We’ll be bringing the site down briefly tonight around 9:00pm EST for some upgrades.  We’re removing the V4 Alpha label from the site, and we’re giving it a face-lift.  This new look and feel will help us keep our FAQs and other helpful info sections updated more regularly.  You shouldn’t notice any changes other than the new colors, font and some aesthetic changes.  If you happen to run into any problems please let us know.  You can click the little feedback tab when you log into your account, or visit our Get Satisfaction help page directly.

Enjoy this week’s Cheeky Tweets and have a great weekend!

Sign up for the bonus program by March 15th and we will send you and a friend to Vegas!

You have been busting your tail. You are overworked and under appreciated. You need to blow off some steam and we want to help! If you sign up for our monthly bonus program now through March 15th at a level of $2,500 or more we will send you two tickets from anywhere in the U.S. to Las Vegas! Sign up for our $5,000 a month program and we will also put you and a friend up for 3 days at The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, send you to see a Cirque du Soleil show and treat you to dinner at STACK Las Vegas.

Vegas + Bonus Dollars!

Not only are we sending you to Vegas, we are also going to hook you up with a sweet monthly bonus. Earn a $2,635 bonus for a $5,000 a month spend! Monthly spends can be allocated to any IZEA property including Sponsored Tweets, SocialSpark, Sponzai, PayPerPost and IPL. You can switch money between platforms at any time.

• Minimum commitment of three months.
• Advertiser billed monthly via credit card.
• Unconsumed dollars roll from month to month. No wasted spend!
• Advertiser can cancel at any time after their contract term with 30 days notice.

Call Pete at 1.866.514.1680 x136 to claim your trip.

You can also drop him an email at pete@izea.com.

• Bonus dollars have no cash value.
• Vegas offer for new bonus program signups only.
• No refunds on monthly bonus programs. Minimum program term 3 months.
• Coach air fair. Valid for travel in the U.S. only.
• Trip must be booked at least 21 days in advance.

We’ll be hittin’ the road…err, skies…over the next few weeks and we’re looking to connect with you! So if you plan on going to any of these upcoming events be sure to catch-up with us on the tradeshow floor or at one of the many parties. After all, you don’t wanna miss your opportunity to take a photo with this guy:

SXSW Film + Interactive Trade Show

Dates: March 13th – 15th
Location: Austin Convention Center
Level 1, Exhibit Hall 4
500 East Cesar Chavez Street
Austin, TX
SXSW.com/Interactive

OMMA Global

Dates: March 17th – 18th
Location: San Francisco Marriott Marquis
55 Fourth Street
San Francisco, CA
MediaPost/events

ad:tech San Francisco

Dates: April 20th – 21st
Location: Moscone Center
747 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA
ad-tech.com/sf

Advertiser of the Month

Henderson Bas is our recognized Advertiser this month. Based in Toronto, Canada, they have run several campaigns–including ones for Coke Canada, Mercedes GLK, and Stouffers Canada–in a couple of our platforms.

Here is a blurb about them from their own website:

“Being Canada’s most awarded interactive agency is one thing. Getting there by developing great creative that gets results is another. That’s why North America’s biggest brands come to us.

Or maybe it’s our glowing personalities?”

We love that attitude!

If you’d like to find out more about this agency and see some of the clients they’ve worked with, visit their website.

Postie of the Month

Give-it-up for Charlene Amsden, our RockStar Postie for February. Known as “Quilly” on Get Satisfaction, Charlene is extremely active engaged on the boards and very helpful to fellow bloggers. As seen on her SocialSpark profile: “Laughter and friendship found in abundance here. This is not a blog, it’s a community.”

Charlene’s blog Quintessentially Quilly is active in inPostLinks, SocialSpark and PayPerPost.

Thanks for being such an outstanding member of the IZEA Community!

IZEA RockStar of the Month

If you follow our blog regularly you might recall our RockStar from last April, Adam. Nearly a year later and the IZEA Team is recognizing Adam again for all his hard work. Over the past year Adam has been integral to the success of SponsoredTweets.com, so help us give him a huge shout-out.

