Giving bloggers the ability to run contests after they write a review has been helping promoters get the word out about their product.  Tomoson has made some updates allowing promoters to better manage the contests on their promotion.

What is a Contest? A contest is run after the promoter has already shipped a product to the blogger and he/she has written a review.  Once the blogger writes the review and verifies it, the promoter can send out A SECOND PRODUCT to the contest winner.  Bloggers will run contests on their website to attract more readers and fans.  This obviously helps bring large amounts of readers to their blogs which brings more eyeballs to a promoter’s product (a win win situation).

IMPORTANT: Contests are OPTIONAL and promoters do not need permit them on their promotion.  On the other hand if you do allow it MAKE SURE you plan on sending a product to the blogger’s winner.   After the first product review is done the blogger will send you the winner’s address via Tomoson and you can export that address in the using the same green button.  Export contest shipping addresses

How To Setup Contests When Creating A Promotion

1.       Select Blogger Contest: When you are making a promotion Tomoson will have the option to select if you want a blogger contest.  If you select yes enter the number of products to giveaway to each APPROVED blogger.

2.       Select Contest Expiration Date: Now a new set of dates will appear.  Select a contest expiration date which tells the bloggers the last day they can get you a contest winner address.  The date needs to be long enough after the review time, so the blogger can run the contest correctly.  If you don’t the system will not allow you to select the expiration date.  After the expiration date the blogger cannot give you a contest winner address and you do not need to send the contest winner a product.

3. Select Contest Shipment Date: The last date is the contest shipment date which tells the blogger what date you will be shipping the products to the contest winners.  You will want to select this date after the contest expiration date, so you only need to export the addresses once.

How To Administrate Contests

Now that you have setup your contest administrating it is easy.  The promotion profile page will show what dates the contests are set to so bloggers will know when to expect updates from you.  As you mark products shipped the bloggers will get updates so you don’t need to worry about sending emails.

When you get to those dates simply export the shipping addresses of the contest winners, ship the products, and mark them shipped.

Learn How To Mark Contest Products Shipped

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A lot of promoters were asking for the ability to see blogger review urls and sort bloggers by the date they applied.   We made some updates to Tomoson and now both are online to use.

Blogger Review Link

After a blogger verifies his/her review you will be able to see the link above the review.  Now you can read the post on Tomoson.com and click a link to go directly to the bloggers post.  You can see an example of  the Review URL below.

Date Applied

We change Tomoson to default the most recently applied at the top of your account area.  Promoters now also have the option to sort the date applied from ascending to descending and show applied, denied, or applied bloggers with a single click.

Date Sorting · Review Link

Now promoters can sort bloggers by their statistics easily.  When a promoter goes to one of their promotions they can click on the stats & sorting button.

Once on this page the promoter can organize each field by the level of importance.  For example, let’s say I feel blogger category is the most important.  I can click on filter and get a window allowing me to pick the blogs within specific categories.  If you want to change the categories simply click the filter link again and edit the selections.

After picking a category, the promoter feels Twitter followers are the next most important stat to the promotion.  Select the drop down above twitter followers (high – low).  The system will now sort the Twitter followers within the categories you have selected from high to low.

Now the promoter wants to see who has the most Facebook friends and fans.  Select the drop down and sort the friends/fans from high to low.  The system will recognize the sort according to the order you sorted them.  Giving more weight first thing selected (groups in this case), then Twitter followers, then Facebook fans/friends.  This means the promoter can organize bloggers by what stats they think are truly important.

Once the promoter has the bloggers sorted simply check the box next to each bloggers name and click approve.  After that’s done the blogger will get an email with a notification of approval.  Download the shipping addresses, mark the products shipped, and let the bloggers write the reviews and verify them.

Filtering · Sorting bloggers

After a lot of feedback from bloggers we made some new improvements to Tomoson.com.  The biggest complaint was the lack of “To Do” dates.  When will a promoter approve people, ship, ect…  We listened and added the dates shown in the image below.  As these dates get hit people are notified via email so the blogger and promoter will know what’s going to happen next.

If you go to any promotion on Tomson.com you will see these new additions to the promotion profile page.

——-Dates Added ——

Bloggers Can Apply From: These are the dates bloggers will have the opportunity to apply for the product review.  At this time promoters will be gathering bloggers for preapproval or auto-approval.

Final Blogger Selection Date: If there is a preapproval stage this date is the day the promoter will select the final set of bloggers to be approved or denied.

Product Ship Date: Date the promoter will be shipping all products to the bloggers.

Review Verification Time: Shows how long a blogger will have to use and write a review on the product.

Thanks again to everyone providing feedback making Tomoson.com better, and as the great Tracy Morgan once said:

“Live every week like it’s shark week”

approval · dates · tomoson · verification dates

Send Tomoson a referral, earn $25.  NO LIMIT

Hello Tomoson Bloggers,

Have you written a review or given away a product on your blog from a company that would be interested in trying our new service for FREE?  If so we will award you $25 for each promoter that signs up for a paid membership!

Promoters Register Here:  https://www.tomoson.com/dev/free-account

Update:  Tomoson is ready for beta testing!  But we need your help finding companies that want to giveaway products to bloggers to review & giveaway.  Please contact companies you have written a review or given away a product for to see if they want to beta test our service for FREE!  Just remind them to include your blog in the “referral” field so you receive credit!

Thanks again,

The Tomson Team

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We have recently finished our message center in Tomoson.com and want to hear what you guys think about it.  Please watch the video below and let us know if there is anything we are missing or should fix.

