Hi Everyone,

Some of you may have started noticing a new short URL in your tweets: vsb.li. It’s something we have been experimenting with over the last few weeks, and just started rolling out to many more accounts this week.

As you know, prior to this, we used various URL shortening services to distribute your links. Among them were bit.ly, j.mp, is.gd and goo.gl. We’ll still use these services when necessary, but have moved a lot of our links to vsb.li for a simple but important reason: it’s faster.

Because vsb.li sits on our servers, it means that followers who click your links don’t have to bounce through multiple services before they arrive at the destination page. The links are coming to our servers already (it’s how we provide the awesome analytics), so might as well bring them here right away instead of going through an intermediary.

Note: For those of you who have provided your Bitly credentials, your links will continue to use your Bitly URLs.

It’s a continued effort to make the process seamless for your followers, and this is another step in that direction.

Cheers!
Saif

Hi Everyone,

As you know, one of our objectives here at Visibli is to help users optimize their social media engagement — in other words, help you share content that’s more interesting to your followers.

Over the last couple of weeks, many of you have started to see (and subscribe to!) the new version of our analytics platform. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, you can do so by visiting the Analytics page. The different sections should give you a taste of what’s behind the scenes.

There are many new features in this version, but the two that are worth highlighting here are content categorization, and follower segmentation and targeting.

Categorize Links (click to enlarge)

Content Categorization

In the last version of our analytics product, we showed you what your most popular links were. This time, we’ve got well beyond that to make things even easier. We now automatically categorize your content into popular topics (technology, entertainment, music, etc.), and show you how many average clicks content from each of these categories receives. We do the same by analyzing and comparing formats (videos, images, articles, etc.) so that you know what your followers are engaging with the most!

Segment Followers (click to enlarge)

Follower Segmentation & Targeting
This is probably the coolest and most valuable part of the new platform.

Say you tweet about technology and sports. But what if a significant portion of your followers are actually interested in entertainment? The new Analytics platform does this analysis for you. We’ll study the content from your most engaged followers to understand what topics they’re interested in. We’ll then present it to you so that you can have a better sense of their interests.

Better yet. Not only can you filter your followers based on their interests, but you can also sort them based on influence, engagement level and interest level. Then, right from the system, you can send them very targeted messages.

Finally, two more sections that we’ve created are timing optimization (what’s the best time to tweet each day? week?), and performance scorecard (how are you performing, and what are some actionable recommendations?).

Using these, every Twitter user can increase the engagement they receive from their followers. If you’d like to purchase the new analytics, or if you have any questions, feel free to email us at sales@visibli.com.

Cheers,
Saif

We’re super thrilled to announce today that we’ve just launched a new partnership with Seesmic, the awesome Twitter app used by so many power users and brand managers.

What do power users and brands love more than anything else? Data. Analytics. Numbers that go up and down… and up again.

Starting today, all Seesmic users will be able to see real-time analytics for the links they share on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks; and they’ll be able to do this from right within the app!

Visibli Plugin for Seesmic

Here’s Seesmic’s take in their blog post, and you can download the Visibli plugin from their marketplace.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think.

Best,
Saif

Excited about Movember? We are. Any time you can make good people look funny with ‘staches is a great time in our books!  But why stop there? We’ve used Visibli to have some fun with it — all the while, raising money for prostate cancer. To add a ‘stache to any site…

Add “http://mothispage.com/” before any URL

(Example: http://mothispage.com/website.com)

Seriously, try it. And if you want to link your own Mo Space or Donate pages to your Movember Engagement Bar, you can customize it as well. Let us know what you think, and grow your site’s mo!

Cheers,
Saif

Hello Assetizers,

Lots of new and exciting things brewing here at Assetize.  You probably saw our last note on the bookmarklet, which you can pick up from your My Accounts -> Bookmarklet page.  What else is new?

BRAND AND MONETIZE WEB LINKS

Assetize now also helps brand and monetize external links from your websites and blogs! Using this feature, all external links form your site will show the web toolbar (with your site’s branding) above destination pages.  Get started here, or see an example here.

You can customize the bar to match the look & feel of your site, and brand it with your logo. During beta, the self-branded toolbar helped increase user retention and pageviews from external links by 25%-40%!

Don’t want to monetize your links? That’s ok. You can remove the ‘Ad’ widget from the Customize page, and still use your self-branded bar above destination pages to retain users. We’ve seen the stats – it works!

INSTALLATION

Implementing this functionality on your website or blog is as easy as Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V (pronounced: Copy and Paste. Who knew ‘paste’ was spelled with a ‘V’?).

1. Visit http://assetize.com and click on Get Your Bar
2. Select ‘Website or Blog’ in Step 1, and go through the registration process
3. During Step 3, you’ll be able to sign in or register
4. Copy and paste the snippet of code from Step 4 into your website or blog’s header. Sample snippet:


Sample code snippet

Why only external links?  You probably already monetize your website or blog with AdSense or a similar network. We wanted to help you monetize a new asset from your site: links.

