Linqia Brings Bloggers and Brands Together

I wasn’t going to write about Linqia until after I participated in my first campaign with them, so I can get an accurate feel of how the brand works and the platform performs.   Now that I have been part of an awesome campaign which happens to be for Western Digital I can share my experience so far and what I think of the platform and why I think it has some serious advantages (but still lacks a few features) of some comparable brand marketing platforms.

What is Linqia

Linqia is a platform that brings content producers (bloggers, social media personalities…etc) and brands together, this platform helps in raising awareness for brands and helps reward bloggers in exchange.  Now this relationship involves bloggers often getting access to review products hands on, at least so far my first campaign was a hands on product review and giveaway.  You also can earn compensation for participating in the campaigns, I won’t assume every campaign has a cash compensation but most probably do and the cash compensation fluctuates and can be based on meeting goals for the campaign.

Example for my current campaign, the cash compensation is based on how many clicks I can drive to the brand link, so is like a CTR compensation campaign.  The more clicks = the more cash earned for the campaign until it reaches the max compensation threshold.  Once your each the max compensation you can still continue to earn and track clicks, but the compensation reaches a cap at some point.

Linqia is designed to leverage your entire network, you are a personality and a brand in yourself if you run online sites and social media accounts.  So this isn’t a service where you are getting compensated to do 1 blog post (at least my first campaign wasn’t) you are being added to a campaign, and from what I can tell a campaign can last around a month or so.  Campaigns have various requirements like including disclosure badges, using specific custom links so they can track your clicks and analytics properly and more, they give you a lot of information about the content to help you navigate your campaign and expectations are clearly set.  Best of all they put you in a live chat with the brand you are partnered with so you can ask questions of the brand and make sure everything is clear.  This is the part of the program that is very different than some platforms, in many platforms you merely submit content, brand reviews and approvers or asks for changes but you can’t easily have two way conversation with the brand.  With Linqia a custom chat is put together for each campaign, and in this chat you can talk to the brand resource as well as the Linqia campaign manager to make sure all your questions are answered.  This facilitated two way conversation is much appreciated and lacking in most other marketing platforms.  The really unusual part of this is that all participants in the same campaign can all speak to each other in the same chat.

This is called the “Community Conversation” and is a really brilliant feature for each campaign, you can start separate conversation threads or just reply to existing threads as you would in any forum.

Creating an Account in Linqia

Once you create your account you start by setting your base account settings like what PayPal email to receive payments, password, email subscription options and personal information.

Then you start by setting up your first community, many bloggers may have only 1 community which is 1 site and social media accounts that all tie into 1 site.  But some bloggers have many communities, each site with a set of social media accounts.  Linqia is one of the few social media platforms that can support multiple “communities” in one single platform account, so you don’t have to create separate account profiles for each blog that you run.  The flagship of your community is your blog generally, but it doesn’t matter what platform (Blogspot, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Self Hosted WordPress, Joomla…etc) it is your website, and then you start listing your social media networks connected to your community.

 You also list details about your community and any other social media profiles, this is again where you want to highlight your community strengths as brands and campaign folks can see this profile information.

From your Dashboard you can quickly see all communities and your campaign performances for each community.

Linqia gives you some impressive analytics for your campaigns that most platforms keep to themselves or only show with the brands, this allows you as the blogger or community owner to understand the value you are bringing to the brand and help you fine tune or know how well you are meeting the goals of the campaign.

ow, Linqia campaigns at this juncture appear to be more about generating clicks to brand target pages, this matters more than site impressions which is why you can leverage your site plus your social networks to drive awareness.  Your campaign tracker shows you the target of how many clicks are expected to reach target for the campaign, as well as how many clicks you have earned.  You also have a set Earnings Per Click for campaigns (not sure if all campaigns) so this can determine how much earnings you can have per campaign, remember there is a cap so though this campaign 8 days in had 663 clicks, the earnings capped out after 197 clicks.

 You can drill down into detailed analytics too showing daily metrics, averages, where the clicks are coming from (Blog Post, vs Social Media post…etc)

So far I can tell you this, my first brand partnership is with a well known established brand that is high quality and matches the niche of my community very well.  We were more than happy to pair with Western Digital and were sent the MyCloud EX4100 8TB NAS to review and we were also given a MyCloud EX2 NAS solution to giveaway to a reader in a contest, combine this with the earnings per click for driving brand awareness and this makes one of the most rewarding brand partnering campaigns I have done to date in both getting a fantastic product for our team to review, but also reward our fans with a great product to win.  All while earning a little bit to help cover operational expenses and the time vested in writing the articles/content and taking the pictures…etc.

Again, this is my first campaign with Linqia but I have to tell you that so far it appears to be a win/win for brands and bloggers, and if you are a blogger who is interested in partnering with brands, sign up for Linqia today as it is free and costs you nothing but gives you the opportunity to join campaigns if your niche and audience match what the brands are looking for.