ReviewMe review

ReviewMe is an advertising network that pays for posts on weblogs. The price per review post is $20-$250, and bloggers are given half of the take. The inventory of available places to commission reviews runs from auto blogs (a review on The German Car Blog will set you back $100) to wedding blogs (you can get written up in American Bride for as little as $40). Advertisers get no control over editorial content, so it's a total crapshoot what kind of review you will get, though if you're only in it for the link love I suspect that's not an issue.

We've seen this kind of pay for review stuff on the net before, back in the dot-com era. I remember when Epinions would dole out cash for you writing up something - I got a few bucks once upon a golden era for describing how to make rice in an old pot.

Naturally, the blagosphere is up in arms about the notion that people are turning their blogs into flogs ("A fake blog typically used as a sales tool"). HipMojo in "ReviewMe, PayPerPost, etc. - RIP (please)" notes that this kind of pay for linkage work is less effective in so many ways than the more traditional advertorial work where you get complete control over message.

As an advertising network, I would expect that this would be most useful if you could identify writers who were already predisposed to liking your product, and then use this channel as a tool to reward them for things they were already doing. What's missing from ReviewMe is a good search engine - there's a way to find brief descriptions of all the blogs you can buy time on, but no way to search through their content in any easy way so that you can check out what they are actually saying except painfully and slowly one link at a time.

Should you sign up for this as a blogger? Eh, depends. Should you sign up for this as an advertiser, or as an advertising agency, and recommend that your clients spend money on it in preference to Google or Yahoo or placement on high-traffic ad networks like Feedburner Ad Network or Federated Media? For what you're paying, you'd almost be better off making individual deals with people for blog PR and not trust your message to the random winds.

Content Guidelines:

You must disclose that the post is a paid post in some way. Here are some ideas: "Sponsored Post:", "The following is a paid review:" "Advertisement:".

Reviews must be at least 200 words. Use whatever length you feel is appropriate aside from the minimum of 200 words.

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