Payperpost recently announced that they have initiated a new program that allows advertisers to go directly to bloggers and solicit sponsored articles. PayPerPost is essentially emulating a line of business that already exists with several payperpost competitors such as Reviewme and Sponsoredreviews, even Blogitive has a mechanism now that enables a more direct approach between advertisers and bloggers.

This new line of business is not a replacement of the old Payperpost line of business and it shouldn’t be viewed as such.

There are times when advertisers needed and want to selectively pick individual blogs or bloggers to cover an article or a website or a product with a sponsored review. There are also times when advertisers do not want to waste the time hunting through individual websites looking for just the right match.

There’s two ways to build buzz.

1. The first way is to utilize a shotgun approach and blast out a sponsored review request across multiple categories of blogs. This opens up things to all comers and you don’t always get exactly what you looking for in the final blog. However you don’t have to spend much time organizing the campaign and you do get immediate benefits and page rank and in traffic.  Plus, the results are almost immediate as the first bloggers available typically pick up these requests and write them. 
2. The second way is to go selectively find those exact blogs that contain either the readers or the writing perspective that you looking for. You can then choose like an ala carte menu each blog that you would like to solicit to write a sponsored review. This is excellent if you have a very tight niche and you want to focus only on that niche and you don’t want to stray from the path. This does take more time to find the blogs and more times for the bloggers to complete the articles as they may not be ready to write when you first place an order. However you will stand a better chance of reaching the ears and eyes of specific consumers that you’re hoping to attract or impress.

Payperpost definitely offers a discounted opportunity to reach bloggers utilizing their tools. Their rates are some of the lowest in the industry and with this new direct model probably the lowest in the industry outside of individual contractors in the SEO field. Payperpost basically only takes 5% on the transaction for a direct purchase, that means when you purchase a campaign to payperpost direct the lion share of the fund your pain are going to bloggers that are writing your sponsored review.

It’s a very efficient model and payperpost is definitely benefiting from their large economy of scale. Regardless this is a separate line of business and will probably not reach the level of success but payperpost has attained when they allow advertisers to reach out in a shotgun fashion across multiple categories. That is still the fastest way to generate buzz rapidly and benefits through search engine optimization results.

Together both of these lines of business will help make payperpost stronger.

For many months now I have been counseling, coaching, mentoring, recruiting and acting as a guru for people that are looking to learn how to Make Money Blogging. Initially when I started blogging, I started blogging to learn how to perform several different web design functions. I used some of my early blogs to express myself in writing in part and in part to use some of my blogs that are no longer in existence as guinea pigs to learn and do new web design things.

I rapidly learned that many people make a very good living from running websites. Initially I started utilizing Google adsense and I thought, “Could it be possible that I can make money from Google ads and actually fund a company?”

The answer is that you could, but you could also possibly get rich selling Amway. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s probable or that it’s going to work for most people.

Not too long later I found several ways that people can earn money by blogging that are relatively easy and fairly straight forward. Plus, they do not require a great deal of time to transpire before you earn money for your efforts.

Back in the days of three television networks, TV announcers and hosts like Johnny Carson would provide product endorsements. Bloggers today can provide endorsements or even provide anti-endorsements and earn money from their efforts. On the Internet the axiom that all publicity is good publicity definitely holds true in the blogosphere. A single mention of a company or website that includes the URL to their website is valuable.

From that simple concept, an industry has been growing and growing that helps bloggers earn money up front for creating value by writing on their blogs and developing their blogs in exchanging links and references for cash. It’s very simple it’s very straightforward and it allows almost anyone to start writing a blog as a hobby and rapidly fund their hobby. Eventually they might even choose to turn a hobby into a business but in the meantime you can definitely pay for the gas in your car or pay for dinner at a fancy restaurant several times a week.

I came across an excellent resource providing information on 100 different online resources and tools for freelancers.

I wanted to internalize the information in a way that I could rapidly work with in multiple settings in the future if I ever needed to find the right tool for the job. So of course I mindmapped out the tools listed, plus I added in the tools suggested in the comments and I added a bunch of my own.

Now I have a great starting point for the future whenever I need to build up the list or find something I need quickly. I linked back to the original article from my MindMap Central topic and I created sub maps for each of the categories identified. This kept each category of items viewable at a single glance.

