My name is Brett Bumeter and I am and have been a professional blogger and social media specialist since 2006.  Since 2006 I have been actively pursuing my vision for advancing New Media and the Blogosphere in general.  To that end I have worked to build relationships between bloggers, new media creators and companies ranging from the fortune 100 to the fortune 500 to small local start ups. 

The Short-Winded Version

Hey, I like to write! I typed this while my son was in karate class this evening . . .  Seriously though, with this article I wanted to point out that 200 words as a ‘typical’ blog article is does not always say enough to communicate a point.  I’m not saying everyone needs to write 6,000 words, but bloggers need to start thinking about what the right number of words is to get a point across.  Consider this article as a demonstration of how important this topic is to me and how much I can write on the topic off the cuff.

In a world that is flattening and changing rapidly, I see a major need for more knowledge workers.  New Media and the blogosphere are two areas that provide both a communications platform as well as a business model for talented, creative and smart people to share knowledge, provide entertainment and create perspective on the application of tools and services of all natures for their readers, listeners, followers and networks.

For several years, I have been testing the inner and outer bounds of this industry, learning from the best and sharing my knowledge with people around me in the form of mentorship programs, internships, and general consulting services.  It is a zany mix, but enables me to have a great deal of fun and cover it in video, text, audio and more.

I work in web design and social media marketing providing solutions to my customers, not just delivering a web site, but a functioning aspect of business with incoming traffic, customers, leads, referrals, and business.

I come from a diverse background that has included growing up in a family business, working in sales, serving in the US Army as an intelligence analyst and cryptographer, then running a bar in Savannah Georgia on River Street (a popular tourist area in a fantastic and historic international port), working in process improvement for the Postal Service, while attending college where I received a double major in Finance and Accounting after switching from advertising early in my college years.  I later went to work for Motorola in Finance, rose rapidly through Motorola and eventually spun off with a Motorola division, where I worked in a fast paced start up environment for several years, until as an accountant I discovered illegal fraudulent activities taking place, which immediately resulted in my becoming a whistle blower. 

That last sudden career change put me on the lamb, hiding out from chinese mafia types that were threatening to make me disappear and kill my children.  I came to the life balancing decision that finance wasn’t a safe career choice and after providing the IRS with all of the information that I could to get those corrupt bastards (not vindictive just being accurate  :)  )

I then settled into a new life building my own business, through business development consulting and later professional blogging and my work in the social media industry.  Today, (when its warm) I work from a wifi fishing dock on a lake in North Carolina 25 minutes from the Charlotte Airport, which is my gateway to social media events around the country.

I have attended a number of events in Social Media for several years now and am building up my expertise, skill set and demand to also speak, train and direct the conversations at social media conferences.  I have written tens of thousands of articles, and through PayPerPost alone I have ordered close to 700 articles with PPP to date, with overall budgets of almost $50k in cash and swag.  My multiple websites (over 15 active) not only earn a profit, but I bring advertising opportunities and direct advertising feedback and insight to my fellow bloggers backed with cash and tools to help them improve their own blogs, and online business ventures.

Part of my writing includes joking, writing satire, and what many would consider just shooting the shit and screwing around.  :)  But all kidding aside, my vision for the future of social media is very real and it has been my passion to pursue my goals very seriously for two years now.  I love what I do, and only do what I love.  For quite sometime, I have been working to help bloggers quit screwing around with their day jobs and start taking blogging seriously. :)

Izea Insider Opportunity

Recently, Izea put out a call for a small group of Izea Insiders to gather bloggers together and around them to build teams of bloggers to go out and spread the word around the blogosphere and around the world in general.  They are looking for people that are connected, know what they are doing and have some level of success in that.

I already do all of these things and will continue to do all of these things.  In fact, I already work with Izea as a distant partner since January of 2008.  I see this as another opportunity for me to work more closely with Izea, while I continue to do exactly what I’m already doing, hopefully just better with the extra support of a company that I have know since they were founded in July 2006 when they launched, and I signed up.  :)  I’ve made thousands of dollars through Izea, and more importantly brought even more money than I have made from Izea to the bloggers at Izea!

