Izeafest is underway, and today’s release of SocialSpark is massive. There are a number of brand new features and really great changes today. Some of the things you’ll notice on the site now include Causes, Networks, Smart Blog Rolls, and more. There’s plenty for advertisers and bloggers to get excited about.
With the release of Causes, you can now easily donate to a number of charities directly through the site. Each Cause has its own profile page, where donations can be made to the charity. Bloggers may also donate through taking Sponsored Post opportunities. On the Take page of an opportunity, bloggers can choose to have their earnings go to a Cause. Also, when Causes are created, a donation goal can be set so that people who donate can see the impact of their donations as the Cause reaches towards the goal it set.
Networks provide a way for advertisers to pick from a preset group of blogs to be eligible for their opportunities. All of the networks can be viewed by going to the Browse Networks page under the Marketplace tab. From this page, some stats such as average cpm, cpc, views, and visits for all of the blogs within the network can be seen. Networks can be searched and sorted in a similar fashion to the browse opps and browse blogs pages. Going to an individual Network profile page shows even more detail. The price displayed for the Network is for the total of all of the blogs within the Network. The profile page also gives a detailed breakdown of the demographics for the blogs within the Network, such as traffic by age group, country location, and gender. Networks will help advertisers get the blogs they want posting to their opportunities very quickly.
Another thing that’s been added to help advertisers find the right bloggers is the Smart Blog Rolls feature. During opportunity creation, if an advertiser selects the Create Custom Requirements setting under Targeting, then they’re taking to the Smart Blog Roll creation page. From here, advertisers can create dynamic blog rolls based on segmentation criteria they choose. For example, if you want a blog roll with all Canadian bloggers that have a RealRank of below 1000, no problem! How about a blog roll that finds all bloggers that are self-proclaimed baseball fans and get at least a certain amount of unique visitors per day? Easy! Just choose a type of criteria from the first field, choose a qualifier, and then the requirement as seen below. Smart Blog Rolls earn their name not just because it generates the blog roll right there, but also because it will update itself. If a blogger doesn’t exist in the system or doesn’t meet your requirements when you create the Smart Blog Roll, the blogger will still be added to it automatically whenever those requirements are met.
Finally, advertisers can also pick out individual blogs to create opportunities for, just by picking them from the Browse Blogs page. On the profile page of a blog, there’s now a Buy Now button, which will take advertisers directly into the opp creation process. The opp that’s created though, will only be available to that one blog. Bloggers can edit the price for a post on their blog from their My Blogs, Edit page. The blogger will also see a new Just For You tab in the Browse Opportunities page if there are any opportunities specified specifically for that blogger.
As you can tell, this is a big day for SocialSpark with these significant features and improvements. These changes should go a long way towards helping advertisers find what they’re looking for more easily, and get the bloggers more exposure to the advertisers that are looking for them. Enjoy the rest of Izeafest!