I’ve provided snapshots of these maps below. For more details about each of the tools I suggest a quick visit over to the site yourself as it really does have a great deal of information.

In the meantime, I did this experiment in part to internalize the info as I mentioned, but also in part to find a more rapid way of mindmapping this type of information from primary sources on the web. I hope to find more efficient ways to achieve this goal in the future.

Recently Mindjet announced the upcoming release of their latest MindManager Version, MindManager Pro 7. MindManager has been utilizing beta testers for the last several months. I queried the MindManager Group at Yahoo! to ask how many people from this group had participated in the beta program.
Several of the responses from members indicated that they had agreed to an NDA with Mindjet that they understood would prevent them from confirming or denying their participation in the beta program. At first I took that for what it was and recognized that these members did not want to harm Mindjet nor breach the NDA. That is very positive and speaks to the loyalty of MindManager users to Mindjet, a loyalty that I share I might add.

I then considered that Mindjet is working very hard, now, to generate buzz about their new version and simultaneously push sales for the Month of May on their old version. People that buy now will get an upgrade to the new version when its available at the end of May.

***Please note I am a MindManager reseller, but I do not advise that you buy it from me. You can get better buys elsewhere on the internet. The channel pricing structure in place does not allow me to be competitive in my pricing of MindManager products any longer. I am considering the removal of these products from my own business, but have not done that yet.

Beta Testing Confidentiality Vs. Rollout Promotion of New Product

It would seem that Mindjet has come to be in a position where their loyal beta testers are attempting to protect the company based on an NDA that Mindjet required. These same beta testers would normally be the promoters and evangelists and word of mouth front line for the product. However, they now have the perception that they are legally compelled not to discuss the new product! That could be great from an information control perspective but its definitely not good from a marketing perspective.

So I re-read the NDA and it does not prevent participants from stating that they were involved in the Beta testing. It does prevent people from sharing their experiences or knowledge gained from the beta participation.

As the MM7 release was built for the Office 2007 standard (essentially a beta itself), I would think that Mindjet would want to utilize as many beta testers as possible and especially those from the Yahoo! MindManager Group community that is one of the largest mindmapping communities open to the public. As Mindjet has essentially a beta(MM7) to work with a beta(Office 2007) on an existing OS and on a beta OS (Vista), it would seem that they could use all the beta testing help they could get. This prompted my initial question to the group.

Therefore, as I read everyone’s responses regarding the NDA, it struck me that Mindjet’s beta testing for MM7 and the perceptions that beta testers were not allowed to discuss MM7 may have had a chilling effect on the Yahoo MindManager forum over the last few months. If forum members engage in a project that does not allow them to discuss the topic of the forum, that seems to harm the community a bit. As this community involves the sharing of best practices and many other nuances of mindmapping and MindManager in particular, it strikes me that this same movement has probably harmed Mindjet as well. Essentially, Mindjet’s beta program has served to halt conversation about Mindjet products as it relates to knew innovations and possibly new best practices.

Transparency vs Secrecy in Business

Now, anyone that reads my blog probably is aware that I do not subscribe to the Apple theory of doing business in an information void contained by complete and total secrecy. I think that business is best served when people and stakeholders operate transparently and communicate.

In fact, this is one of the great benefits of mindmapping. It helps people to share information transparently faster, easier, more efficiently and with less obfuscation by data or lists of facts. So it strikes me, that our group has essentially been silenced a bit by the company we all evangelize and promote at a time when they need us to talk about their product and share more information with each other and with new potential users.

Please understand I am not trying to be critical of any members in the Yahoo! MindManager group. I can definitely understand the perception around the NDA, but I did want to remark on the unintended consequences of the beta program. There are some very good reasons why a beta program might be covered under an NDA, some of which have been mentioned in recent replies such as

• Helping to set user expectations for the actual product to be rolled out as opposed to options tested and held back
• Not airing complaints about bugs identified during testing that may have not been fixed in the beta testers desired way in the final version
• Not sharing information that might be used or stolen by competitors

These are all important items to manage during a beta program. However, these items should not not take place in a way that

• Silences product evangelists from discussing the product
• Stops or hinders product buzz and word of mouth promotion
• Prevents collaborative discussion of the beta such that users can share insights into the product providing Mindjet with a better understanding of the scope of an issue or opportunity
• Creates an artificially created information void at the time the product is launched or announced by silencing beta users from sharing their experience (As an example consider how compelling some ‘behind the scenes’ features are for some movies, and how these are used to market a movie product and get people to buy or watch a movie.)