I’m doing everything I can right now as an advertiser to help bloggers improve their efforts and their financial success through Izea and through other networks. 

Relevant Social Networks

• Izea Boards Since September 2006 1400+ posts aprox.
• SocialSpark - 2008
• Utterli 150+followers
• Twitter 150+followers
• LinkedIn 150+ connections (not fluff)
• Facebook 150+friends
• MyBlogLog
• BlogExplosion – since 2006
• BlogMad – since 2006
• Comedy Soap Box – since 2006
• IBNMA - International Blogging & New Media Association – Member since 2007
• Performancing – since 2006
• Associate Content – 2006
• NaNoWrimo - 2006
• MindManager Yahoo Groups since 2005 – MindManager Trainer

Video Services

• ScreenCast
• YouTube
• Revver
• HowCast
• TubeMogul
• Flickr

Financial

• PayPal – Since 2000
• MoneyBookers 2008

Events

• eComXpo (Attended last 7 shows and brought major customers to Izea)
• CES exhibitor 2006, Planner/Attendee 2006, Press alum 2007, registered 2008
• Bloghaus 2008
• 
• New Media Expo(formerly Podcast Expo) 2006 LA, 2007 LA, 2008 Vegas
• Laughlin River Run 2008 Nevada – Interviewed Joan Jett with Rock n Roll Geek Show, covered 4 day event as blogger, Reported on Arson Fire through CNN and Las Vegas Local Nes
• Voice 2008 (Voice Actor Conference in LA 2008)
• 
• Blogworld (2007, 2008) – Ran Dragon Naturally Speaking Demo at Blogger & Podcaster Booth 2008
• 
• WordCamp Birmingham Speaker 2008
• 
• Social Media Trainer American Red Cross for Utterz 2008 (now Utterli)
• Former Utterz Ambassador,
• Current Utterli Evangelist
• Windows Live Writer Trainer (cross blog platform composition tool)
• Shot Show 2005
• Numerous Tweet Ups, Industry Parties, events, award shows, magic shows(seriously those voice actors are zany),

Partnerships

• New Media Creative (Since 2008) – Business Developer, Web Designer, Social Media Strategies
• Izea (PayPerPost Inc) (Since January 2008) – Lead Generation, Campaign Management
• BlueLiner Marketing (Since 2007) – Social Media Specialist / Contract Ghost Writer

Technical Preparations

• Internet Connectivity
• Primary – Time Warner Cable – with 2 wireless routers
• Verizon Wireless Air Card – Yes with 3g wifi router add on
• At&t DSL – Yes, backup connection
• cell phones, tmobile & Verizon
• Skype – Yes in and out with video
• 5 active laptops + 1 desktop
• 2 terabytes of storage
• Server from InMotion Hosting
• WebDesign – Primarily done in Adobe products (Flash, Dreamweaver, CS3, Fireworks, photoshop, illustrator)
• Bloggging tools – Snagit, WindowsLiveWriter, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and more
• Video – Vegas Studio, Camtasia, Pinnacle Studio 12, AVS Video tools
• Email Accounts – more than I can count

The Long Winded Version

OK, if you didn’t get enough from the Short winded version below is the Long Winded version and my history of social media and PPP.  I wrote the previous 1100 words by hand and the next 4500 words with Dragon Naturally Speaking 10, a product that I’m passionate about and working to advertise through the Izea Network of bloggers.

Back in 2006, while I was dabbling in web design and working as a business developer, I started blogging. I came across a service called PayPerPost. For many months, I had been writing about technology and business and a number of things I had worked with in my former professional career as an accountant.

In those first few months, I was actually fairly successful at earning money through Google's AdSense program. It must have been beginners luck, because by June of 2006. The money from Google had virtually evaporated.

