New reputable way to make money by blogging

Sponsored Post

It seems like a lot of schemes offer ways for bloggers to earn money. But most of them don’t work unless you’re attracting huge traffic numbers. Monetisation often means having a few ad networks scattered around your site, rather than doing something more meaningful.

The good news is that Ebuzzing is a platform to bring together advertisers and bloggers – and having launched in 2007 to a predominantly French market, it’s now available in the UK, allowing you to serve advertiser campaigns either via a dedicated video player, syndicated video players and banners, or by allowing sponsored posts about brands and services. It’s also quick and easy to register on ebuzzing.com

Ebuzzing video campaign with the dedicated player

I’ve actually used the service already, resulting in a post on the Small Rivers blog network tool. Importantly you can choose whether or not a campaign is suitable, and apply or decline on a topic basis, so you don’t have to cover anything your readers would find odd.

Equally importantly it’s an ethical platform, requiring the “sponsored post” disclaimer for all articles, advertiser names alongside all videos, and all links are ‘no follow’ links to avoid being mistaken for paid links – not only do you submit your article for approval, but they’ll also check it’s appearing correctly when it’s published on your site. And more than 600 brands have proposed campaigns so far..

Ebuzzing video campaign with the syndicated player

The financial rewards are at a good level, and registration is quick and simple – and there’s no obligation to post anything if you don’t find a suitable topic – you can also set your own price. Plus it was recently acquired by the WIKIO group, so there’s enough backing to know it shouldn’t disappear overnight. Take a look at ebuzzing and see what you think.

Twitter continues to expand the team…

Twitter has been making some more hires recently – first up is Robin Sloan, who joins to handle media partnerships. Sloan previously worked as a strategist and executive at Current TV. During the first presidential debate of 2008, Sloan built an application to overlay tweets on the bottom of the screen. Spookily he was also the author of Twitter’s 5 billionth tweet.

Also joining is user experience designer Mark Otto, who worked at ZURB, an interaction design firm whose listed clients include TinyPic and CC:Betty. And finally Dan Webb, the London web developer behind Twaudio, which brought MP3s to Twitter through direct uploads or recording.

(Hat tips to Venturebeat and Louis Gray)

Louis estimates the total number at Twitter to be around 158 following a regular weekly pattern of hiring. It seems as if the desire to evolve and most importantly monetise, will be the main drivers. After all, the user experience of the Twitter website hasn’t changed in great detail for some time (The main added features have been the new Retweets and Location), and meanwhile 3rd party clients are constantly finding new ways to improve on the default experience.

Beyond the UI for consumers, this could really be about improving the experience for the monetisable advertisers, marketers and customer service teams. Big businesses are generally used to working with well-polished, expensive systems, and polished controls/dashboards for business use will add to the draw for mainstream business.

Listorious is quick off the mark to find best Twitter Lists

With about half of Twitter users able to access Twitter Lists as they’re rolled out to everyone, independant Twitter list directory Listorious has been quick to launch and offer curated lists on a range of topics.

It’s interesting to see whether the relatively peer-led recommendation of Twitter lists will displace directories of individual users grouped by category such as WeFollow and Twellow. Obviously there are concerns about both the follower-inflation that everyone has seen from the Suggested User List presented to new users, as well as individuals worried about being pigeon-holed and lists becoming reciprocal favours rather than recommendations.

It’s also likely to diminish the value of the longstanding Twitter tradition of #followfriday.

From a business point of view it makes utter sense for Twitter to have some input/control of listing users – all the examples above have been relatively successful. What’s the betting that an option to promote a specific list could be in the monetisation plans? Spend some cash and your list could be promoted to everyone, or possibly replace the Suggested User List for a period of time?

Suddenly they’d have a route for grabbing sums like the $250,000 offered earlier this year by Jason Calacanis, without it being flagged up as obvious in a list of just 20 or so people.

And obviously list pages themselves offer individual sponsorship/promotional oppportunities…

As a user of Twitter, I’m undecided whether lists will be a positive thing on balance, but as a Twitter observer it’s one of the biggest steps they’ve made in a long time towards making money.

Mashable monetizes Twitter in an innovative way

One way to monetise Twitter seems to be using feeds/information outside of the site itself – good news for sites and businesses, if not for Twitter directly.

Probably the best use so far is by Mashable, revealed today. In conjunction with viral scientist, Mashable contributor and Twitter uber-analyst Dan Zarrella, the site now has a widget displaying ‘Twitter Brand Sponsors’.

Quoting from Mashable:

‘Twitter Brand Sponsors is a small step towards our sociable ads goal. Here’s how it works: a limited number of brands (and one charity!) looking to engage with the social media community can have their latest Tweets syndicated into the Mashable sidebar, and interested visitors can choose to connect with those brands on Twitter.’

The first sponsors are Jetblue and Mailchimp, indicating that there’s interest at launch – it will be interesting to see how many companies are engaged with a suitable Twitter presence to benefit.

And it also removes the questions around the previous example of Glam’s Twitter feed widget, which displayed moderated #Oscar tweets in a widget with advertising:

Is it right to profit from user-generated content created on another site, and without the awareness of those creating the content?

Would advertisers, even those related to the target audience/subject get enough value from display advertising around Twitter content.

Instead, the Mashable approach allows people to see interaction from businesses (and charities), and decide whether or not to engage.

I have to admit, I’m wondering whether they’ll white-label the Twitter widget, as I’d be keen to run something similar!