Writing Paid Reviews: Is It Worth It?

I have to make a confession here: I don’t like pay-per-post blogging (sometimes known as paid reviews). There are thousands of interesting and entertaining blog posts made every day and I don’t like the idea that the content or perhaps even the honesty of a post might be swayed by editorial guidelines.

How Does It Work?

Paid blog posting works like this: you sign up to a broker who lists all the available advertisers. These advertisers pay you to review a product. There are often requirements about the topic of the website and Google PageRank. They can sometimes require the review to be of a specific tone (i.e. positive or neutral). Advertisers get to review your blog post before you are paid.

Importantly, advertisers require you to link to a specific page on their website and they can dictate the anchor text you must use. See the quote from Review Me’s quality quidelines.

What’s The Problem With It?

Reviews may not contain “no-follow” links. If they are present the review will be rejected.

The motives of the people who are buying these paid posts are, in my opinion, largely the wrong ones. But what do I mean by the wrong motives? Not wrong for the advertiser, but wrong for the blogger. It is acceptable for an advertiser to want to gain a little exposure to a relevant and interested audience. We all do that. From social bookmarking, to press releases, this is a common way to build interest in your website or product. But paid reviews are crafted and manipulated by an advertiser. They can specify if the want a neutral or a positive review. They can specifiy a minimum Google PageRank of the blog doing the review. But more significantly, they are generally able to specify a link with a specific anchor text.

The fact is that you would not be reviewing the product unless you were getting paid. Everybody tries to pretend the advertisers are trying to build buzz or attract visitors, but in reality they are trying to boost PageRank.

Paid reviews are also generally poor value for money for the blogger.

Let’s look at an example. On one of the blog review networks there is an opportunity to review “IDrive Online Backup.” It pays $35 and requires a minimum PageRank of 6. Remember this is for a permanent post on a blog, not a recurrent monthly fee. If we take a look at Text Link Ads for a link on a PR6 website, the cheapest we can buy is $24. This is a monthly fee. Remember that the paid review is a one-off fee and it will create a permanent link from your website. When you consider that it is not unusual to have up to 8 text link ads on a page, it should be clear which is better value for the blogger. At least with having text links on your website, everybody is up front about the reasons for having them - to help improve your PageRank.

So back to the original question: is paid blogging worth it? For the advertiser, yes, but for the blogger, no. If you are looking to monetise your website, text link ads represent much better value for money and you won’t be annoying your visitors by pretending you have something interesting or relevant to post.

But if you still want to look at paid posting, Dosh Dosh has a list of the most popular ones.

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