As a business developer, my consulting career was stalling out as I had approached the point where my client base no longer needed my services. For the most part I had helped many of them achieve what they were looking to achieve. My clients were very competitive and didn’t share good ideas with others, so my word-of-mouth referrals were nonexistent. Basically, they were not going to refer my services to their competitors. :-).

At the end of June, I heard about this new company that would pay bloggers to blog about the ‘things they loved.’ I was on vacation when I heard about it and signed up the next week on July 7^th. I then started playing with PayPerPost and working it into my blogging efforts, late that summer taking it very carefully. I figured the whole concept was likely a lark, and the company was doomed to failure within a week or two, and I would probably never be paid for any of my work. :-)

Then I received my first payment(about $200), and that definitely changed things quite a bit.

As an accountant and as a credit manager. I had lived very successfully by the principle that when a person or company pays you, that is a good indication that they are healthy enough to have paid you. It's a bit of a paradox, because the historical action does not necessarily mean that a future event will happen, such as getting paid a second time.

However in credit as well as in finance and business in general, you have to build up some level of trust and faith in your business partners. Money is a primary way of measuring good faith, and establishing trust. It is definitely not the only thing, and over the next few months I rapidly saw this brand-new company called PayPerPost grow into an Internet phenomena.

I became very active in the community that fall, and at the same time. I began traveling in social media circles, literally. I started by going to the Podcast Expo in 2006 (today it's known as the New Media Expo). At the time, I was working to bring the first WiFi MP3 player to market, under the Motorola brand name. That didn't pan out, and it was a year later before Microsoft was able to successfully achieve the same goal, even though we had the product working in hand, a year earlier.

I rapidly met up with a number of Podcasters that were working in this exciting new area of social media. I'm not even sure if it was called social media back then, but it was definitely a rich form of media. The community was tightknit and very close and everybody was working on something completely brand-new.

I could see that these people had developed a keen sense of creating quality content, building solid relationships with their viewers and readers and listeners, and really had a passion for what they were doing.

I also saw that most of them weren't making a dime doing anything.  With the exception of RocketBoom, which brought religion to Podcasters that year, but it didn’t sink in till the next.

I watched all this through the spectrum or filter of my recent experience with PayPerPost in the blogosphere. I had seen PayPerPost ignite a wild fire of activity in the blogosphere as people jumped on the bandwagon to earn money, getting paid up front for writing a blog article.

Many of these bloggers were relatively new at blogging, and quite a few of them had actually been involved in it for almost a decade. But earning money in this way was new to everybody for the most part. It was the wild West in the blogosphere, and as I went to the Podcast Expo, I could see a convergence of this business model developed by PayPerPost, and the quality content generation capabilities of those hard-core Podcasters.

I thought this convergence would take place sometime in the future.

This also happened to be the year that YouTube was taking off and just going crazy. Everyone could see that video was going to be jumping into the mix, very soon. PayPerPost even got some other bloggers to create a number of crazy and zany videos of themselves creating fake tattoos, silly videos, and even dressing up in sexy costumes. Back then, I didn't know anything about video, but I even put together a pretty poor video myself. :-).

The cool thing about this whole getting paid to blog concept was that it gave people a feeling of value for the work they were doing. This was just a hobby for many people anymore, this was real business. People grew their businesses extremely quickly, and admittedly some grew them very poorly. But people took their blogs much more seriously now as they started to pay bills with their earnings and some even reinvested in themselves.

By the fall of 2006, I happened to fall into both camps as the business cycle of business developing was in a trough, I was paying bills with my blog earnings and investing in my future at the same time.

I personally felt like a bit of a mad scientist, maybe that's a little extreme, I felt like a mad business developer. I was writing business plans, day and night, burning through mindmaps and whiteboards. I could see that the blogosphere was being filled up with a drive to create a quantity of content that no one had really seen before. New bloggers were joining PayPerPost by the tens of thousands, and all bloggers were jumping on board to cash in on their own sites that had been developed over years. It was basically a gold rush on the Internet.

