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The biggest news out of PostieCon here in Las Vegas isn’t the Fab Four panel I participated in, or the huge party at Tao tonight. It’s that IZEA (formerly known as PayPerPost) has announced their new baby. SocialSpark is the new website we’ve all been waiting to see, and it’s a completely new type of website. Ted Murphy has come up with a concept that combines social media and marketing into one package. Think of it as Facebook + PayPerPost + Google Analytics. Those of us here at PostieCon ‘07 here in Las Vegas got to see a sneak peek in person, but the site will remain in beta until January of 2008.

“SocialSpark is a quantum leap forward for IZEA and the over 85,000 bloggers and 11,000 advertisers we already serve,” said Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA. “We have taken our highly successful PayPerPost model and flipped it inside out, creating a completely new model for social media advertising that extends beyond sponsored posts and opens up a wealth of new opportunities. In many ways we are disrupting our own disruptor.”

As bloggers, we’ll get a whole new way to interact with advertisers who want to use our blogs as a vehicle to promote their sites and products. Advertisers and bloggers will have public profile pages on SocialSpark. Advertisers interested in learning more about a particular blogger can view that blogger’s profile page to see all of the blogs authored by that blogger, as well as other advertisers they’ve worked with and sponsorship details. You’ll be able to interact with the profiles by adding friends, sending messages, and leaving comments, which enables you to create a network within the SocialSpark network. Advertisers will be able to easily identify the bloggers they wish to continue to work with on a long term basis, making it easier for great bloggers to earn money through the site.

In post disclosure is required, so that should please the most vocal PayPerPost / IZEA critics. Hopefully this will appease the Google gods as well!

But wait, there’s more! In addition to creating sponsored posts through the site to get paid, you’ll be able to accept “sponsors” for your entire blog. Advertisers set the price they’re willing to pay and when you agree to the price, you’ll have a Blog Welcome™ ad unit that will serve as sort of a splash page to a blog. It’s basically a small doormat for the front door of your blog. Once the initial welcome message disappears, a small, unobtrusive ad unit will move to the bottom of the browser while the visitor views your blog. You’re not giving up any of your valuable blog real estate, and you’re not annoying visitors with pop ups and pop unders. I am SO excited that PayPerPost / IZEA is moving beyond sponsored posts like this!

Pagerank will matter less…YAY! You have the choice to install analytics to allow advertisers to select your blog based on actual traffic, instead of pagerank or Alexa scores. Advertisers can also search demographic information you choose to input. Advertisers wishing to work with 30 year old moms in Florida can easily find ME and offer me work. They’ll also get detailed CPC and CPM stats for their blog campaign.

Third party developers will be invited to use open APIs provided by SocialSpark to enhance the site experience. SocialSpark will also adopt Google’s recently announced Open Social platform to augment user profiles and distribute native SocialSpark profile data to other networks.

Here’s a sneak peek of a profile page – this is mine, of course! I can’t even tell you how psyched I am to see this all come together. People are going to be talking about this for weeks, and it’s going to completely change the way we monetize our blogs – all for the better, of course! I’m extremely excited about the other ways IZEA is giving us to network with other bloggers and advertisers that we want to build relationships with. This platform is going to be amazing. AMAZING!

Update: Arrington still doesn’t like it. Color me shocked. :eyeroll:

[tags]IZEA, PayPerPost, PostieCon, PostieCon 07, SocialSpark, Argus[/tags]

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