ReviewMe reviewed - get paid for writing reviews

Posted in Website review on 10 November 2006

The following is a paid review.

ReviewMe is an interesting new service that promises to connect bloggers with advertisers. Nothing new with that, you may say. After all, there are various advertising options for anyone with an active blog (for example, Text Link Ads and the ever popular Google AdSense). However, ReviewMe is different because it provides a service where bloggers get paid to write reviews for advertisers. At the same time, if you are a potential advertiser, you can sign-up and purchase reviews. Sounds interesting.

ReviewMe's marketplace of web authors will review your product or service on their Web site sending your site traffic, viral buzz, and invaluable feedback.

The ReviewMe website has a clean and simple design with, dare I say it, a 'Web 2.0 style'. You know. Bold colours with large text. Quite attractive actually. Sign-up was quick and easy and this review is the first result.

After sign-up, any reviewer can accept or decline a review. Once accepted, you are asked to write the review within 48 hours. That should be fine for most people but accepting a review when you are snowed under with other work may not be a good idea. I like the idea of writing reviews and I already do it - but it will be important that I can accept or decline a review. I only want to write reviews that fit in with the normal articles on this blog. Time will tell if I get offered relevant reviews.

Everything seems in the right place and intuitive to use

After login to the ReviewMe system, everything seems in the right place and intuitive to use. There is a useful option to subscribe to an RSS feed of your account activity. This is a great idea because it means you can keep up-to-date and receive messages with minimum fuss using your RSS feed reader.

In the main admin section, any reviews that you are offered will be listed with details. You have the option to sign-up to write a review, or not, and there are some simple review guidelines. I imagine the guidelines may increase as ReviewMe grows. For the moment, they simply say that you must state that a review is paid and the review must be a minimum of 200 words. Not too onerous.

How much will I get paid?

Well, the ReviewMe website says between $20 and $200 for each review. I assume that the higher of these figures will only be offered to bloggers with highly influential and well-trafficked sites. It might be quite lucrative if you become a regular reviewer and have a well respected site. However, I think you may have to be careful that you do not alienate your readership by posting lots of paid reviews at the expense of your regular articles. Keep it honest would be my advice.

That brings me to an important point. Any completed review must be submitted for approval by ReviewMe. What happens if you write a review that is "unfavorable"? Will you get paid? I don't have an answer for that at the moment but I am not intending to change what I write.

Final thoughts

In summary, ReviewMe looks like an interesting addition to the blogger's arsenal of income sources. I'll write another review (paid or not) once I have used the service a bit more.

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