Izea sure is filled with a bunch of characters! Whether it was Ted Murphy or someone else who found these crazy turkey hats, well, my hats off to you! I’m way behind in writing about this but still wanted to share some of the craziness with you all!

Back a week or two before Thanksgiving, I saw a tweet from the folks at Izea asking if people would like to receive a Thanksgiving care package. I responded with my address and waited patiently. I knew what was in the box, but still wanted it to show up quickly as I was leaving for Washington state for the holiday and wanted to have the hat for that trip. It would have been hilarious, in my mind, when meeting my wife’s grandparents for the first time, to have the turkey hat on – what a way to celebrate the holiday! But, it didn’t show up by the time I left and I had actually forgotten about the package until I picked it up the following Monday.

All of the sudden, my giddiness of a school boy came back and I was excited to open it up. Inside, well there was simply a flyer wishing a Happy Thanksgiving, the wonderful Turkey hat, and a bottles of Jones soda…and not just normal cola, but a Tofurky and Gravy Jones Soda Yum, not!

Now, there is no way in hell I was going to taste the soda, because I can only imagine how gross it is. Or, it could actually be really good, I have no idea and no desire to know haha. If you got a similar package from Izea, I’d love to hear if you tried to soda and what you thought of it. I mean I do like Turkey and Gravy, but just the thought of those flavors in a liquid form…no thanks. But, the bottle will sit on my shelf and be a funny item to pull out when showing people our house and my office!

Maybe I need to start a Jones Soda collection of unique flavors? BTW, my Wife didn’t find the humor in the turkey hat…

Izea, the company behind PayPerPost and Social Spark, have launched Sponsored Tweets – another Ted Murphy idea!

SponsoredTweets is similar to the other services Izea has in which you sign up as a “tweeter” and give SponsoredTweets access to your Twitter account through the API. Then as offers come in through their service that meet your criteria, you get notified by either a DM on Twitter or email and you can accept or deny them. Finally, you post the tweet to your account you get paid.

There are two ways to make money from Twitter when using Sponsored Tweets.

• Charge Per Tweet – this is the amount that you want to earn for each tweet you send out. As an example, when I signed up for the service, my “CPT” was recommended at $3.33. You can obviously change this yourself or just let it roll. The starting rate is based on your Twitter account – number of followers, etc. Some people are reporting great pay outs from sponsors such as Shoemoney who reported $250 for posting a tweet about K-Mart.
• Charge Per Click – this is the minimum you want to be paid when you being paid per click. Again, when I signed up, this was automatically set at $0.13 for each click. I’m going to leave it here to see how it goes.

Two types of offers

When you sign up, you have a choice to make about the types of offers you get – you either have the ability to edit or write the tweet/ad that you post to your account or you just have to post what the advertiser provides. But, the best part is that you can select to have either type of tweets, so you’re making your chances better.

Minimum payout is $50.00, which seems pretty high when similar services offer a payout of $20.00.

Anyway, I’ve signed up for the service and will report back how it goes. I suggest checking it out if you are into Twitter and social media, as well as if you have a pretty good following because you can quickly make some decent money from Twitter with little effort!

Click the bird to make it happen!

So after I got off work I headed into downtown Orlando to the Izea office to check it out, drink some green beer, and meet some new people. I was very surprised when I walked in to find a security guard checking ID’s, giving out wrist bands, and also giving directions to the office. Yet, he seemed like a nice guy. Anyway, I headed up the fourth floor to check out the Izea office and see what was going on.

I snapped a few pictures of the incredibly colorful office as I walked in. The office is really wide open with just little cubicles in the center and a few rooms on the sides. Here are a few pictures.

I was also sort of surprised that there were not more people there. I mean free beer, why not right? Oh well. It’s hard to put together a meet up via Twitter and a blog only, plus for the amount of time that I knew about it, it was still a good size crew, even if majority of them were Izea employees. Ted also did a UStream show for Ted Tube while the party was going on, so that was actually pretty funny to watch as there was about a 10 second delay from what they were saying/doing to when it came through on the TV that we watched it on.

As I was thinking about leaving, Ian Fernando rolled up and others started leaving. As the crowd died down I got a chance to chat with Ian about dropping out of school, Twitter Banking, affiliate marketing, and much more. Ian’s a great guy and incredibly nice and willing to help those around him, so it was a pleasure to catch up with him. Here is a picture of us as well as some more from the night.

What did you guys get into for St. Patty’s Day? See some of the tweets from last night with the tag #paddytweet.