At a minimum it would seem that Mindjet needs to find a middle ground on this issue either now or in the future. If they must operate in secrecy behind an NDA, then they need to balance that with the ability to allow their beta testers to transform from a free testing resource over to a free marketing and word of mouth evangelism resource. They could attempt to prevent product evangelists from participating in the beta program, but that would remove some of the most experienced MindManager gurus from providing help and guidance in developing a better product. They need the beta testing help of this community, but they also need the voice of the community.

I’d suggest that they would even benefit from the perceived behind the scenes look about the development of the product. Mindjet was founded by Mike and Betina Jetter. Together, they provided an extremely compelling story about the early development of MindManager 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 in a book that featured Mike’s battle against cancer. That behind the scenes connection to the creators and the creative process is extremely compelling. If Mindjet were to open up their beta testing program and allow beta testers to share their beta testing stories after Mindjet announces the eminent launch of the product, Mindjet could benefit from the experiences and voice of their beta testers. Essentially, they benefit from free testing services provided by beta testers and this free beta testing experience then becomes feature rich content to help communicate the journey of MindManager from version 6.0 to 7.0.

Its notable that mindmaps help people see the connections and relationships between one topic and another. If Mindjet were to show the developmental relationship from 6.0 to 7.0 via their own developers and their network of beta testers, they would essentially benefit that much more. They would help potential buyers make the connection between 6.0 and 7.0 and that information could make the difference in a purchase decision or in the speed of a purchase decision!

Back in late March you may have noticed that this blog was shut down. In fact the entire Softduit site was down for several hours.
We never entirely isolated the issue, but basically there were 2 things going on that could be identified:

1. Wordpress 2.1, the software that runs this Maven Mapper’s Information, was leaking bandwidth severely – leaving a call open when something created ‘persistent connections’. Persistent Connections are not always bad, but they are dangerous when not used correctly.
2. I had a meta tag plugin (Autometa) that was creating an error that was not visible on the blog but creating significant havoc with my host.

When this happened, I was a bit frantic. I didn’t know a persistent connectin from a hole in my head. My host shut my site down, much to my dismay. Thinking that there might be something like a denial of service attack going on, but there was not.

Right away, I got rid of the Autometa (bye bye). It may or may not have been a big portion of the problem, but for troubleshooting reasons it was in the way and had to go.

The thing is that persistent connections are not always bad, but it was a bit beyond me to identify the good from the bad in this case.

Here is some of the information they gave me:

System administration has noted that your account appears to be using persistent connections in some of the software used on your site. Persistent connections are by and large not necessary for most software to function, and they can cause issues with your account.

To explain a bit further, persistent connections are one method PHP scripts may use to open a connection to a MySql database. Using persistent connecting is only useful in an environment with a high overhead in connecting to the MySql database itself – in your case the connection (and ‘cost’ in resources) is negligible compared to using persistent connections as all of your queries are executed immediately.

The persistent connections in this case are simply sitting idle consuming memory and may bring your site close to the predefined limits set for accounts in the shared hosting environment. If you have a database intensive site, this could make the site appear sluggish or appear to be down while the initial queries time out (this can take up to 300 seconds, depending on several factors).

You will need to review your code and see where these persistent connections are coming from, as spikes in traffic could cause your site to appear to be unavailable to your visitors.

Plus

I had to suspend your site due to the very high load that it was taking on. There were multiple IP addresses connecting to it over and over again. Some of the IP’s had over 80 connections each.

Here is what I learned.

1. After you install a plugin, check your error logs. Just because it seems to be working doesn’t mean that it really is.
2. The jury is still out on some things about Wordpress 2.1 that haven’t been documented well by the community yet, so pay attention to your bandwidth and be careful.

Note for all people new to hosting their blog on their own domain. – Be Careful!

It is likely that you have a hosting plan that allows a certain amount of bandwidth per month. If you go over that bandwidth a couple things are likely to happen:

1. Your host might shut your site down.
2. You might get an overage charge (like going over your minutes on your cell phone bill – very very scary if it happens and you are not prepared)

We are all used to getting typically hundreds to thousands of hits per day, but if your site goes into the millions of hits per day or hour you better make sure you have a good solid way of monetizing that traffic or else you are going to be in trouble.

