Here comes Social Spark

SocialSpark is now live, the public are all welcome to go and join in the fun.

Social Spark is Izea's new baby. It's a kind of mixture between a social networking site and Pay Per Post. It's geared towards making an environment where advertiser and blogger are all together and social plus it claims to be completely search engine friendly with all links being "nofollow" and every post fully disclosed.

Asides from paid posts you can also take on blog sponsorship in the form of a nice new bar that sits on the bottom of your blog and they offer non paid "sparks" or "blog u backs" which are intended to be communal writing prompts and ways to spread the love to each other.

I have been using it throughout a lot of it's beta phase, I am not to sure that it was ready for public release but so far it's been a good experience on the whole.

The design is very slick and you immediately feel that you are away from the old PPP way of things. You can comment and easily rate all opportunities and also accept and make friend requests with both bloggers and advertisers. People can give each other props and drops plus the whole system seems to run on Izea Real Rank which us great for bloggers with a low PR.

If you go and take a look at my public profile it looks and works very much like a social networking tool but definitely geared towards bloggers.

I was asked to look at a persons profile for this post and I chose mine as I want more Izea friends. As you can see, you ca see my friends, see how many times I have been propped and dropped and even read my latest submissions. This is great as it make people want to create better posts and provide decent material for the people paying the money. There is also very often extra cash for the best posts and this is a great motivation to write.

I do however feel it needs improvement in many areas and these should have been addressed before release.

• Opportunities are reserved and you have to wait for a slot. Then you have 12 hours to complete. In principal this is a great idea. Sadly I always get my slots allocated at midnight. This means if I do not check my email before say 11am, then I pretty much miss the opportunity and have to sign up to wait again. The other day I only ended up with one hour to create a video opportunity! I think the completion time should be extended to 24 hours bearing in mind that many bloggers actually work during the day.
• Opportunities also give you a page explaining what it is all about. When you take the opp, this info is not on your submission page. You have to manually make sure you have both the opp description window and the submission window open to see all the info for making your post.
• Sometimes when you reserve an opp it goes to a crappy white screen with an error but it does reserve you slot. It's a simple bug that needs fixing.
• My reservation emails do not include direct links to the posts, I have to go to the opportunities list and find the post I have been told that I have a reservation for.
• There is no way whilst browsing the opportunity list to see or sort out which posts you have already done or are waiting in line to do.
• RealRank is great but does not seem to correspond with the RealRank that is shown on other Izea websites.
  

I am sure there are a few other niggles but it must be realized that Izea are working hard on this one and anything that you are unsatisfied with, they are listening. I definitely think everyone should sign up and start involving themselves in this great new community, oh and make some money too.

Hopefully see you there, please do stop by and make me your friend.

This post is sponsored by Social Spark (but it's also very honest!)