About Sponsored Posts on Egonitron.com

sponsored reviewsEvery once in a while I’ll get on a Sponsored Post kick in which every few posts will be sponsored from various sources. Hey a blogger’s got to eat, right? Well I’ve cut back on this a bit, partly because of Google’s Page Rank drop, partly because I’m going to be changing the format of Egonitron.com a bit.

Regardless, I may still do sponsored posts here, and I’d like you to know what my stance on them are.

I take sponsored posts from various 3rd-party companies as well as direct. My favorite places to take sponsored posts: PayPerPost, SponsoredReviews, ReviewMe, and LinkWorth (LinkPosts.) It’s a good stream of revenue, but they’re still too reliant on Page Rank. Fortunately, Izea (PayPerPost) is working on RealRank which has already been implemented in response to Google dropping the PR of a lot of blogs in their system to Zero (including mine,) so be careful.

Anyway, I don’t have anything against sponsored posts unless the advertiser requires a positive review, or no in-post disclosure. I believe it’s very important that for your blog to remain trustworthy, you need to be transparent. That means not recommending something that you don’t like just because you’re getting paid for it. Tell the truth. If the advertiser doesn’t like it, maybe they need to listen, and change the service. You did them a favor; companies pay tons of money for real customer’s opinions. Why would this be any different?

I once got a request to review a financial services company on an old blog of mine. I did the review, but there were a lot of problems with the site that I not only said was a problem in the post, but offered a good way to fix each issue. The advertiser didn’t like the fact that everything in the review wasn’t positive, so they didn’t pay me. I “nofollow”d their links, and never took another post opportunity from that post broker.

But I digress. My point is that I believe sponsored posts are great, as long as they’re honest and fully disclosed as sponsored posts. Each of these that I do on Egonitron.com is included in the Sponsored Posts category and also have a disclosure inside the post, usually at the beginning or end.

How do you feel about sponsored posts? Are you OK with not disclosing them as paid, and why?

BritePic – Monetize Your Site With Pictures

With so many services out there to help you monetize your website (specifically blogs,) this is no surprise. AdBrite seems to be on the leading edge of monetizing multimedia on blogs; first they released InVideo to get you making money on embedded videos, and now they’ve just released BritePic, which makes your pictures highly interactive.

It’s surprisingly simple to use, and you just need an AdBrite account to use it. Instead of inserting a picture with the <img> tag, you use a special code that they give you. You can insert the code yourself, or go to their interface, where you just enter the image URL and it creates the code for you:

BritePic Step 1BritePic Step 2

So after you enter the URL, you just copy the given code into your page. To show you the end result, here’s a bunny with a pancake on its head:

As you can see at the top, there’s the ad. Non-intrusive, and only shows if you hover-over with the mouse. Ads are completely optional, so you can still get the added functionality without advertising.

As you can see at the top, there’s the ad. Non-intrusive, and only shows if you hover-over with the mouse. Ads are completely optional, so you can still get the added functionality without advertising.

At the bottom-left there’s a Menu item, and if you click on it, you get some cool options. If for some reason you want to see the bunny’s nostril really close, you can zoom in up to 1000% (10x) by clicking the “Zoom” option from the menu. The Menu also allows you to Email the picture, Link to it, or even embed the same image into your own site. So if you want to embed the bunny picture into your site, I’ll still get revenue from ad clicks from your site as well; the tracking information remains with the picture. The next menu item is “Subscribe to RSS.” AdBrite sets up an image RSS feed for you with the pictures that you use with BritePic. This is super-useful for photographers who run photoblogs.

BritePic embed image

BritePic optionally lets you automatically add a watermark to each of your photos that appears in the lower right-hand corner of the picture. You’ll also notice that when you hover over the image, it scrolls a caption from the top right of the picture.

Another really nice feature is the picture loads before any of the flash, so users with a slow connection can still see the picture before the flash loads. This also lets people without flash see it.

Altogether, this is a really cool new technology that not only makes the publisher money, but finally gives boring ol’ pictures some interactivity and provides some very useful functionality. They also plan to add more features in the future like image rating, view gallery, photo discussion, and visually impaired accessibility. JPEGs are so 2006.

Helping Geeks Make Money Online