Why You Should Do Paid Reviews Part 2

In part 1, I showed why you should do paid reviews. In part 2, I will show you how to make more money and be safe without loosing your PageRank.

Get your own domain name

If you want to attract advertiser's, you should first own a domain name. This way, you will be able to promote a brand and look more appealing to advertisers. The cost is very low at 3.99USD/month(see the end of the page).

If you have a blog already on a free service, you will loose your PageRank for a while but the payout will be worth it later. You could do like I did and add notes about it when you add your blog on 1 Cool File.

It's in the juice

Advertisers chasing for a link may not want feedback or a quality review. They may just want the PageRank juice and SEO. In that case, I could advise them to just buy a link from the blogger. However, the blogger will take the whole risk of loosing the Blog's PR.

A blogger may decide to just do a simple post instead of a review. Not being a paid review, it will give some meat to the link while not being announced as a paid post. The link should still be useful to visitors if the blogger take this more risky route.

But remember, the series is about paid reviews and not paid post.

The better solution for an advertiser would be to do a simple contest. The whole advertising budget would be given in prizes instead. The advertiser can contact blogs in this category. Plus, bloggers do like contest!

Quality first and more money

But if you think on a longer term, you should look for advertisers asking for a nofollow or at least make it optional. They are looking for a real review. You will make more money and your readers will appreciate more those paid reviews. Why? Because if you do a real quality review, another advertiser will read it and think:

Well, it's not negative and the blogger even offered recommendations about that product or service and pointed out the good things. the blogger may offer me some independent and valuable feedback.

Note: Again, I don't believe in giving a negative review without giving recommendation to make the service/product better. The tone should be neutral or positive if your really like it.

As your reputation of a quality reviewer grows, you will earn more money over time. I recently read a review that gave me some valuable insight forcing me to change my business model by giving the option for bloggers to add their blog(s) for free. I did not check if the review was nofollow or not because the quality was there.

The goal of a paid review

For me, a paid review should give or be use for:

• recommendations
• create a buzz
• real feedback(reviewer and commenter's)
• get traffic to the advertiser's site

A review should meet most of this points above to be a good review and pay off to all parties: blogger, advertiser and readers.

The industry is already changing

While viewing opportunities on SponsoredReviews, I saw advertisers asking for the nofollow or making it optional in the requirements text. PayPerPost indicated that it will be also be optional in a more visible manner(check box?). I would prefer to be a check box because it would help new advertisers/blogger be aware of that fact. A F.A.Q. about it would also help. No word yet from ReviewMe on their official blog or current reviews.

Conclusion

Until you have enough readers that you don't depend on Google, it will be wiser to only accept nofollow paid reviews. It's not the perfect solution but that's what we got now until a better solution could be found(RealRank?).

You may choose a third party paid review service like 1 Cool File, PayPerPost, ... or go direct if you want. But the more options you have, the more opportunities you will get.