
Can I post for other "pay you to blog" or monetization programs on my blog and still blog for PayPerPost?
Of course! Your blog is your own and how you choose to utilize your blog's real estate is your choice. As long as competing ads do not appear within a PPP sponsored post, there are no restrictions disallowing them from your blog.
What does PPP consider as part of my post?
Generally, a post includes everything from the title through the comments. Therefore, to be sure that you post is approved, make sure that competing ads or links do not appear between the title and comments of a post. A good test of this would be to take look at your specific post. When you click on the title of your post to view it individually, you should not see any ads included.
As always, should you have any additional questions or concerns about these issues or a specific post, we are only a ticket away. To contact a member of the Customer Love team, simply click on the “Contact Support’ link at the bottom of each page of your account, or the ‘Contact Us’ link at the bottom of each page of the PPP/Izea site.