Adsense May Not solve the Problem

You might think that Adsense will earn a tremendous amount if you see a spike in traffic (ergo you write the golden article that captures the attention of the world and that CPM number makes you rich!)

Wrong!

Google will sometimesshut down your Adsense account because they think there might be fraud going on (Google is like that ~unpredictable) . They like to see nice constant (expected/predicted) growth in your traffic. If you jump from 100 hits per day to several million hits in an hour (and your server doesn’t crash), Google may nix your account and not pay you your earnings blaming it on fraud.

Now you have a bandwidth issue, commonly referred to as a Big Fat Bill and you have no Adsense revenue and no Adsense Account. Its kind of like getting your right hand chopped off, having salt rubbed in the wound while someone slaps you in the face repeatedly with your own hand.

The LinkyLoveArmy.com is launching a beta program this week.  Today, they released several insights into their Internet marketing 2.0 of strategies.  They are forming an army of bloggers to leverage the numbers of bloggers and blog campaigns in the direction and shape reminiscent of a wedge formation.

You lazy this type of structure they hope to penetrate advertising campaigns and in particular keyword searches that generates large amounts of traffic such that the bloggers can directly market to business-to-business and business-to-customer groups.

Up until this point in time, those Internet marketing 2.0 firms have offered up a bit of a free-for-all where advertisers come to purchase reviews with contextual links inside of his and bloggers respond acting as individuals in the marketplace offering up individual benefits.  The LinkyLoveArmy hopes to organize those bloggers with a much more focused strategic objective and at the same time harness a new revenue model for bloggers yielding a higher return on effort.

Here is a short video that they are offering on their website today:

The PayPerPost sponsored PostieCon ‘07 conference is confirmed. The event will take place on June 1 through June 2. Is a weekend to Memorial Day weekend.

Roberts Scoble will headline the event is the keynote speaker. The theme of the event is that lawyers are a rock star.

The goal of the blog conference is to bring bloggers together and help them learn new and better methods for blogging gaining traffic and monetizing their websites with PayPerPost.com.

The registration price is $200 if you register late after May 18 the price goes up to $250. The event will likely be a an excellent. opportunity. There will be in award banquet and an open bar which probably justifies the $200 price tag.

Other Speakers and Moderators

David Ponce, Dan Rua, and Paul Lewis

Events and Sessions

The itinerary for the events are not filled up yet. PayPerPost still looking for additional speakers and moderators. This is the first event for PostieCon. So it’s probably to be expected that it’s going to be a little green or rough around the edges. The big advantage of this event will be for bloggers to network with other bloggers. Everyone will get a chance to learn a great deal of information and benchmark about best practices.

The event is not open to other paid to post companies or networks. So this should be really looked at as an industry event but as a private event. It remains to be seen what type of turnout will show up for this event. PayPerPost has over 10,000 blogs in its networks these days and a couple thousand advertisers. However this is a company that’s based on an Internet model with people blogging and advertising from all around the world. Many of the bloggers have been categorized as “mommy bloggers” and it’s unknown whether any of those bloggers will actually be able to show up for event such as this.

So as these shows go especially when they’re launching, missile and probably par for the course. No big great opportunity for people it to attend to get in at the ground level because PayPerPost is will will only be a little less than a year old at the time this event takes place.

Softduit Partners Attendance

I will likely be at the show representing Softduit Partners as well as several of our advertising customers. For any of my readers or fellow bloggers or my sponsors and advertisers that we’ll be able to go, I look forward to meeting you there!

PayPerPost has been working to add more value to its marketing campaign opportunities over the last few weeks. They have begun to apply segmentation to the blogs of bloggers.

This segmentation comes in the form of blog rank and blog category. The blog rank is determined via PageRank as provided by URL Trends and the category is self assigned by the bloggers and currently reviewed by PayPerPost.

This is an entirely new process for PayPerPost and they have had to work through a number of bugs in the first few days on the rank side that seem mostly solved at this point. The categorical review of blogs is proving a little trickier, but they are working on it.

