While we’ve all witnessed a web-based publishing revolution, one thing hasn’t changed. It’s still a pain to insert links and content in blogs, web-based emails, and web pages. Even if there are trillions of them.
That is, it used to be. Now there’s Lizzer. It’s a service that makes it easy for anyone to insert links, images, and YouTube videos wherever you need them. Here’s how it works: Just enter a term in the Lizzer search bar, identify the content that you want to link or embed, then click on the link or insert button to make it happen. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything that’s faster at putting in those links to Wikipedia for definitions or even just adding a simple link to a company or your friend’s blog.
You can play with the Lizzer demo site at Lizzer.com, but the really powerful application is the bookmarklet. Once you’ve dragged the bookmarklet link to your bookmarks bar, you can then use Lizzer wherever you are on the web. In other words, say you’re typing up a blog post in WordPress. All you have to do is click on the Lizzer bookmarklet and there you have your little instant linking and content embedding tool. Even better, you can just add your flickr account name or YouTube account and then be able to easily insert or link your own images or videos. If you’ve been looking for a way to add your images to your emails without having to jump back and forth, here is the tool for you.
While Lizzer works best with WordPress blogs, Gmail, Google Docs, or even new blog tools like Tumblr (On the rocks) or Posterous (Start me up), it’s still handy to use in “manual mode” (when the text editor doesn’t allow instant linking). If you want to add links to Facebook or MySpace, it’s handy to just be able to search across Flickr, YouTube, Google, and even Twitter at the same time. All you have to do is find what you want and then grab the code – still faster than having to leave your work to find a link, image, or video elsewhere.
So, how does Lizzer make money? Alpha users will see on the bookmarklet based application that there’s a small “drawer” at the bottom that carries an ad. Currently it’s carrying a simple display ad for feed growth! (some crazy site about digital marketing ideas). However, there’s more to come. Lizzer is targeting advertisers who would like to use the bookmarklet as a delivery vehicle for advertiser links or content. In other words, advertisers will be able to put their own, proprietary content into the bottom drawer, in the same way an advertiser might use product placement investments in TV and movies.
So, for example, the next time you want to promote something new and have it “placed” in blogs, emails, and websites, you can do so. As you’ll see in the example, you might want to give potential publishers access to special photos, videos, widgets, or even MP3’s.
Even better, Lizzer is able to provide you with aggregated insertion information, so you know if your ad placements and ad insertions are actually working. You can just contact Lizzer to learn more.
Finally, it wouldn’t be just to leave out what may be the most important thing about Lizzer. Warts and all, it’s our baby. The team at feed growth! and digital scientists developed Lizzer in part to help with the linking and content embedding required for the maintenance of this site. We’re not solving some problem that we dreamed up – we’re solving one that we experience every day. Please be sure to check out Lizzer and sign up for the invitation-only alpha (we’re not snobs, we just want to make sure that everyone has a great experience- ergo, the invitation requirement). That way you can give the bookmarklet a test run and see how you might be able to use it to make your blogs, emails, and web pages even more compelling (and sell more!).