During a gold rush, gold miners typically don't get rich. It's the people that sell the tools that get rich. PayPerPost does a very good job of functioning as the general store. They offered up a marketplace where bloggers could easily find work, and advertisers could come in and collaborate with very large numbers of bloggers, all from a central location and with relatively little effort involved. Gone were the days when an entire public relations department might have to reach out to 50 or 100 or 500 writers across the country or the world. A single person could put in an order through PayPerPost and reach 10,000 bloggers in a single day, and by the end of the week, that advertiser could reach 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 readers of those articles.

PayPerPost was not the only one earning money. Advertisers were significantly improving their own business results and a number of bloggers were joining the ranks of those like myself that had earned thousands of dollars from their blogs in short order.

As all this happened, I continued to build up my skills. I continued to learn how to code, in HTML and PHP. I learned how to run multiple websites and manage my own server online. I ventured into affiliate marketing, and learned how to write Linkbait articles. I started ghostwriting for other websites to develop my skills, learn from the best in the business, and get exposure to new trends and techniques.

I even started up my own company for a brief time working to essentially cut out the middleman in the relationship that had formed between bloggers, PayPerPost, and affiliate advertisers.

A new niche of advertisers had creased into the situation that were created websites that were simply landing pages to funnel people and readers away from bloggers enter in intermediary page before they landed on the actual landing page to buy something. I call these made for affiliate program websites. And they were basically buying page rank from bloggers in traffic from bloggers through natural search.

I wanted to help bloggers remove this middle person from the equation and learn how to write content and cover products that would enable them to get their readers to the right destinations on the Internet without having to go through a middleman along the way collecting the commission.

The problem with this scenario, existed in the fact that these same made for affiliate advertisers were paying bloggers upfront to write articles and churn out content. This was not high quality stuff and it was not high paying work either. I could see that this was creating a downward spiral of quality and I was working like hell to cut that off at the pass and simultaneously bring New Media content producers around to new more lucrative business models.

You see, Google has a fatal flaw in its search engine. It relies on text in order to index the Internet. Bloggers write about things and create a great deal of text. Essentially, bloggers were the de facto people involved in helping Google to categorize and organize the Internet. Just like those directory reviewers or editors at Yahoo in the old days. Google had found a way to spread that review capability further across the Internet, but they still had the same fatal flaw. They needed people to look at stuff on the Internet and write about it so that their search bots can figure out what it means and where it's going.

PayPerPost was essentially a path of least resistance for people that were trying to increase their presence in Google search engine rankings. Google created this marketplace, but they hadn't found a way to improve it, such that it could not be manipulated.

In fact, Google still has not found a way to avoid being manipulated!

PayPerPost provided two things that were key to their success. They provided easy access to a large number of bloggers, who in turn provided influence to readers. Ted Murphy at PayPerPost came from an advertising background, and he recognized that access and influence are valuable commodities in advertising.

PayPerPost also provided a way, by keeping things simple, of generating text links within blog articles. From an SEO perspective, these links put in the blog articles were like money in the bank. Search engine optimization orders piled in to the system, while Ted and crew did their best to bring in high-quality advertisers that recognized the benefit of access and influence from HP to USA Networks to The Police and many more.

So the marketplace became a little weird for quite some time. This created a great deal of controversy in the webmaster world of the Internet, where selling links was something that was taboo for those people that supported Google, or at least wanted to remain in Google's good graces as the monopoly on the Internet that they are. Ted also happened to be a genius when it comes to guerrilla marketing, and he rode and milked this controversy for all of it was worth. All of that negative attention that he received from detractors was channeled into building his company and making it successful.

Bruce Lee has nothing on Ted Murphy when it comes to doing business. :-).

