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26.7.07

Review You, Review Me - Part One

Blog or website reviews have come a long way with more and more bloggers jumping on the bandwagon. The monetary aspects of it as propagated by ReviewMe, PayPerPost and a host of other Internet establishments have lured bloggers into this area of making money online.

In no time, some individuals have even bypassed sponsoring companies to offer reviews directly to any taker who's game for it. But in this case you have to establish or hype yourself as someone who can do the job well. Your credentials depend on the posts that you write on your blog. A certain Japanese woman blogger has done quite well so far by striking out on her own to do these paid reviews.


To be frank, it's easy to offer to do paid reviews but it's NOT EASY to get customers. Why? Because it's not cheap to get your blog reviewed by someone who's gonna charge you from $400 to $1,000. If you charged $40 for a review, it sounds like a fair deal, but still not everyone is going to beat a path to your gate no matter how good you claim yourself to be. And for much, much less you may go for it but there's no guarantee that you will get a quality job done. It may turn out to be a crappy review.


Paying to get your blog reviewed is fundamentally a way to publicize your site, especially for large companies, and hopefully turn your ROI (return of investment) into more inbound links, viral buzz, feedbacks and traffic. That's about the main reasons for doing this. When the idea was first mooted, it sounded like a great, cool idea.


Some individual bloggers who can afford "big bucks" will paid for a review from some high-ranking blogs. They will come back and do a review of their reviews and, usually, the conclusion is that they have seen an increase in traffic and are happy with the results. Well, to me, it smells like BS although it's correct to say they have gained extra visitors. But how will this stake out farther down the road?


In the early days of blogging, as far as I know, those who have reached big time today did not pay for any reviews. It's the content they wrote that pulled in a huge stream of followers to their blogs. Maybe some of them may have slacked a bit today in their blogging knowing they have already captured an audience, but that was how they did it without paying for a review. With a huge following today, these big-time blogs are getting reviewed in some form almost everyday by their blogging fans or otherwise - for better or for worse.


For most bloggers, you can bet they're not going to pay for any kind of reviews whatsoever - whether it's only for $4 or $400. Isn't there a better way around the paid review syndrome? I'll write about this in another post soon. Meanwhile, your feedback will be appreciated.
Of related interests:
Writing paid reviews: How is it going?

How cool or uncool are these "Hire Me" widgets?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I see more blogs doing tit for tat reviews without payment I guess. Don't see that many paid reviews on blogs though. Maybe you're right.


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