Did we miss something? Send us a note and let us know what you think.

Happy Assetizing,
Saif

Hear ye, hear ye! We’d like to announce a new bookmarklet to help you Assetize your ‘organic’ links!

We know what you’re thinking: Hey smarty-pants, what the heck are organic links? Links that are green? Made from natural ingredients? Low-emission?!  Err, no. We mean links that your share naturally with your friends and followers, and not just ones from RSS feeds – a limitation we used to have.

What the Bookmarklet Will Look Like

Using our brand spankin’ new bookmarklet, you can monetize any link with one click, and then share them everywhere: Twitter, Facebook, email, snail mail…ok, not snail mail, but you get the point.

To download the bookmarklet, visit your My Accounts page and ‘drag’ the bookmarklet button from the site to your bookmarks bar. Then, every time you want to share a link, simply click the bookmarklet and a box will appear with the Assetized link. Copy-paste it where you want, and you’re done!

Ready… set… Assetize!

Twitter has published some new rules regarding affiliate marketing, which can be found here:http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/76915

Here are some excerpts we would like to bring to your attention:

Feeds of your own blog: It’s generally fine to automate your account with updates of your own content; just be sure to review the Twitter Rules before setting up your automation…

Feeds for community benefit: We welcome feeds that are used for community benefit or provide non-commercial information to a niche group of users, such as local weather feeds or transit information….

Automated or mass-created affiliate advertising is not permitted on Twitter…

Updates that are posted automatically to your account through a tool or third-party application, for which you are compensated (whether on a “per-click,” “per-sale,” “per-tweet,” or other basis), are prohibited…

All sponsored or paid updates must be manually approved

From the above, you’ll notice that using Assetize to post news content on your account is completely acceptable. However, they do require that all ads sent through accounts must be approved each time.

Our goal is to work within Twitter’s Terms of Service so that you can continue to see the benefits of your valuable Twitter account. As such, we’ll be making the following changes:
1) Assetize will no longer publish ads automatically through accounts in-stream. All ads will first be sent to publishers for approval, and will then be posted. Due to this change, you will see fewer ads within your stream.
[We have asked for, and received, permission from Twitter to run the Haiti in-stream campaign (more below), so these will continue to run in an automated fashion]
2) If you use RSS feeds to send out content through Assetize, all content links will show an ad bar on the destination pages. You may have already noticed this, as we have been testing it out with a few valuable accounts. Users will now be paid based on a combination of an account’s influence, as well as the number of times their content gets clicked — a CPM-like model.

To see examples of this format, visit our homepage at http://assetize.com. Not only does this keep you earning money, but is a much less intrusive and less interruptive solution for your followers!

Hi Everyone,

Sorry that I’ve been slow to blog recently but, as you’ll notice, we’ve been busy making big changes to our site. We have built out our ad network functionality, and are focused on being the best targeted ad network for Twitter (check out some real examples on our site).

For those users who have been inquiring about our Buy/Sell service, we have decided to turn this functionality off for the time-being. Since these actions were against Facebook’s and Twitter’s TOS, we thought it was best to focus on ways of monetization that added value to not only our users but also the social networks. We are confident that by creating a proprietary technology that offers targeted and relevant ads, we have now done this.

If you haven’t signed up for our new account monetization service yet, give it a try. Most of our users have already made more money through this than they did through Buy/Sell. It’s a win-win for all!

Hope this clears up why the services have changed.

Happy Assetizing,

Saif

Most Twitter accounts are inactive. Is yours? You can make money without lifting a finger.

Assetize has introduced a new way for you to monetize your social accounts: Twitter Account Parking! [Our interns call it the Bird's Nest. Pretty clever of them]

How can you park your account? Follow these simple steps:

1. Provide your account information

2. Give us keywords related to your account. We’ll use these to make sure that the content we provide is relevant. (Your only step*)

3. We provide the content and insert periodic ads

4. You make money

*Seriously, that’s it. You might want to come back and check your earnings once in a while though. Seeing your account balance grow is always soothing for the soul.

We’re currently in beta and sending out invites daily. To learn more or request an invite, visit http://assetize.com/park

Happy parking,

Saif

Greetings Assetizers!

We’re excited to announce two updates to our site:

1) You can now request accounts that aren’t already listed on Assetize – either directly from our homepage or following a search. We act as your broker in contacting the owner, and you still benefit from our escrow services to guarantee safe transfers.

A special thanks to all the users who suggested this in our Feedback Forum!

2) In the most obvious of changes, we’ve got a new UI! If you don’t remember what we used to look like, here are Before and After screenshots:

Before

After

Talk soon,
Saif