Heather from BC gave me this fancy smancy green IZEA tee while in the blogger’s lounge at last month’s Affiliate Summit in NYC*.

IZEA is a social media marketing company and the world leader in sponsored conversations. They operate a network of over 250,000 bloggers and 25,000 advertisers around the globe.

SocialSpark.com, my favorite IZEA property, is a blog marketing network that connects advertisers with bloggers through an online marketplace. I personally have taken several “opportunities” that include Pay-Per-Click (can be promoted via Twitter and Facebook),  Sponsored Websites (that put hover ads on your websites), and Blog Posts (that I fully disclose are being sponsored).

I think Social Spark is not only profitable, but fun (and I wish they had an affiliate/referral program).  Yesterday I took an hour to review a few opps and ended up writing two blog posts about what I learned on those sites. Most posts require 200 words which isn’t hard to come up with.  Considering the price paid for post varies from $5 to $300 per post (mine were both somewhere in the middle of that), it turns out to be a pretty good hourly rate!  Plus I added new unique content to my sites, so it was a double bonus.

Check out BenSpark.com’s SocialSpark Saturdays for great insight on how to most of out of SocialSpark. You can join me on his “I’m Not A Famous Blogger” Crew.

Recently IZEA also released Sponsored Tweets that matches tweeters with advertisers.  This is the best “get paid to twitter” program I’ve seen thus far as you can review and accept or reject the tweet that that the advertiser would like to send out.  Some advertisers even let you write your own tweet. I will decline a tweet if the “ad” doesn’t fit my audience, as I don’t want to risk losing valuable followers if they think I’m spamming them. But if an advertiser wants to advertise a shoe sale via Twitter to my @shoeaholics followers, everyone benefits! Sign up at SponsoredTweets.com.

*I also got to meet Ted Murphy, Founder/CEO of IZEA, while in NYC.  Watch for a “Famous Tongue Photo” in an upcoming post!

Today’s free tee spotlights MoneyReign.com – which I received by following @moneyreign on Twitter! Zac Johnson (aka Super Affiliate by Day, Super Hero at Night) not only gives away free tshirts, but he gives away free secret tips over at his blog, ZacJohnson.com.  I’ve known Zac for the past ten years and have seen him at every Affiliate Summit - trust me he was “just a kid” when he started making money on the internet. He is a true affiliate marketing success story in my book!

I’ve praised the Power of Twitter many times over now. And it was a twitter conversation after my 4/17/09 Free Shirt Friday post that led to today’s featured Free Shirt…

@kimarketing Does this shirt make my butt look big? http://twurl.nl/dgpm0d It’s Free Shirt Friday! Gotta love pre-publish, I’m actually still in my pj’s.

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@mookie94 @kimarketing can you please send me a shirt that MAKES my butt look big? i’m a member of the NBA — No-Butts Of America!

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@kimarketing @mookie94 Wonder if Lipo could be transferred? I’ll share. But I need a http://www.94rock.fm tshirt first!

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@mookie94 @kimarketing that’s one of the few things i actually have the power to make happen! also, i can play the willam tell overture on my face.

Ok, so it only took 6 weeks for me to actually get the shirt from 94 Rock’s Morning Host, Mookie, but like many things, it was worth the wait. And I didn’t even have to sleep with him. 

Anyhoo, I usually don’t participate in the whole #followfriday hashtag scheme of things, and I usually ignore tweets that just list names with no reasons as to why I should follow them.  Example…

@kimarketing #followfriday @shoppingkim @shoeholics @stealthestyle @freebiefox @cybersweeps @preemietwins @huskersetc

Had the above been a real tweet, I do recommend following all of the above twitter users because they are all mine! And they are set up to auto-follow courtesty of TweetLater.com (and auto-unfollow, so you can’t just follow and unfollow to increase your count without reciprocating). I do recommend creating a twitter id for each website you have.  If you don’t have time to maintain multiple accounts, set them up on auto-pilot with TwitterFeed.com to tweets your RSS feeds.  Can you say free traffic?

So today is Friday and I anticipate seeing several #followfriday recommendations. I prefer the tweets that are genuine and tell me why I should follow someone.  Like this…

@kimarketing #followfriday I recommend following @mookie94 because he’s crazy like me and his tweets make me laugh milk out of my nose.

The milk is in reference to yet another tweet.  And that recommendation is sincere - Mookie didn’t pay me (much anyway) to write that.

So thanks 94 Rock for the tee! 94Rock.fm is a local radio station for me in Northeast Nebraska (94.7), but you can listen live via the internet from anywhere! Now what do I have to do to score some free tickets to the Heart/Eddie Money and Big & Rich/Zac Brown Band Concerts coming up…