Archive: Opportunities
The advertiser has always had to enter a reason for the ban. We are working on getting those comments displayed for the Posties in a near future release. Thank you all for your feedback in the townhall meeting, a lot of those comments drove this change.
Well, we made a fairly hefty release yesterday, a release that has taken over a year of person-effort to bring to fruition. There's a lot in it, so let's go through the key features here.
REVIEW MY POST
Posties, you will notice a new "Affiliate Tools" button on the top at the top of page. The "review my post" link takes you to a brand new shiny button. Just copy/paste the code for the button in any of your blog posts, and anybody that signs up through it will have an extra special, high priority, opp to review your post! As soon as the new blogger's first post is paid, you each get the princely sum of $7.50. What a great way to bring new traffic to your blog!
The other link in "Affiliate Tools" is the referral program. As before, put this anywhere on your blog to receive $15 when a new postie that signed up through you gets his/her first post paid.
PPP FIREFOX PLUGIN
If you aren't already using Firefox, you're missing out on its greatest feature, plugins! Plugin can add convenience and utility to your browser, and our new PayPerPost plugin does just that! After logging in to PPP, you'll receive a warm greeting AND get to see your total earnings to date. Bored?...click on the eight-ball to read a daily random 10 of your fellow posties' blogs.
Here's where it gets really cool...when logged into the plugin the star will light up if you come across a page that hosts opportunities. If it does, just click that and you get to see all the opps offered! Sad that you didn't see the light?...well let the world know by clicking "I'd like to blog about this" and who knows what might happen.
VIDEO OPPORTUNITIES
If you're tired of vague opportunities that mention including videos, you'll love the addition of specific video opportunities. Whether the advertiser wants a completely original video, an original video with "bumper" intro and outro segments, or a mashup of supplied footage, you will in the clear with a more easily understandable set of standard video types to blog about.
PRESS RELEASE OPPORTUNITIES
Many of our advertisers have asked to use press releases in opportunities. The theory is simple; get paid to publish your feedback about a press release from a company. Well, we now support this. As an advertiser simply click on Press Release opportunity when creating a new opp and paste in your press release into the text box provided. Posties with create there own post based on your press release and the information you provided them.
OPPORTUNITY SEGMENTATION
As our marketplace grows, it is more and more important that we provide Advertisers with a way to target specific blogs. That's what Segmentation is all about. For example, if an advertiser selects "game" and "gossip" as categories for the opp, you will qualify if your categories match. This makes things just that much more convenient, allowing your interests and your blog's focus to remain on target.
The more fun part of segmentation is minimum Average Tack, minimum Google PR, and maximum Alexa Score (we are working on Technorati as well). Through these options more advertisers will create higher payout opps. If as an advertiser you decide you want a PR9 blog, then you're going to have to up the stakes on the blog post fee. If as a Postie you don't qualify, you can still the view opp (highlighted in red) to see why... If you're noticing a bunch of opps requiring ratings you don't have, then level up your blogs and try again later. You're likely to find these highly segmented opportunities fill slower than un-segmented ones as well.
USER EXPERIENCE AND FASTER PAGES
Hopefully you have already noticed some interface and graphical updates. As always, we try to stay fresh and make the experience as nice for our users. Prior to this release, you also probably experienced the site blazing after fixes by Pete et al. When we released the new Beta 3, the speed didn't transfer as expected and we're working hard to find out why.
Disclosure Badge and BubbleAd:
First of all, be aware that the Disclosure Badge is something entirely different from Affiliate Images, or the "Blog about my post" features. A lot of people seem to be mixing these up.
DISCLOSURE BADGE
Now that we require disclosure from bloggers, it is up to them to disclose on each post. However, some of our advertisers may want to ensure this, and by doing so, they create a "Disclosure Badge".
The Disclosure badge is a 238x20 image that the blogger needs to include at the end of their blog entry if the advertiser requires it. In our demos, the Disclosure Badge has been seen as blue, however, a blogger has the opportunity to select any color badge from the 8 primary colors (when they take an opp that uses Disclosure Badges).
The content of the Disclosure Badge is created by the Advertiser when they create their opportunity. This is optional to them, so not all opps will have the Disclosure Badge. Ones that do will begin with a greeting, like "Sponsored By" and followed by the advertiser's message. The advertiser also has the option of including a small 16x16 icon to be used on the badge.
Bloggers that take opps with the Disclosure Badge need to include it on their entry or it will not be approved.
BUBBLEAD
Advertisers can take the Disclosure Badge one step further by creating content that displays a cool overlay when the Disclosure Badge (on a blog) is mouse-overed by a reader. There are two things needed for this to occur:
1) Advertiser needs to specify they want this, pay for it, and build it
2) Bloggers need to add a link to a Javascript file on our site from their blog.
INSTALLING THE DISCLOSURE BADGE AND BUBBLEAD
If a postie wants to install this, they need to go to their blog list (My Blogs). There they will see a column in their list of blogs that has a dialog bubble with a red X in it indicating the code can not be found on their site (because they haven't installed it yet). There is also a link by this icon to "Get Code". Clicking on that link takes the blogger to a page on how to install the code (please see: https://payperpost.com/blogger/blog/blog_tools_disclosure_badge).
If they install it correctly, on the "My Blogs" page, the red X should now show a green check mark for the blog they installed it on.
Many bloggers at this point thought they would see something on their blog. This is just a link to code that waiting to be called. And that is only when they take an opp that uses it. Below is a message I left on the boards that seems to help them:
----
When you place that code on your site, you will never see anything. It is just there waiting for when you take an opp that takes advantage of it. When you take an opp that has chosen to show the BubbleAd (as seen in the picture on the page where you copied the code), then it will be triggered to help display that. Basically, here's how you use it:
1.) you copy the code and place it in the head of your blog
2.) Your blog list will show you that the code is properly installed (currently not working, working on fix now) with a green checkmark
3.) you go about blogging as normal, this has no affect.... until:
4.) you take an opp that uses BubbleAds
5.) when taking the opp, you will see that you must include the "Disclosure Badge" at the bottom of the post.
6.) You copy the code and paste that image at the end of your post.
7.) When a reader of your blog mouses over that image, the BubbleAd will appear (this is where that code kicks in).
8.) Please note that not all Disclosure Badges will display the BubbleAd (you can tell the ones that do because they contain more code than ones that do not)
THAT'S A WRAP
Whew! We've been pulling some long hours for you guys here at PPP dev central, so please try to enjoy this. Of course there were some bugs on release and we're working diligently to swat them, but overall this release seemed to go over smoothly. Stay tuned as we work to continue growing a leaner and healthier app.
Thanks to Larry and Daniel who produced the vast majority of this blog post.
Labels: release segmentation video press
