Tech Talk Tuesday: MyLikes.com
Last week I got an email from Bindu Reddy, inviting me to be a Premium Influencer on MyLikes. After poking around a bit, I decided that MyLikes is a community I’d like to participate in. Everything about it makes sense, as it appears to be the natural growth of Likaholix.
Rather than a traditional review, I’m going to give you my brief interview with Bindu Reddy of MyLikes. Also, I’m giving it my full endorsement. It’s a good site, and if great people participate it will be a great community.
Q: How did the shift come about from Likaholix to MyLikes?
BINDU REDDY: We first started Likaholix with the intention of starting a word-of-mouth advertising platform. We wanted to start with a consumer-only site in the beginning so encourage users to genuinely express their interests and build a profile. MyLikes takes Likaholix one step further and allows bloggers/influencers to express/endorse what they like and earn money doing so.
Influencers can also choose to donate the money to charity if they wish. Further more, we allow influencers to create and post Sponsored Likes wherever their audience may be – their blog or their twitter stream
Q: Is MyLikes in beta? Is that why it’s invite only or is your goal to grow slowly with an organic community.
BINDU REDDY:MyLikes is out of beta. You can sign up here – http://mylikes.com/i and become an influencer. However, we do have an invite-only premium influencer program for influencers with > 5000 followers. You must receive an invite to be a premium influencer.
Q: Who else is working on this with you?
BINDU REDDY:I am working on this with Arvind Sundararajan. Arvind was the lead engineer for AdSense at Google and understands ads on content-networks/blogs really well. You can read more about him here – http://mylikes.com/about
Q: I know you’re a Xoogler, how did google docs lead you here?
BINDU REDDY:Before MyLikes I was in-charge of product management for Google Docs, Blogger, Video and Google Sites. Working on Blogger helped me understand influencers and the power of influence marketing. Prior to working on Docs etc, I used to be a product manager for AdWords where I learnt a lot about ads and ad networks.
Q: Why should someone like me join MyLikes? I’m just a mommy blogger. What’s the real chance of real income?
BINDU REDDY:As a mommy blogger, your chances of real income are very good. In the coming weeks, we will be recruiting advertisers in the education, lifestyle, home and baby brands/products space. Mommy Bloggers can post sponsored Likes on twitter and blogger and make more money than they currently do running banner ads and adsense on their websites. We also want to work with Mommy Bloggers and evolve our product to make it useful to them. Also our earnings-per-click can be as high as $1.00 which is much greater than other ad-networks. Mommy bloggers who engage their audience can earn more money with time as we increase your earnings-per-click as you post more relevant likes.
Q: Some people are “liking” carrot sticks, some people are “liking” their computers. Did you have a vision of what direction this would go? Has your vision changed?
BINDU REDDY:We want users to create likes for products/services/brands that they have really looked at and want to genuinely endorse. So liking their own computers is perfectly OK and we encourage that. CarrotStricks, is a fun educational math game and I am surprised that people like it :)
Q: What’s your “like” today?
BINDU REDDY:My Like today is a sponsored one for the company 99designs – We got a lot of graphic and web design done on 99designs. It’s a great website if you are looking to outsource logo, graphic and web design. All the money I make on our website, I am donating to the Haiti – World vision relief fund.
My like today is MyLikes. If you do sign up, you can click here and you will automatically connect with me.