The Goal

Ultimately they hope to be able to offer their advertisers to be more precise in the targeting of their campaigns to individual types of blogs. The obvious next step in categories is to find an objective technology capable of reviewing and indexing blogs by category up front.

I have found that technology and forwarded a summary of the capability to PayPerPost. The end result could allow PayPerPost to not only put blogs into categories, but it could enable PayPerPost to track in real time the metrics of the blogs performance and content characterization.

Selling Price Spike

PayPerPost has seen a spike in the upper selling price of ad reviews and placements taking the price from a previous high of around $20 up into three and four digit prices for a couple hundred words. The image on the right shows some current opportunity prices and their word counts.

Some Advertisers are willing to pay a premium for the laser precision option of hitting the right audience.

Still Lowest Commission rate in Industry

PayPerPost does charge a much lower service fee for blog marketing as opposed to competitors such as ReviewMe or Blogitive which can charge fees of 100 – 500% more than the amount that goes to the blogger. PayPerPost charges a rate of 35% for their portion allowing SEO and SEM specialists the pricing differential to come in and walk less experienced advertisers through a Buzz Marketing Campaign through the blogosphere. Even after an SEM markup the rates are still lower than their nearest competitor and the options that advertisers can require are infinitely more flexible and scalable to large and small campaigns.

PayPerPost’s biggest challenge will hinge largely on their ability to get solid metrics back to their customers as mentioned above, but providing the ability to launch campaigns of this nature will initially create something worth measuring.

This week PayPerPost launched a new affiliate program to promote its services.

Here is how it works:

1. A blogger already enrolled in PayPerPost, includes a button in any article (related to PayPerPost or not).
2. see live example.
3. Then when any other blogger visits their blog, they can click the button to review the article in question.
4. They perform a review by writing an article in their own blog and linking to the original article.
5. If they sign up for PayPerPost, then PayPerPost will Pay them $7.50 for reviewing the post, and
6. PayPerPost will pay you $7.50 when they get paid for referring them.

So if you have a blog and you click on the button above and you meet the acceptance requirements for PayPerPost, you can then write an article reviewing this blog article. You will get paid 30 days after you publish that article and so will I! We will both receive $7.50.

The beauty of this affiliate program is partly the money, but it is more impressive for the viral nature of the enticement. It encourages new participants to review articles of other existing participants. This builds links and relationships for everyone involved, which improves the quality of the publishers working in the system. More links yields higher page rank and search engine rankings.

That means that everyone in the ad network ecosystem can benefit from the growing strength of the blog. Advertisers that previously purchased advertisements get a bigger bang for their buck as the page rank goes up. Bloggers earn more from having a higher PR, and PayPerPost gathers more writers and its existing writers grow and can charge premium rates.

Its an excellent concept and a very good execution of that concept.

Technorati tags: PayPerPost, afilliate programs, blog review afilliate hybrid

ZDNet revealed last week that PayPerPost will target the top 100 bloggers with the rollout of a new system upgrade geared towards advertising segmentation and offering a new standardized disclosure policy that will trigger BubbleAds to appear when a user hovers over the disclosure badge in an article.

The increase in disclosure and transparency are noble advances in the correct ethical direction. 

However, Considering the PayPerPost business model, how will targeting their system towards the top 100 bloggers further business?

The Top 100 Blogs according to Technorati achieve their rank primarily according to the number of other blogs that link in to them.  At the high end of the 100 Engadget has 25,682 unique blogs linking in and at the low end the blog that has no English name has 2,995 blogs linking in.  For the sake of comparison, there is currently at least one blog in the PayPerPost network that has about 1,300 blogs linking in.  While this blog (Maven Mapper’s Information)  has 145 blogs linking in according to Technorati.

But what exactly will a new disclosure policy and a new ad delivery engine do to entice a blog like Engadget to seek sponsors from the same poll that Maven Mapper utilizes?

That I do not know and do not understand.  I do understand that one of the great powers of the type of Buzz Management or Internet Marketing 2.0 services that PayPerPost and many of its competitors such as Blogitive, Blogsvertise, LoudLaunch, iWebTools and others provide is the ability to connect advertisers with the leveraged power of thousands of bloggers and websites. 

