I mentioned a while back that I had signed up for SocialSpark; In fact, I was invited for the alpha. So, what makes SocialSpark great?

First of all, they have a code of ethics that sets them above and beyond other paid-blogging services.
-100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure
-100% Transparency
-100% Real Opinions
-100% Search Engine Friendly

No longer do you have to worry about getting on Google’s bad side to do paid posting - with SocialSpark, all paid posts use the nofollow attribute.

So, you’ve gone through the simple sign up process - now it’s time to really get started!
Even if you aren’t interested in making money with your blog, there’s still tons of stuff that can help you out. Each blogger and advertiser has a profile. You can create a friends list and send messages to other bloggers. This friend and messenger system is a great way to meet new bloggers. (By the way, remember that part of your May checklist is to make a new blogger friend!) Overall, SocialSpark has a very friendly atmosphere - every day or two I get another friend request from someone else. Sometimes it’s someone I already know, but sometimes I meet new people as well.

By placing the ITK code on your blog (which is provided for you when you add your blog), IZEA will record interesting statistics about your blog. How many hits did you get? How many unique visitors? What country where most of your visitors from? All this and more is available at SocialSpark - this can be a plus especially for showing off your blog to prospective advertisers.

The opportunity system is okay - although it could use some tweaking. You all have heard what I think about the reservation system. It’s a wonderful idea, they just need to make it more distinguished between readily available posts and ones that are just able to reserve. Sometimes I’m looking for something to post about right away, you know? The pay is decent, although it seems harder to grab the higher paying opps. If I had to choose one thing about the opps system, though, I’d say that it would really come in handy to know why I don’t meet the qualifications for a certain assignment. Other than that, nonetheless, the opp reservation system seems to allow a more wide spread distribution of assignments than previous installments of paid blogging.

Another cool thing about SocialSpark is that anyone can run an ad campaign, even with $0.00 of funding. There are these things called “Sparks” that allow you to give ideas to other bloggers. If you’d like them to link to your blog, you can do link exchanges using this system as well. Keep in mind that it’s still good in my opinion to use nofollow links even in the free spark assignments, since Google seems to look down on blatant link exchanges.

No, SocialSpark isn’t perfect - but I do think that it’s on the way to becoming the best paid blogging platform around. If you haven’t signed up yet, be sure to head over to SocialSpark.com and sign up - at the least you’ll get a few free hits to your blog. Who knows, you might end up earning money too!