Through this whole time, in addition to building out new clients, they invested a significant amount of money building and improving their systems. They rebuilt the system from the ground up on more than one occasion. They had to as the network was growing at outrageous rates.

About a year ago, at BlogWorld (2007), Ted & company showed up with a great big booth, and they even bought an extra day at the Las Vegas convention Center to run an event called PostieCon. Their goal was to bring PPP bloggers together and do two things.

1. Gather feedback and share some best practices, and
2. More importantly show off the new SocialSpark system. SocialSpark was a brand-new company line that removed the page rank and link selling aspect out of their system. Selling links on the Internet is easy, and PayPerPost was taking a ballsy move to position itself away from link sales and move into a more white hat advertising play.

The system was designed to gather and harness the metrics associated with each of the sites owned by bloggers around the Internet, such that an advertiser could reach out into a number of categories and niches and raise awareness of their products and services or events, building buzz about it across the Internet, and ultimately generating new business.

Transparency was key, when it came to disclosure. So all of the links were now compliant with Google. In fact, the system picked up an endorsement ultimately from Matt Cutts himself.

Now to back up a step, I should first date that I've been attending the consumer electronic show for a number of years now. I started going when I worked for a company that was a spinoff from Motorola. We ran million-dollar booths at the show and launched new products with XM radio and Motorola among other things. I kept going to the consumer electronic show, as I worked as a business developer. But in January 2007 when I went to CES, I started talking to people about this new ability to reach out to people across the Internet. I talked about the numbers that could be reached. When you push a message through 10,000 bloggers, you're able to achieve numbers very similar to American Idol.

This caught the attention of many of the people and companies at the consumer electronic show. At the time, no one really had a solid enough company to approach a Fortune 500 company with an advertising plan, and with the exception of a few, such as Hewlett-Packard, there were not too many daring companies out there that wanted to dabble in some new Internet startup.

Later that fall, in 2007 I went to the podcast and new media Expo of 2007, where I cemented some of my relationships. In that community. I was no longer trying to push a consumer electronics product, but this time I was trying to function as a blogger, and as a new social media insider that understood how a business model worked in the blogosphere and how it could be applied in new media.

The tone of the show had changed significantly, and now people were very interested in learning how they could make money from podcasting and new media content. I had just live this through the previous year, and I could see the path that was laying out before a number of these people. This show was quickly followed by BlogWorld and PostieCon.

I can already see the quality of content, decreasing in the blogosphere. In essence, some of that gold rush cash was like a bit of a bomb that had gone off in the community as people struggle to figure out the right way to balance good content with lucrative yet easy advertising revenues.

Over the summer I had worked with a number of bloggers trying to show them the light. I was less than successful with this initially, and moving into the fall I set up an internship program, where I recruited college students to learn how to run a blog is a business. My idea was that if I could reach people that were brand-new to the business, people that were already living in rich social environments and exposed to rich sources of information and ideas, they could be taught the benefits of writing good content and creating great videos or audio content and then balancing it with advertising revenue. I thought that this would be a good first step into the realm of training people how to blog better.

Now when I went to PostieCon, a month later, there were only a few bloggers that recognized the perils of lower quality content, and even a smaller number that were doing something about it. Many people recognize detrimental content contributions coming from foreign countries where the writers did not speak English as a first language. But fewer people saw the problems with writing in a way that was just not effective communication.

Maybe to be more precise, many people were not verbalizing this problem yet. However, there was this overall sense that a number of people felt like they were stretching themselves then, with their writing and churning stuff out like piecework. Writing a blog article for money had become something like ring the cash register. Push the right number of keys and hit the enter button, and out pops a five dollar bill from the cash register. To make this a business cycle, all you have to do is repeat the process.

While that can be very lucrative, it's not very fulfilling work. People were starting to gravitate away from this business model and dabble in some of the new knockoff networks, that had creeped into the system that basically copied what PayPerPost was doing. It happened to be opportune timing, because Google had started slamming people's websites engaged in blogging that sold links. The method for valuing those links was nuked by Google. With no way to value a link, the price point rapidly dropped for many bloggers from levels of $50-$100 down to five dollars.

