Consultiq stopped by at AdTech in San Francisco yesterday, and spent time chatting with, among many other companies, Ted Murphy, Founder and CEO of Izea, the parent company of SocialSpark, a new sponsored post blog advertising platform.

We decided to give SocialSpark a try, so we registered our own blog, under strategic management and strategic marketing consulting. The user interface is colorful, if a little busy for this blogger’s eyes. Registration involves filling out a number of forms on your blog (topics covered, RSS feed, etc.) and yourself (how much time you spend at work, play, interests, lifestyle questions). After that, it’s off to look for opportunities to get paid for blogging.

SocialSpark offers a couple of different ways to get paid.

• A pure pay-per-post model with “sponsored post” opportunities – the blogger gets paid for each unique post on the sponsored topic.
• A blog sponsorship model wherein advertisers pay per-day for a welcome mat and persistent banner on the blogger’s page. Sponsorship creative can be text, images or video.

Advertisers also have the option to create non-paying “sparks” which are described as “free opportunities that serve as ideas for blog posts” – it was a little unclear what the purpose of sparks are beyond a way to throw some ideas out to the blogging community.

SocialSpark has a number of advertisers loaded into the system already, from window blinds providers to blog and web hosting providers to timesheet and expense management solution to…well, paid opportunities to blog about the launch of SocialSpark itself. You can see what a sponsored post opportunity looks like here:

SocialSpark also has a 450 word description of their Code of Ethics, which emphasizes transparency, genuine opinons and notes that SocialSpark places no restrictions on good or bad opinions written about advertisers products. The also provide a snippet of code to bloggers to include a mandatory “Disclosure Badge” so that readers know the post has been sponsored by an advertiser. They summarize their code of ethics in four bullet points, and in this particular sponsored post opportunity, they ask the blogger to mention those points specifically, so here they are:

-100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure
-100% Transparency
-100% Real Opinions
-100% Search Engine Friendly

So in the interest of full disclosure, Consultiq plans to submit this post for payment with SocialSpark, and we’re off to see if we can get this post approved, and get the code to display the Disclosure Badge.

Addendum: SocialSpark is telling us we aren’t qualified for this particular opportunity, but it’s not clear why.