SEO Partner and continues to offer $400 registration discount for the Chicago Summit (April 22-23) and New York Summit (May 13-14.).

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) March 12, 2009 – Pay Per Click (PPC) Summit, leading educational search engine marketing summit, announces an exclusive agreement that makes Anvil Media, Inc. (Anvil) the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Partner of PPC Summit. Anvil, a search engine marketing (SEM) and social media marketing agency, will share cutting edge SEO strategies at upcoming PPC Summits scheduled for; Chicago (April 22-23), New York (May 13-14) and Los Angeles (Sept. 23-24). PPC Summit brings together an expert pool of industry experts to teach sessions on improving search engine placement, increasing quality score, managing the keyword and bid management process and gaining top visibility in organic and paid search results.

“We look forward to partnering with Anvil Media and teaching online marketers how SEM and SEO techniques can be employed together to create a powerful marketing strategy that will generate more leads and sales.” said Mary O’Brien, PPC Summit CEO. The comprehensive two-day summits teach the skills needed in order to maximize search marketing opportunities on Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter and all other engines. Each attendee walks away equipped with the resources and tools to manage profitable search marketing campaigns and increase their visibility in the search engines. PPC Summit attendees can customize the agenda and choose sessions to meet their own skill level and needs. Participants will leave with a deep and profound understanding of pay per click, search engine marketing and search engine optimization. “We’re thrilled to partner with PPC Summit and help marketers learn how to manage and improve the effectiveness of their search engine optimization strategies,” said Kent Lewis, Anvil Media, Inc. President. “We look forward to sharing our SEO best practices with PPC Summit attendees.” Join a rapidly growing list of professionals learning the secrets of search engine marketing and search engine optimization, including former attendees from Hyatt, eBay, The Gap, Wells Fargo, Yahoo! and more. PPC Summit 2009 are scheduled for; Chicago (April 22-23), New York (May 13-14) and Los Angeles (Sept. 23-24). Seats are limited and space is filling up fast. Attendees can take advantage of the early bird discount and save $400 off two day rates for sign ups before March 16. For more information about PPC Summit partners or to register, please go to http://www.ppcsummit.com/overview.html?PR4. For more information about SEO agency Anvil Media, Inc., please visit www.anvilmediainc.com.

Paid blogging has been flying “under the radar,” lost among all of the other word-of-mouth marketing techniques. There is, of course, a lot of chatter about paid blogging on blogs themselves, but this report pulls together from various sources the most pressing issues and considerations into one concise report and provides key insights and specific recommendations that bloggers, advertisers and ad networks can put to use immediately.

Key Findings

· Sponsored blogging is a nascent, but growing, advertising vehicle with the potential to represent a substantial share of Internet advertising spending. It has the potential to be a $2 billion market 5% of online ad spending by 2011.
· Sponsored blog posts are a unique online advertising vehicle in that they provide for more text and context than pay-per-click ads or banner ads.
· Typical payments for sponsored blog posts are less than $10. But there are many things that bloggers and paid-blogging ad networks could do to increase that figure.
· As bloggers invest more time and emotion in their blogs, they start to look ways to make money from blogging.
· Bloggers walk a fine line between adhering to truth in advertising laws and maintaining a strong, trusting, readership base.

“Bloggers who reported spending 20 or more hours per week on blogging tend to be making money from their blog (75%) and tend to be getting paid for blog posts (75%).”

Target Audience

· Advertising agencies: sponsored blogging is a creative new medium are you fully briefed so that you can brief your clients?
· Advertisers: gain an understanding of the mechanics and considerations behind sponsored blogging, and what to look for when you are ready to spend.
· Paid Bloggers: learn what steps you can take to increase the value of your blog and the amount you get paid for each post.
· Sponsored blog ad networks: there are specific steps you can take to increase the average payment per blog post and provide better value to advertisers.
· Online advertising networks: sponsored blogging threatens to encroach on pay-per-click and banner advertising spending. Are you positioned to defend or capture territory?
· Traditional print publishers: understand the threat that sponsored blogging represents to your advertising revenue. Do you have a counter-strategy?
· Readership, circulation and traffic auditors: what new products could you introduce that tap this growing advertising segment?

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.