Google did not delist these blogs and the traffic for these blogs do not go away. They just took away the easy way to value the worth of the links that were being sold. So as many of us attended PostieCon, we were watching our websites and websites of our friends being ravaged by Google, while we were simultaneously trying to assimilate the potential of the changes coming in a new system called SocialSpark, which would not be live until January.

I saw the value in SocialSpark from the perspective that all of those companies and advertisers at consumer electronic show, could now jump on board and safely enter into this advertising market.

I went to the consumer electronic show in January 2008 and rapidly built up a client list of companies that were interested in using the service that spring. Unfortunately, the SocialSpark system didn't go live in January as it was expected to. In fact, it didn't go live until that spring, and by that time the advertising dollars for most of those clients was gone.

Now each year, I also attend an event called the eComExpo. It's a virtual tradeshow that occurred about every six months, but has recently slowed down to about every nine months. I had also started using Dragon NaturallySpeaking around January 2007. I was trying to find a way to write content faster, and with less effort, and just get those great ideas out of my head without damaging my hands. I've been typing for years, and even though I trained and trained others in ergonomics, I did not want to damage my hands or body.

Learning how to write with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, took a lot of practice, because it's a different area of your brain that drives the words that come out of your mouth versus the words that are typed out of your fingertips.

During the summer of 2008, a perfect storm of an opportunity came together. During the eComExpo, I connected with Digital River, a leading affiliate marketing company, who happened to manage the affiliate and e-commerce platform for Nuance, the makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

We talked a great deal about how affiliate marketers utilized the blogosphere to build links and drive people through intermediate steps towards a transaction. It was an inefficient process, and we decided to put together a campaign to build buzz about the launch of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, leveraging the power of blog marketing, with Digital River and Nuance.

Building the campaign was not easy, but ultimately we were able to launch this campaign and get it running through SocialSpark and PayPerPost. As I write this, we are running a buzz marketing campaign utilizing full disclosure, and no follow links.

Our campaign epitomizes the realization of the convergence of this market, and the potential and power of the blogosphere to share the right information with the right people when they need it to make informed decisions on what to buy and how to use that tool. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is unique in that it also happens to be a tool that can help bloggers write higher quality content.

Through this campaign, we have utilized a number of tools to increase the buzz about this product in ways that have not been seen in the Izea networks. We are using interactive video, blogger generated video, blogger generated articles and insights, and industry expert articles and insights in a mix of blog articles and buzz building efforts are helping to spread the word about using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. Our campaign is not yet complete, in fact it's only about one third done.

That said, we have definitely broken new ground with this marketing campaign, and we've increased the communications between bloggers and advertisers through the network in the process. Today were having almost daily discussions between bloggers and advertisers on how to improve the system, improve blogs, improve the way that advertising campaigns are structured and delivered and communicated to bloggers, and much more. We're providing extremely viable feedback to Izea, enabling them to develop and identify friend new business lines and products which will make the entire network, stronger and more successful.

I have been driving this particular ship myself since July, and the entire campaign is my brainchild. It's not something that was developed overnight, but was developed, built an orchestrated two years experience working with the system and with this industry. It was built because I've been able to work with people at each level of the industry from the bloggers to the business team at Izea to the affiliate partners and to advertisers. I've even been in discussions with venture capital partners at Izea, who provided excellent feedback and insights into ways to tune and improve my campaign and their business.

Is this open communication between all of these levels that made this campaign possible, and have kept it progressing forward.

As I look to the future, I see a new opportunity that I'm working to seize. I see a number of bloggers in the Izea networks these days, that want to significantly improve the work that they are doing, and as a result, be more successful, both financially and from a career perspective. I would like to be able to share my knowledge and help orchestrate their efforts to improve and grow their skill sets, their networks and their blogs.