HERE IS HOW YOU CAN TEST IT OUT (watch the video below first)

1. Log into your tomoson.com account
2. Go here and ask a question in the lower left corner: http://www.tomoson.com/dev/view-promotion/new_promotion_testing_message_center
3. Within a few hours (DURING NORMAL BUSINESS HOURS) someone in our team will respond to your question.
4. After that you will get an email with the answer to your question and you can start to interact with the message center more.

And because we all know how funny movie quotes should close out any blog.  Where did this classic line come from?

“I want to go somewhere, where the salmon instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano.”

message center · testing

Stats don't always tell the full story. (image by KevinzHengli)

Thank you for the feedback on both our logo and sharing of stats. We wanted to highlight this comment from Kelly from Kelly’s Lucky You:

Now, the third one, yeah, it’s fun but it doesn’t tell me who you are! When I looked up synonyms for “beta”, I got “dubious, experimental, flaky, mostly working, new, pre-release, suspect, testing, unready”

The beta comment is a great point. What does Beta mean to us? Beta means we are testing the platform with a few bloggers and promoters to ensure a few things:

• The platform is easy to us for both bloggers and promoters
• That helps connect both bloggers and promoters and provides equal value to both
• Third that it makes the web a better place.

It’s our goal to get out of Beta as quick as possible.

On Bloggers and Stats

As a blogger myself I know how a blog can play a role into your daily life. While every blogger has their own personal reasons for blogging at the core it comes down to having something to say. If you have enough interesting things to say and can entertain people will begin to follow you. Thus you gain an audience– this is what promoters are really looking for.

I do think it’s important to remember that promoters have limited resources and limited products to give away. So when they look at the landscape of bloggers they are asking themselves what is the best way for us to get the word out? They are really looking for what is called the vocal minority–finding a small subset of a market and making them aware of their product or service. As a blogger you fit into this vocal minority (or at least that’s the hope from a promoters standpoint).

Stats Don’t Tell the Full Picture

So on one hand stats are important but on the other they aren’t. How are stats not necessarily important? As a blogger or even someone engaging in a social network you have a level of influence. With certain stats like Facebook fans, Twitter followers, RSS and newsletter subscribers you can gauge at least some form of reach or audience. While that does sow some level of influence that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Take two bloggers who blog with the same consistency. They both have Twitter accounts. Blogger one has 3,000 followers and blogger two has 200. Objectively you could say Blogger one has the most influence and audience. But that is not the full story–when you look deeper Blogger one is using Twitter to really push communications whereas blogger two is truly engaging with a good percentage of her 200 followers. Also one of her followers writes for her local paper and often includes ideas she gets from the blogger in her columns. Blogger one really is not interacting and thus doesn’t have influence over her audience.

So Who Has More Influence?

The other aspect of influence is among your peers, friends and family. This is where numbers don’t always tell the full picture.  If you take Blogger two she might influence 6-8 of her friends on Facebook that never show up on some statistic. We bring this up just to explain a little more on how stats do play into how a promoter views your blog and your efforts. Sometimes we get so caught up on numbers that we don’t dig deep and say what is really going on.Also with Blogger two and the newspaper writer this is a form of what we call influencer of the influencer. One person influences someone who has a larger audience but you would never know that without knowing the connection between the two. There is no stat I know of that is going to tell you this influence effect.

In the end a promoter is looking for a blogger to review their product and give an honest assessment of it’s feature and uses. They also are hoping that in reviewing the product the people that you influence will either purchase or continue the conversation around their product.

Does This Help?

We wanted to share a little more on why stats are important but also why they are not. Yes we know kind of like answering a question with a question. This is important because not only do we want you the blogger to have success we also want a promoter to understand the value of engaging and interacting with all levels of bloggers on Tomoson.

Is this post helpful? Should we do more posts like this where we go a little deeper into the aspects of both promotions and blogging?

Movie Quote: “Surely you can’t be serious!”…  “I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.”

bloggers · influence · promoters · social media · stats

The entire concept of Tomoson.com is to give away free products to bloggers and have them write reviews on them.  When the blogger writes the review they normally link to the website where the review came from.  Since studies have shown readers trust bloggers, it’s more likely a positive review will lead to a sale on your website.  The link also serves another purpose helping increase your search engine rankings with a backlink.   The more backlinks you can gather  the better according to search engines.

Since Tomoson.com helps you get more sales and more backlinks we’ve added a feature allowing the blogger to have a contest giveaway with the product he/she just reviewed.   The benefit to the promoter is he/she will get double the backlinks and double the exposure to a positive blog review.  Bloggers love it because they can gain more readers with contest giveaways.

Stay tuned for the Big Tomoson Launch and Bloggers PreRegister Here

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contest giveaway · Marketing · SEO · tomoson

First off we want to say a huge THANK YOU for your feedback, and please keep it coming.

Due to this feedback we will be removing the requirement for a password when bloggers apply for a promotion.  The reason behind the password was to capture the amount of followers bloggers have on their Twitter profile.  We realized that bloggers do not feel comfortable giving out this information so we will be removing it before the site launch.

If you don’t know what feature I’m referring to please sign into your Tomoson.com account.  If you don’t have an account click here to register for free.  Once logged in click > bloggers at the top > find promotion > apply to review product and you will see this information below.

We will be removing the password requirement but we will be requiring what the bloggers Twitter account is, so promoters can see how many followers a blogger has.  This is critical information to a promoter and this will keep highly qualified promoters with great products coming back.

If you have any other feedback for us please click here to submit it.

password · tomoson · twitter