I had been using IZEA services and platforms ever since I started in 2008 and it was a great way to get noticed and have partnerships with brands through an influencer network before my sites were big enough to work with the brands directly. Over the past few years IZEA condensed their many platforms into the IZEA Marketplace which basically took everything from all other platforms and consolidated so that bloggers and personalities can work with brands to help mutually benefit.
Now as much as I like the system, there could be some improvements when it comes to opportunity filtering. The bid system where you are offered opportunities you can “bid on” is not a bad idea, since you see opps that you may qualify for, but it doesn’t discriminate against minimum pricing, so if you have a threshold you will still see opps to bid on well below that threshold which can take time sorting through them all as they don’t show you how much the opp offers until after you click “bid”
Also when you have a lot of online properties as in my case with 5 Twitter accounts, 3 blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram…etc all of the opportunites for all accounts are all listed in one section and you have no ability to sort out and look at opps only for a specific online property in one page. To further complicate things you can’t check box and mass select and “reject” offers, you are forced to take an action on each opp 1 at a time. So in the end, I wind up procrastinating which only makes the situation worse, and have to devote 15 minutes to 1/2 hour once a week just filtering through a hundred opps rejecting all but 2 or 3 which were good content matches and are the real ones I wanted to bid on.
So I did like their SocialLinks options for bloggers and social media personalities to make some affiliate commissions from sharing some products that fit their niche, being in the tech/gaming niche it wasn’t hard at all to see some cool Storm Trooper or Halo 3 costumers that were worth sharing with my own audience and commission earnings for sales were percentage wise better than Amazon affiliate directly in most cases when browsing options.
The also are expanding tools to help you connect, follow hashtags, track your links and more. When you sign up, make sure you fill out your profile as much as possible, the more detailed your profile the more attractive you are to brands and advertisers.
At IZEA you are an influencer, and your goal is to help raise awareness for the brands and/or their products with your audience. Now in most of these cases think of them like being a commercial or a temporarily paid spokesperson for a single event like a Tweet, Blog Post…etc. But in some cases you can get more extended campaigns that include a series, or even get samples and do true product reviews and such.
I don’t get as much content from IZEA as I used too, my brand now gets more direct partnerships from brands and also being more technology and gadget focused, other platforms have been just more in touch with partnerships, but I will say that IZEA still brings most of the partnerships for my smaller blogs and Twitter accounts, especially my food and cooking related blog that I manage. So I think personal bloggers and “mommy bloggers/influencers” still have a lot more viability to do well with the IZEA Marketplace. You also don’t need tens of thousands of followers, having a strong engagement with lower number of followers will grab interest too.
There is no cost in trying and listing yourself, though you can only bid on 5 opps a month with the free plan, what you do is start off with a Free Plan then when you start earnings, you leave your IZEA balance to pay for the Standard plan and work your way up. So I end up never paying out of pocket for my PRO plan, my plan expenses come out of my earnings, so it pays for itself and then some.
The one Niche I don’t really see on IZEA is related to Video Games, so if you are a video game blogger or personality I don’t see any opps for this niche yet on this platform, but you see big technology brands and retail fronts on this platform fairly regularly.