I'd also like to start working with many more bloggers to help coordinate the efforts of future campaigns. Typically advertising campaigns that go through the Izea network are built in a very flat structure. Campaigns are fired in a shotgun blast across the blogosphere. This is typically done because people are experimenting with this new industry and with this new advertising platform.

My campaigns are designed to build on themselves growing, the benefits of the campaign as it runs for longer amounts of time. We are building the capability and the blogosphere to help people navigate the paths of knowledge and information. That's what bloggers do best, they cut to the chase of what's important, where it is, how much it costs, and how to slice through the red tape to get what you need and get something done effectively.

Those things cannot always be expressed in a single article. Consumers typically have to go on a journey to investigate and find information that they're looking for. This journey may start at different points for different consumers, and that can lead them to finding an open door on any given blog of any given day, hour, or minute.

An open door, or gateway can then lead them to a path through the blogosphere that can help them guide their investigation and their decision. Each consumer will make different choices along that path and will need to find different steps towards the solutions that they're looking for, because not every consumer is the same. They have different needs and come from different backgrounds and areas of the world. And sometimes they will need to be able to relate to a specific solution or presentation that can only be provided by someone that shares their unique perspective. Enter the blogger, and enter blog marketing.

This is a path of knowledge management that I think is extremely valuable in the blogosphere. I think there's an even more important area that this industry will ultimately evolve into. I believe that more bloggers are building up their skill sets, and rapidly becoming better, site managers, better publishers, better writers, better graphic designers, and better video creators. I was quoted by Technorati in the 2008 State of the blogosphere, saying, “This is just the beginning for blogging. People are getting better and better at this skill set, quality is improving, and we will soon have millions of people generating great content around the clock.”

This is not only something that I believe, but this is something that I believe I am witnessing, and being the mad business developer that I am, it is something that I am working to realize every minute of the day. I see a future where we will need more bloggers than we have today. I think there is a huge demand for content and an even bigger demand for high quality entertainment.

It is getting easier and easier to utilize technology tools that can achieve things in music and video and audio that required entire teams of people. In past years and decades. A single person can put together an entire TV show today for next to nothing. The challenge is to get that person. The skills that they need to create a quality TV show, publish it, and get that show out to the eyeballs of an audience of substantial size. This is rapidly becoming possible, and it is the future for many bloggers to realize this goal, either by themselves or by learning to work together and collaborative teams.

This concept of collaboration is something that I hope to explore during the next year working as an Izea insider. I hope to gather bloggers together to run effective campaigns in the short-term that are profitable for everyone that's involved, while simultaneously generating stronger content and building out audiences. But ultimately, the true value will be in helping bloggers learn how to work with each other as well as with other partners in this growing industry of new media.

I take this very seriously, because this is exactly what I'm passionate about doing. This year anticipated sending the consumer electronic show again, along with South by Southwest, and many other venues including podcamps and wordcamps. I will be back for BlogWorld, but in general I'm looking to hit smaller venues in the new media genre to have more focused discussions with individuals attending these groups to find a way to bring more people together.

I also intend to cover more shows in the affiliate advertising industry, as I build up my connections with these groups. New media needs to learn how to more effectively work with these groups and provide the right solutions to help our both of our industries forward. New media needs to find better ways to incorporate its own strengths and providing the right information at the right time for the right products and services and the affiliate industry needs to work at providing the right ways to establish a handoff to walk the customer through a process and a checkout that has very little red tape and gives them the solution that they truly need, when we hand our loyal readers over into their care.

We all have our challenges this year as we face a economy is dropping off. That said the industry of social media marketing is in a prime position to capitalize during the downturn. Our marketing solutions are extremely effective, and a relatively very inexpensive. To achieve all the goals that were looking for, we have to increase the quality of content, increase the audience size for that content, and increase the quality of the handoff of audience members when they start looking for solutions through our referrals.