I had an email from IZEA offering me $100 in credit to run a Sponzai advertising campaign and I jumped on the opportunity. Not only would I be testing IZEA’s newest service that allows you to get paid for hosting “guest” blog posts on your blog, but I would also get to purchase $100 worth of sponsored posts to help promote my own blogs. I had a ton of fun purchasing guest posts and learning how the system worked.
First let me tell you about Sponzai:
Sponzai is a website that allows bloggers to sign up and list their blogs, in listing your blog you are allowing advertisers to potentially hire you to post a “Guest” post that is prewritten by the advertiser. You have to exactly cut and paste the guest post provided, you can’t even go so far as to add line feeds or spacing tags in between the guest post or it will fail when you attempt to submit it for review.
Sponzai is another means of monetizing your blog by allowing you to sell guest space on your blog, think of it as using one of your blog posts as a “billboard” for a company or service that wants to hire a page on your site. They are purchasing a “post” from you, like taking a full page ad out of a Yellow Pages.
All guest posts links are “nofollow” so you don’t have to worry about losing your PageRank juice from taking a Sponzai post, in addition all guest posts have an exceptional full disclosure that says something like the following at the top of a sponsored post:
This is a sponsored guest post written by <author> on behalf of <company website>. Post powered by Sponzai.
Here is how it works if you want to use Sponzai as an advertiser. After you sign up for Sponzai as an advertiser you write your first “Guest Post” this is the post you want to pay people to publish on their blogs. Here is an example of my first created guest post:
After you create your guest posts you will see a listing of all your guest posts with various options:
At first you will only see “matching” which are blogs that match the criteria you set in your guest post (some of this criteria may include “minimum pagerank, minimum backlinks, categories of blogs…etc”
When you expand the “Matches” you can click on “Generate Leads” which sends a notification out to every matching blog to see if they are interested. This is highly advisable, because you could end up sending offers to people who have no interest in taking the opp. I highly recommend generating the lead unless you like shooting blindly and hoping the blogger is interested (though if you do this you can look at the bloggers approval/rejection rating to get a feel for how likely they are to reject your offer).
To extend an offer to bloggers you check mark each blog you want to hire, you can plainly see how much it costs to hire each blog and their PageRank, Backlinks and accept rate for Sponzai opps.
Click submit when you have selected all you are interested in offering the opp.
When a blogger has completed the opp, you will see an exclamation to the left of your guest post, you click on this and have to manually review and approve each submitted post. You can request changes if need be, or you can reject them if you don’t like the quality of the blog. It is in your best interest to approve since you should have screened the blog ahead of time and extended the offer.
Once approved the blogger receives payment for taking your opp.
Summary:
Sponzai is a great way for you to promote your product, service, blog or website by purchasing entire posts on other bloggers accounts. Instead of purchasing a bloggers review in their own words and opinions you are purchasing a prewritten “advertisement” that they post on your behalf. Again, it is like purchasing an add in the Yellow Pages, or a TV commercial spot except on another bloggers site.
Since I am signed up as a blogger and as an advertiser, I noticed that Sponzai seems to charge a 50% commission to sponsored posts, which means if as a blogger you charge $5.00 for a guest post, an advertiser will see it cost $10.00 in their list. This I think is too high a fee, I think that 25% would have been more reasonable to a minimum of $1 because this means for you to make $10 on a post, an advertiser would have to be willing to pay $20 for a guest spot. In what I have seen so far the target magic numbers are around charging $4-$6 per guest post. Though many newer bloggers list guest posts for $1 which costs an advertiser $2.
Still that is a good rate for an advertiser to be able to purchase ads on 50 blog sites for only $100.
One other note, I know “nofollow” is good for the bloggers who accept the guest posts, but as I was testing this service as an advertiser, I would have liked the dofollow backlink as it would have helped increase number of links to my sites and services. I do understand why they are nofollow (all social spark links are nofollow as well), but would have been nice to have the option of requesting dofollow links like people can do with PayPerPost Version 4 which the Sponzai model is almost identical to.
-Dragon Blogger
Let me know your thoughts and opinions on Sponzai, is this something you are interested in as a blogger or an advertiser?
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November 15th, 2009 at 9:11 am
I’ll check it out, see if they might accept me – thanks for mentioning it.
Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..Free Google Wave Invites Giveaway For Tweeps
[Reply]
November 15th, 2009 at 10:46 am
They accept all blogs, advertisers just decide whether to make you an offer or not.
[Reply]