PayPerPost, a place for bloggers and advertisers to connect and profit, has made a significant change on Monday which will force bloggers to disclose that they are being paid for their posts. This is due to a recent move by the Federal Trade Commission to force word-of-mouth advertisers to disclose financial inventives to promote products. The move doesn’t completely fix the problem but it is a definite move in the right direction for the company.

The Pay To Blog system on the internet has been a joke for a number of months until ReviewMe launched today. ReviewMe is a pay-per-post like service which pays bloggers to write about advertiser’s products and services. The flip side is that advertiser’s get to choose which blogs they want reviewing their products by filing out a form on the ReviewMe website.

ReviewMe is setting itself apart from the competition by offering a single fee paid to bloggers regardless of blog post size. ReviewMe uses an algorithum similar to Alexa, Technorati, etc. to determine the importance of the blog you submit and charges advertisers a fee based on the importance of the post. Bloggers can earn anywhere from $0.01 to $1,000 per post.

An extra incentive, with today’s launch Review Me is giving away $25,000 USD. I signed up for the service today and my blog was only worth $40.

I ran across MegaKarma.net today. MegaKarma is a 100% free service for submitters to popular news aggregators like Digg and many others. They help new users increase their ranking on sites. It works like this:

1. Sign up with a free account
2. Submit your link
3. If your link is accepted (ie. isn’t spam or a money grab) it is entered into the link queue.
4. You receive emails periodically containing links that other users have submitted.
5. You vote up the articles you like, spreading around the digital karma.

iFeedReaders is a new feed reader for your feed that will allow you to create social bookmark drop down menus and link lists in seconds. All you have to do is select the social bookmarking sites you want to use, choose the list type (link list or drop down menu), and customize it the way you want. There’s also a social bookmarking plugin available for Wordpress.

I have added a really cool new Digg Button Plugin for Wordpress. The Digg Button for Wordpress automatically detects incoming links from Digg.com and will display a button back to your Digg post whenever people Digg your story. Also, when the first Digg is recognized the script will send you an email notifying you that your story has been dugg. You have a couple of options with this Digg Wordpress Plugin. You can adjust the settings so a text link or a button link show up. The plugin is very easy to install and use. All you have to do is upload the plugin is go to your wp-content folder and put the file in the plugins folder. After that, log into Wordpress and click on the plugins tab and click “activate.” After doing this, you must place the following code for the button to appear in your single.php file: < ?php digg_this_button(); ?>

The button works really well. The only problem is that Digg.com has banned me for placing a link in a comment post. Placing a Digg.com button will increase your number of Digg’s like no other. When it comes to marketing, we know branding is a great way to familiarize people with objects, symbols, or names. In the case of Digg, we instantly recognize the Digg button as opposed to a plain text link.

Marginalized posted this very interesting look at The Digg Effect. Check out the short exerpt below and click continue reading to see the whole thing.

I recently had a blog entry hit the front page on Digg. “But, how can all that traffic hurt,” you ask? Simple. Because Diggers do not click on advertising you will find your “click-through” ratio (or CTR) drops into the decimal range. The CTR is a prime factor in getting paid by the company who puts advertising on your blog. If you have a high CTR you get more money and better ads showing up on your site. If your CTR drops very low you will find the money drops with it…continue reading

Squidoo. It’s new and not as noticable as it should be amongst news and resource hounds. Squidoo is also a great tool for your blog or web site’s search engine placement. Squidoo is a commercial site launched Oct. 2005. Users can create ‘lenses’ which is like a MySpace portfolio for vieing. You can make a lens about anything. The primary focus is not building content like a blog and its’ not just social networking like MySpace. Rather, you use your lens to point to tools, links, feeds, abstracts, and more while earning cash. The Squidoo site allows ‘lensmasters’ to share their expertise on any given topic to save web searches time.

When it comes to optimizing your site for the search engines, Squidoo will help your site get the exposure it deserves. Now you can learn all the tips, help, and tricks to earning more money with your Squidoo lens. Just download the Squidoo-It Yourself Guide (.pdf).

This ripple concept is amazing and brings back thoughts I had about the sphere of influence in the blogging community. About a month I was discussing how best selling author Seth Godin of such books as “Purple Cow” and “Free Prize Inside” can post a thought in his blog and have thousands of other bloggers responding and paraphrasing his work.

His “sphere of incluence” puts him at the top of the charts when it comes to the online world of bloggers. Surely being a best selling author automatically puts his ’sphere of influence’ towards the top. But how can a common blogger just starting without amazing credentials reach a higher sphere of influence? Producing high quality content and resourceful tools is a start. Unique content or tools can have a ripple effect. One person might find your tool useful and tell another person and so on. The link-back popularity of your tool or article will directly have an effect on your search engine rankings as well.

Those bloggers with pre-exposure, such as acclaimed authors and heads of corporate agencies will often automatically get a large scale of exposure. The key to achieving a greater sphere of influence over the blogging community and therefore your blog’s traffic is to create the unique. To create what others are not talking about. Simply put, to be yourself. Thanks to Logic + Emotion for the ripple chart.

I was getting pissed at WordPress today. That is, until I figured something out I want to share with all of you. If you have Wordpress and want to put Videos from MySpace or YouTube into your blog, don’t mess with plug ins and fancy programming code. All you have to do when you “write” a new post is put the following code directly into the box you’re writing in. Don’t attempt to modify the HTML or input the code below directly into the HTML. Replace the URL in the code below with the video you want to put in your blog. (Note: Remove the spacing before embed and after the 350. I had to add the spacing so a video wouldn’t appear below)

<   embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/y_FjWNKulNc" mce_src="http://www.youtube.com/v/y_FjWNKulNc" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"  >

Social meter scans the major social websites to analyze a webpage’s social popularity. Currently we scan Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati, and Yahoo My Web. Check it out at SocialMeter.com . How did Caffeine Marketing hold up? Well, the movie box below explains it all.