(Adam and honorary house doggy Lilly.)

Congratulations to everyone, and thanks for everything you do to help us be a success!

Here are this week’s “Cheeky Tweets”. Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

It’s the last Friday of month (where has this year already gone), so let’s end it with some entertaining Tweets!

There’s generally a SponsoredTweets release every week or two, but it’s been a while since we had a release quite this big. If you’re an advertiser or a tweeter, you’ll want to check out these changes. The focus for this release is around adding more value for advertisers and opening up more information to Tweeters.

Advertiser Updates!

The bulk of the changes for this release are on the advertiser side. We added a lot more bang for your buck by filtering out invalid clicks using ClickForensics. Click Forensics is the industry leader in scoring, auditing, and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. The way it works is simple — every click on a link from one of your opps will go through ClickForensics, and unless it’s considered valid it won’t affect the CPC of your opportunity. This is the same system that SocialSpark uses to verify traffic. We’ll still retweet it if the offer doesn’t meet a CPC of under $1.50 and they have ClickWatch enabled. This assures that duplicate clicks, click farm clicks, bot/spider clicks and otherwise invalid clicks aren’t counted. Since we’re tracking valid clicks on our side, we cut bit.ly out the picture, and we’re now shortening links using our in house shortener – spn.tw.

Dashboard Changes

The two notable changes are pointed out below. The first is the new notification settings that Tweeters already have. In addition though, Advertisers can now get a daily email summary of all activity on their account — or choose to receive no notifications.

Benching

We also added Benching! We actually added this a week ago, but since we’re sharing we thought we’d let you know. The concept behind benching is simple: an Advertiser has multiple opportunities with slightly different text and wants to make only one offer to each tweeter. Chances are the Advertiser doesn’t want to make offers to the same Tweeter for very similar opportunities. So the advertiser just needs to set their Bench length to a few days, and it’ll automatically hide any tweeters who they’ve made offers to in that many days. You can change this bench period at anytime and it’ll hide/show tweeters again. It’s that simple!

Reporting

When viewing a campaign, advertisers now get a great high level overview of their clicks. This will detail when the clicks happened, how many were considered invalid and more. Invalid clicks won’t show up on the graph, and won’t count towards the total clicks for this opportunity. Advertisers can even drill down and see the referrer for clicks on their offers.

Tweeter Updates!

When Tweeters login to SponsoredTweets they’re greeted with their opps list as usual. Above it though, we’ve added a breakdown of the money you’ve made in SponsoredTweets so far. This includes anything you’ve made by tweeting, referring people — and even a total that you could’ve made if you’d taken more opps offered your way.

There’s a lot of bug fixes and tuning going on under the hood for this release as well, but that’s the bulk of what you’ll see different when you use SponsoredTweets today. Hope you’ll enjoy this release!

It has recently come to our attention that there are companies trolling the internet with promises of making money online, and charging for it.  This is a scam!

Please know that IZEA and its platforms have never charged bloggers to participate in any campaigns, or to join the system.  We are not involved or affiliated with these companies in any way.  If you are asked to pay for something that mentions any of our platforms (InPostLinks, PayPerPost, SocialSpark, SponsoredTweets, etc), please walk away and report it.  Do not give them your money!  We encourage you to contact the Better Business Bureau and let us know, as well.

You can always reach us through Twitter @IZEA or @IZEALove, through comments on this very blog, and through the contact page on our main site.  Again, IZEA does not charge its members to participate in any campaign, or to join any platform.

Despite having sent the 1099 forms for 2009 to the processing company several weeks ago, many of you have commented that you’ve yet to receive yours. Our Finance team contacted said company earlier today, and they assure us the forms have started being distributed. If we receive any information that should require an update we’ll be sure to let you know.

Remember, you will only receive a 1099 form if your 2009 earnings exceeded $600 (through any of IZEA’s platforms).

Thanks so much for your patience!