This post is sponsored by ReviewMe.
Few days ago, I saw in my RSS agregator article about ReviewMe. The article stated that this is a new way of getting some revenue from your blog, and I decided to try it.
Read the rest of this article to find out more about this cool thing.
Here is how I see their service so far.
The homepage has
simple design and very clear information about what this is about.
There were two options: for advertisers and bloggers. Since I am at the
second group, I clicked the second link. Actually, I just opened
the site in IE and saw that there are some differences with renderings
in site CSS depending on which browser you are using. They should fix
that.
Next screen is a simple description in four steps of
how it works. So far, so good. I like minimalistic texts π and I like
those two sentences:
- You will be paid $20.00 to $200.00 for each completed review that you post on
your site. - Sign up as a blogger at ReviewMe and you will immediately have the opportunity to earn cash by reviewing ReviewMe itself!
Nice! This means that in the worst case, I will earn 20$ just for signing up and writing review about them. And, yes, the registration is free.
The registration went normal. The only problem I saw there is that they are paying via Paypal or check. I would prefer MoneyBookers, they are accepted in whole world and are good solution for those of us not living in those 35 countries which can receive money from Paypal.
I know some of my friends are receiving checks from microstock sites,
and it was a real pain to wait for the check to come (and not been
loosed), and wait another 45 days for it to be cached. Most of them are
now using MoneyBookers, and they say that it is a bless. π Other suggestion is to use 2CO, since they send money worldwide.
After registering, and logging in – you can add your blog. You can add up to 6 blogs. The menu title says Submit a Blog, but the page itself contains: You may only have up to 6 active sites. I suppose that you might add site which is not a blog, but the home page also wanted bloggers, so – I am not sure. Also, keep in mind that RSS feed is required, too. If your site has bloglike structure and has some rank on technorati, maybe you can give it a shot. Luckily for me, I own a blog (actually two), so it was no problem for me.
After you submit your blog, it is automatically checked for its rank at Alexa, Technorati and estimated number of RSS readers. I am not sure how the last one is determined, but I got lowest rank at it, and because of that – my whole site has been ranked with one star (out of 5). It is interesting (no, it is bad), that I could not check my rankings on their site from my interface. I had to find my site from the list of all blogs and then I could see its stats – no link to this page from my admin. This is page that I usually call ‘view your profile’ and it often is missing, even if I find it very useful.
I hoped to achieve at least two stars, so I was kind of disappointed. I also hoped that they will count Google PageRank, too. Level one means that one review is 40$ for advertiser, 50% of which will go to ReviewMe. Hm, it looks like a great piece of the cake, but I don’t mind as long as this thing is giving me products to review. And, the blogged is rechecked for new rankings every month, so it might be only better. Never mind, going further … I tried to add my second blog called photography-reviews, but the system said that it was not popular enough, so I should try few months later. For the first time on their site, I saw that there is a limit which blog should fulfill. I must agree that photography reviews is not very popular (still), and I was also happy to see that they are not receiving ALL blogs, since this would be equal to suicide. Advertisers would run away, and their database will be full with useless blogs. So, this is a good thing.
I read the FAQs and some other texts on the site. And, after that, there was not much more what I should do. I should wait for the advertiser to choose my blog and request a review of his product/site/whatever (oh, yes, this is the idea of ReviewMe). After some clicking on site interface, I finally noticed that their image-banner-like promotion saying: $25 000 giveaway had alt text attached to it. The text was:
When you are accepted as a blogger by ReviewMe, your first review offer will come from ReviewMe itself. We will keep ordering reviews from new bloggers until we have payed out $25 000!
I have to admit, that they did great job there – I am certain that word about this money giving site is spreading all over the world of blogs. And, after all, that is how I found them. I clicked on the banner-like thing (I usually don’t click on banners – I just don’t see them. In this case, this was a bad thing) and received the review request. Whew, luckily for me, they have not payed out the whole sum and it looks like my first review came earlier than I expected. Cool. I have 48 hours to write this review (which is almost done).
Some final thoughts:
- I would like Moneybookers, or at least 2CO.
- It looks that the only criteria for the review is the minimum of 200 words. I think that there should be more things to look for. Like originality of the review, its approach, in-depth analysis …
- Affiliate program would be nice
- Also, once you register, there is nothing you can do to get clients. It would be nice if we could also search for publishers. At the moment they are the active members, they can search or browse by using tags. I expect to see number of registered bloggers rapidly growing, so it might be problem for smaller sites. Or not, depending on advertiser’ budget.
# It will be interesting for me to see Successful stories from some publishers. I have some product or two which might need reviews. My idea was to use AdWords for traffic, but this is also interesting. Of course, both can be used, but it will be interesting to see where this will go.
I can say that it looks like potentially good service. If the advertisers buy it – it will be great one.