Content is King on the internet and the strength in this model is in the vast army of content producers.  The Queen of course is Search.  If you cannot find the content then the king will be dethroned.  Building web buzz by leveraging the masses through both their discussions and their links is the second strength of this model. 

The fact that these services combine the power of the masses from all around the globe to generate content and push that content up such that it can be found is amazing.  Not to mention the fact that these blogs take their advertising sponsors and their keywords with them on that upwards journey in the Search engines.  This is truly where the power of the model comes into play.

The top 100 bloggers already have the ability to illuminate content they deem worthy, by shining a Google Page Rank 8 mega spot light towards a website or advertisers promotional link (using Engadget and Boing Boing PR examples).  They do not need a middle man.

From an advertisers perspective it would be the equivalent of purchasing a Super Bowl commercial from your local TV stations ad agency, and who does that? 

The top 100 bloggers cover their advertising sales and placements very well already.  Similarly, speaking companies that can afford a big ad spend are typically going to be covered in relationships already. 

The Real Penetrating Power of Buzz Management

PayPerPost can offer a buzz coverage and band width that is phenomenal (rumored to be over 10,000 blogs and growing every month).  Would a big company like to hit the same 100 blogs they are all ready hitting through a new middle man, or would they like to get access to the marketing bandwidth of 10,000+ bloggers downstream?  (Multiply that by two or three and elliminate duplicates to consider the entire industry.)

In the long tail model the theory goes that if you have blogs that have an average of 500 visitors a day (some on the low side an some much higher).  10,000 bloggers will bring you 5 million hits per day.  With an average ad spend of $10 per ad (including fees), a big advertiser could run a single campaign for $100k (10 x 10,000) across all 10,000 blogs.  Plus that is with an ad that is relatively permanent.  It will likely be there until the demise of the blog.  There are blogs that are in the top 500 that charge that kind of money for a single weeks worth of ads, with daily hits in the 1 million range.

An advertiser can get 35 million eyes on their ad in 1 week for $100k through PPP theoretically in the first week and long tail eyes for months and years to come compared to 7 million eyes through traditional top blogs.

So what happens to the bloggers in the long tail of the blogosphere when the service refocuses on the nub of the tail? 

The risk is that the long tail will be neglected.  Unless the systems and organization are built out to cover the long tail needs in an automated and streamlined manner.  Instead of focusing on growing the blogger base from 10,000 to 50,000 or 100,000, PayPerPost seems to be opting to push up the average ad rate for top blogs chasing after someone else’s pie.

Step in the Right Direction

Now to their credit PayPerPost is working to put on a mass training event called Postie Con in Orlando next summer.  The event will bring some of the PPP Army of bloggers to learn new trends, improve their skills, grow their blogging business and increase the quality and effectiveness of their work.  This is excellent.  Analogizing the blogger masses to the elite 100 blogs, this is taking the grass roots, growing the yard larger and fertilizing it to nurture a healthy ecosystem.  Importing a patch or two of high quality sod however, will only stick out like a sore thumb and prove a distraction.

PayPerPost and the other Buzz Management organization should be pushing their network of writers, which I refer to as a Writer’s Collaborative.  The push should be towards improvement and growth.   With these simple Goals:

1. Establish more segmented blogs
2. Write Better
3. Write more (but spread on the additional blogs)
4. Optimize, Promote, and Grow Readership and Subscribers
5. Reform the long skinny tail into a muscular fat wagging tail capable of shaking up the internet with every swing!

To accomplish this, the Buzz Management industry needs to sponsor more education and provide more support for their ecosystem.  Possibly even utilizing technology found in common elearning solutions and virtual conventions such as the EcomExpo.

Closing Perspective

The world is closing in on 10 billion people.  The United States will likely hit 400 million people in the next 15- 20 years.  A network of 100,000 experience content producers five years from now could significantly shake up the world of media as we know it.   That would be 1 content producer for every 100,000 people world wide.

The Missing Dynamic – Collaboration

Let me also offer that this is just one aspect of the dynamic taking hold on the internet.  These numbers all assume that the content producers are working in a vacuum.  If you add in the other major trend the internet has enabled, and these producers collaborate, well then you have an entirely different topic and a much different entertainment, news, education and information industry.

For more Information:  See ZDNet Article PayPerPost to Launch disclosure badges, new tools; targets top 100 bloggers by Larry Dignan – January 30, 2007.

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