Big Guns Leading Ad.ly Contest for a MacBook

The race for a MacBook Pro in the Ad.ly contest is heating up, as the site has just made available the leaderboard of who’s winning. So far, ShoeMoney has the top spot, with John Chow trailing in 4th. There are 21 days left for you to enter and hopefully knock out some of those in the top positions. That MacBook Pro would sure make for a nice early Christmas present!

The site has also added the ability to track your referrals to see how many people have signed up under you.

Ad.ly also says that they will soon be adding a self-serve feature for advertisers to purchase Twitter ads directly from publishers. This will hopefully allow more advertisers to participate.

With that said, more brands are promised to be coming soon. Successful campaigns with NBC and Sony Pictures have already been run, and brands like Dell, Hilton, the Olympics and Maserati are on the way too. One thing about corporate advertisers taking part in Ad.ly, is spending a few thousand dollars per day on advertising is no big deal to them.

When you look at the bigger picture though, and Twitter advertising as a whole… I’ve had much more success with Sponsored Tweets than with Ad.ly. From my experience, Ad.ly targets the bigger Twitter users with 10,000+ followers for example. While I have about 1,300 followers on Twitter (@ChrisJacobson), I haven’t been getting too many advertisers willing to run an ad on my feed. Sponsored Tweets,  however, is working out nicely and I’ve been running campaigns on almost a weekly basis.

While we’re on the topic of promoting things for money, SocialSpark.com has also been good for me. It’s similar to both of the services mentioned above, but asks you to write a blog post about a certain product. The payouts (in my experience) range anywhere from $15 to $30 for a simple 200 word post. You set up a profile explaining yourself and your blog, add your site to the marketplace, pick some appropriate categories that best suit your site, and then wait for advertisers to approach you. I’ve been receiving 2-3 offers daily from advertisers, but some of them aren’t too fitting for my audience, so I pass on a few of them. Payouts with SocialSpark.com are done via PayPal once you hit a certain threshold.

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