Wednesday 14 March 2012

[IZEA] SocialSpark Review - Make Money Blogging

There exist numerous ways to earn money online from Blogging. This can be some PPC (pay per click) campaigns, like Google Adsense (btw my Adsense account was banned a few days ago...I will write a post about my "fatal mistakes" soon) or some of its alternatives, this can be direct advertising or affiliate sales, it can be CPA (cost per action) offers or some CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) banners etc. All this reflects the topics of  "how to make money online blogging""blogging for profit" or"how to monetize your blog".

Bear in mind, that you can create and write your blog on different platforms. The variety simply stumbles at first:
  1. You can create a [Squidoo Lens], for example. Establish a [Hub Page]. (each of this two can be easily monetized by Adsense and other ad blocks). 
  2. Use free blog platforms, like Wordpess or Blogger. I love blogger most of all – it is really simple, nice and easy to use, with in-built ability to monetize your blog with Adsense block widgets. You can see that this blog is built precisely on Blogger platform.
  3. Use some blogging networks which allow you to post your articles plus participate in Adsense "share revenue" programs, meaning that you will split the profit and earn 50-100% of total Adsense income from your blog posts. They slightly differ from squidoo lens and hub pages. Examples of such websites where you can get paid to write or as they say "blog for cash" are: 
  • WikiNut - here you can be writing about anything you like. You will get 50% of the revenue generated by ads on your article pages. You can make money as a moderator reviewing other articles as well.
  • Bukisa - write about your favorite subject and get paid for it.
  • SheToldMe - on SheToldMe network you don't even need to write and post articles or make any reviews etc. Here you can be making money by merely bookmarking your favorite content - articles, images, videos etc! And the best part is that you keep 100% of Adsense revenue generated by your bookmarked pages.
  • Helium - one of the best revenue sharing and paid to write sites! You can blog about whatever you want. Your income depends on the quantity as well as on the quality of your posts.
  • Xomba - this network allows you to write about anything but a few topics connected with violence or adult. Here you can be earning two different ways: through adsense share revenue (targeted ads will be displayed on the pages you post and when anybody clicks on them you get paid) and through bookmarking pages.
  • About.com - quite popular network, where you can make very good money. You can blog on whatever you like. Your income in this case is determined by the number of page views your articles get.
  • Meshplex - here you will be writing tutorials on any topic you'd like to choose. You get paid through Adsense ads and it's worth mentioning that you get 100% of the generated profit!
Another great opportunity to make money blogging that I'm going to expose in this article is called "sponsored posts" or "pay-per-post" campaigns. If you don't know what a sponsored blog post is and the difference between normal posts and sponsored posts, do not worry, I'm going to explain it to you too right now.

The point is that in sponsored posts you have to write about the advertiser's or company's product or service using all the required data and their affiliate links. In other words you are promoting a third party's product for his benefit only. As a result advertisers (companies) will get good amount of promotion (traffic) from the sponsored posts you publish and you will get paid just for the fact of submitting a sponsored post to your blog :) It's as simple as that.

Concerning examples...You may have already noticed two posts on my blog with the statement "This post brought to you by ____. All opinions are 100% mine" at the very beginning of each of them. If not, here they are, just check them out:
They are these so-called sponsored posts which I had already been paid for (see screenshot below).


You see that I've been paid almost $30 just for publishing two sponsored posts on my blog. Easy money, isn't it? :) I could have earned much more (some posts cost up to $100 for being published!), but this was not the aim. I just wanted to show you how you can make money blogging and some prove of this fact. Besides I decided not to post “irrelevant” to my blog topic articles as well as those ones that I simply didn't like for some reason. I always want my content to be good with no trash.

How and where to get/find the sponsored posts? 

Here are a few options as well.
  • You can be looking for advertisers manually. Search using search engines and contact advertisers/companies directly. Or wait for advertisers and companies to find you as a blogger and a publisher. But this happens, lets say, not too often, so we need to find a better way to get sponsored posts.
  • Use a "middleman" who would supply you with a number of sponsored posts.
One of such "go-betweens" is called SocialSpark

SocialSpark is a branch company of IZEA, Inc and belongs to the latter. In general SocialSpark positions itself as a marketplace for advertisers and publishers (e.g. bloggers). SocialSpark makes it easier for advertisers to search for those who wish to publish sponsored posts. As a publisher you will have to open SocialSpark account and add your blog there.

To be ahead of other publishers and get more advertisers' offers, be sure to create Google analytics account and connect it to your blog. Choose the autopost option (advertisers like when your articles are posted automatically through Socialspark publishing tool) and select your preferred companies (I recommend choosing all of them despite of your blog topic). All this will help you to get a lot of offers from different advertisers.

After you set up your account and it has been approved, you'll have to wait for a few days for advertisers to find your blog. If an advertiser likes your blog, then he will show his interest by sending you a "Lead", which will contain all the details about the sponsored post and the amount of money you will get for its publishing. Then you have two options: either accept the lead as is or negotiate the price (or just specify some other details).


After accepting the lead the advertiser sends you an "Offer", which you have to accept as well. Later on you get 3 days to complete the offer, in other words to write the very post. And it should be remarked that you don't have to write the post yourself, as you are being provided with all the necessary information to post. Al l that is left to do is to structure the info. When you are done with "writing", your post is submitted for a final review. After it your post will be automatically published on your blog shortly.

You will get paid for the post after 30 days upon it is being published. The payment can be sent via check, bankwire or Paypal. I recommend using the last variant, it's easy and fast.


So if you are looking for a way to earn money from blogging, sponsored posts would be one of the best choices. SocialSpark helps you to get sponsored posts easily. Believe me, with such a golden opportunity you don't want to miss the boat on this one.

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