Bloggers Wanted!

Snapbomb has been growing extremely fast and we now have a ton of great writing opportunities for bloggers.

The process is simple - just log in to Snapbomb.com, add your blogs, then click on the Find an Opportunity link. Select an opportunity that matches your area of expertise and start blogging!

Here are some examples of what you can write about:

• Are you computer savvy and know the value of a good backup system? Sign up for the RAID backup campaign.


• Do you like skiing? Check out this campaign about skiing in Whistler, Canada.
  


• Are you an entertainment fanatic? Write about celebrity weddings or the Cannes Film Festival.
  

These are just a few examples of many. What are you waiting for? Start writing now and get rewarded for your hard work!

Are Blogs the New Media?

The growth of blogs over the past several years has been nothing short of phenomenal and there are no signs that it's slowing down. An estimated 50% of the US population reads blogs at least once per month and that number is growing. Are blogs the new media? We sure think so and here's why:

"The number of people creating blogs in the US will reach over 35 million by 2012—roughly 16% of the Internet population."

"More importantly, by 2012, more than 145 million people—67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once a month. That is up from a readership of 94 million in 2007, or 50% of Internet users."

"A big factor driving the increases is the niche orientation of the blogosphere," says Mr. Verna, eMarketer senior analyst. There really is a blog for every interest which makes the reach of the blogosphere MUCH bigger than any mainstream media. For instance, how often do you see articles about insects in your daily newspaper?

"Furthermore," adds Mr. Verna, "the rates at which blog readers notice and click on ads suggest that they are a well-primed audience."

Snapbomb customers have seen great click through rates (we have seen it in our own marketing efforts too) and not only are the click through rates high, but after a visitor clicks to the site, the conversion rates are also very high.

Source: eMarketer

Elements of a Good Blog Post

A good quality post is important to ensure that bloggers get a good feedback rating. But what exactly is a good post?

Here are some basic pointers to a good post:

1. Read the campaign description well, do your own research and write your own words - don't copy and paste! I always suggest to write around 200 words or more.
   
   
2. Use correct language. Some advertisers have disputed posts because of incorrect use of language - you should be fluent in the language you post in
   
   
3. Go easy on the links. Putting lots of links into a short blog post looks like spam. Make sure you have a reasonable amount of links - either follow the campaign description guidelines or if the amount of links is not mentioned got with the motto: less is more! One link is the minimum, more than 5 is probably too much.
   
   
4. Use pictures - images make a blog post look professional.
   

If you have any other comments on what ensures a good quality post, please add them here!

Expand the Reach of Your Press Releases

Press Releases are a great way to share information with customers, prospective customers and shareholders about new things going on at your company. Press Releases are generally distributed to news media and other publications so that these news services and publications can then publish the press release to their readers/viewers. The problem today is that more and more people are using blogs to get their news, not the newspaper or from TV.

Newspaper readership has been declining significantly in recent years with an expected 50 million daily readers this year, the lowest it's been in 60 years. While blog readership has grown by leaps and bounds with an estimated 57 million people reading blogs as of 2006, overtaking newspaper readership. This trend is expected to continue.


So how can you reach these people that get their news online through blogs? One way to do this is via Snapbomb Blog Marketing. You can get your Press Release distributed on thousands of blogs very easily. It only takes a few minutes to setup a press campaign and you'll start seeing results immediately.

It's Pay Day!

Today is another pay day for our Snapbomb bloggers and it's by far our biggest to date. We will be paying our wonderful bloggers thousands of dollars today. A big thanks goes out to our Advertisers and our Bloggers for making the past two and a half months since we launched such an overwhelming success.

Designing a Blog Marketing Campaign

I often get asked by customers how they can optimize their campaigns. In response, below are some basic tips on how to create a successful campaign with Snapbomb.

The first step in creating a successful blog marketing campaign is to define the objective. I generally distinguish between two high level goals:

1. Buzz Campaign
Get the word out, gain mind share (and links) over time - this is a longer term strategy

2. Customer Acquisition
This one is all about conversions (sign up, purchase, etc.). In this category I also differentiate between a targeted and a broad shotgun approach.

General Tips
Before I go into detail there are some general rules:

• Choose an eye catching title for your campaign; you want to grab the bloggers' attention!
• Provide a landing page that is directly related to the campaign topic - don't just provide a link to your home page.
• Go crazy on targeting keywords - use at least 10 and make sure you include both singular and plural of the keyword. Play around with the word sequences of key-phrases and don't forget to include words or phrases from the campaign title.

Achieving your objectives

Buzz Campaign
With this type of campaign you want to make sure that you get broad coverage from bloggers that match your site and topic, and that also have a good search engine rank. Translated into settings for a campaign this means: (1) select low targeting (so that there is some targeting but not too much) and (2) set the search engine rank to a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 10. It is also a good idea to set a maximum dollar amount per post to a lower amount so that you can stretch your campaign budget over a large number of posts.

Customer Acquisition Campaign
The objective of a targeted campaign is to get a few very good posts that are read by many people that have a high potential of turning into customers. To achieve this you should pay particular attention to your targeting keywords - make sure there are at least 20 and that they are very relevant to your campaign. Select a moderate to high targeting level. I would not recommend setting a maximum price per post - high value blogs will be be costly but it will be worth the expense. Instead, set a minimum of e.g. $10 to filter out lower quality blogs.

If you are marketing a product with a broad appeal (such as running shoes or chocolate) you can use the shotgun approach: try to get the maximum amount of posts by keeping the field of potential bloggers as wide open as possible. For the campaign settings this would mean no targeting and a wide open search engine rank. Here I would also recommend to set a maximum price per post so that you can manage your budget better.

Results
We started a shotgun campaign for Snapbomb in February with a max of $20 per post. The result: 300 posts in one month for under $1000 that got us approx. 500 conversions. As time goes on, the cost per conversion is going to go down as the posts stay up and continue to get us conversions.

When you design your campaigns make have a clear idea of what your objectives are. If you need help please don't hesitate to send me an email at sales@snapbomb.com

StumbleUpon vs Snapbomb: Quantity vs Quality

While looking at our web analytics reports, I noticed a huge spike in traffic a couple of weeks after our launch and it turns out that 70% of our visits that day were from StumbleUpon.

So then I compared our signup/conversion rate for that day vs previous days and found some interesting results. The days for the week leading up to this spike had at least as many conversions or more, but with far less traffic. So what does this say about the quality of the leads?

StumbleUpon surely provided us with a lot of traffic that day, but the conversions did not go up with the traffic. So lots of quantity, but far less quality. Blog posts on the other hand have a more focused audience and the click throughs are from people that have already read about you in the blog post and are actually interested in learning more about what is at the destination.

This is not a post to devalue StumbleUpon, they are providing a wonderful free service and any traffic is good traffic. This is just to show that not all traffic is created equal. Food for thought while you enjoy your weekend. See you on Monday.