Marketing and Lead Generation | Swyzzle

This is big. Forget sliced bread, Swyzzle is now offering a way for bloggers to recommend products without having to compromise any sort of journalistic integrity. In the newest version of the Swyzzle Editor, you will find a new menu from which you can search Amazon.com and add purchasable products directly to your Swyzzle show–so now your readers can find the products you use directly from your website without the use of a store on your page! Here’s the kicker (and we promise we won’t tell): you get money every time someone purchases a product from your show. Yep. No stores, no order forms, no UPS bills, nada–just profit for your site from the products in your Swyzzle show.

It was definitely our biggest Ah-HA moment to date (pause for sentimental sniffle).

There are currently two example shows posted on the main page–”A Morning with the Atlanta Cupcake Factory” and “Scrap Chic Workshop,” so if you’re curious go check them out (or better yet, create a new show yourself).

And cheers to a new way to Swyzzle the web!

In the next few days, Swyzzle’s blog will be expanding the FAQ section, enough that we can celebrate it as a brand new page! Right now, we’re reaching the end of new edits that take care of what some may call the more puzzling aspects of learning how to best use Swyzzle. We’ll even have mini-shows giving a screenshot-style look at the specific questions. Be sure to check back with us later this week as this would be the perfect time to look through the FAQs in relation to the main page  and let us know if there’s anything that still doesn’t seem crystal clear.

P.S.-Keep your eyes peeled for cosmetic changes to the blog pages, too! We’re working on a new version that looks much sleeker.

I just wanted to take this momentary break from video editing to praise the equipment Swyzzle has been using to capture video: our delightful Flip Video. For our purposes, this is a stellar piece of equipment. The Flip is tiny enough that our subjects don’t find it impossible to ignore during an interview. Most importantly, however, is the video quality: although it lacks a flash and the ability to use manual focus, I’ve never missed these features even in low lighting. The features it does have are clever: the pop-out usb connection is genius, and the screen is bright and durable with easy-to-navigate buttons. Sound is remarkably clear, although if there is a lot of background noise you may have to use a video editing program after the fact to clean it up.

Besides Swyzzle shows, I’ve seen these used for home movies, video notes, and video blogging…and nearly everyone I’ve talked to has loved their Flip from day one. They’re the video equivalent of carrying around a digital camera in your pocket wherever you go–and they’re rugged enough to take the beating of everyday use. I highly reccommend you check them out…at around $130, it’s definitely worth a shot.

One sunny morning a few weeks ago we were invited to film a Swyzzle show with The Atlanta Cupcake Factory–it was a tough job, hanging out in owner Jamie Fahey’s cozy Virginia Highlands bakery all morning, but somebody had to do it. But not to fear, the Swyzzle team is always ready to handle your next cupcake [eating] emergency. 

Besides being there in person, Jamie’s creations are best viewed in this Swyzzle show we created discussing the finer points of her amazing business:

Dear denizens of the internet,

In our quest to create Swyzzle, we read a lot of blogs about technologies like AJAX and Flash, media companies like CNN, and social networking sites like YouTube and Facebook. While some of them were entertaining and informative, they all would have been more effective if they had mixed media. So Swyzzle works the same way you upload videos to YouTube or pictures to Flickr, you can upload media clips like video, pictures, sound and text. Then, you build your show by dragging your clips right onto the player and arranging them, kind of like you are making a scrap book.

After we chose bloggers as our target market, we set up meetings with between 10 and 20 of them to test our product concept. One meeting with pizza pro Jeff Varasano, who counted over half a million readers of his blog dedicated to how to make the perfect pizza, told us that his income from Google AdSense is a paltry $100 every two months. And because he recommends it, people who read his blog spend $500 on the mixer, pizza pans and spatulas[JO1] he uses. He doesn’t want his web site to be a store, so he gets nothing. We left the meeting with the goal for Swyzzle to help bloggers like Jeff make money from the products they recommend, while preserving their objectivity.

We decided that Swyzzle should connect the reader to the recommended products. So Swyzzle connects the blogger, the reader and Amazon.com’s inventory.[JO2] The result is that Swyzzle lets show authors insert a product thumbnail inside the show for any product he recommends. If the viewer chooses to buy the product, the author gets a commission on the sale. If 100 people bought the mixer because of Jeff’s recommendation, he’d make $2000-$4000. This possibility sounded a lot better to Jeff–and we’re hoping it lights you up as well.

We hope you enjoy using Swyzzle. We’re confident in our diagnosis of the issues facing bloggers today and our creation of this solution. Let us know what you think, and stay in touch.

Sincerely,

Mark Krikorian
CEO, Swyzzle.com

You’ve got to love the feeling of a good Ah-HA! moment…we had one recently while brainstorming what we would do to show everyone the possibilities of a Swyzzle show. Our hometown, Atlanta, is chock full of people doing crazy and wonderful things, so why not help them show it off with Swyzzle? Not to mention, of course, that this means we will get to meet cool people with awesome ideas.

We’ll be helping the best and brightest local organizations make the most of their online content and posting the finished product both on Swyzzle and embedded in their own webpages and blogs. Check back soon, because besides being terrifically entertaining, these inspirations may just ring a few bells for you, too.

It’s certainly exciting to see the Swyzzle site accelerating towards a brilliant launch. We expect to be live and available by early October! All of us here at Swyzzle central are working with our noses to the proverbial grindstone, motivated by our eagerness to see the content that our first batch of users creates.

Hopefully the site will work for you as it has for us so far, encouraging a level of everyday creativity previously unexperienced. Playing around with Swyzzle shows has directly influenced how we interact with our content–never again will we have to sit through an hour of slides in a darkened room.

Keep in touch, we’ll be posting again soon to let you in on the newest bells and whistles we’re adding to Swyzzle.

Oh, and drop us a line on our chatbox (over here —>) or at support@swyzzle.com

We’re thrilled to welcome you to the new Swyzzle blog. Check out the main site here