The Mantra of Paid Reviews

Its been a while since I been blogging and I have done some unbiased paid reviews as well. I thought its time to share my experiences in doing paid reviews with all of you. If you want to make money online, this could simplify your paid review blogging experience.

The Do’s:

• Its a good idea to include screenshots of the product or website even if its not been asked for. This brings in some level of seriousness and character to the review.
• If its a product that can be evaluated (website, software, etc.), do try it out for a brief period before writing the review. This should make the review that much better! The amount of time you spend in evaluating it could be proportional to the payout for the review. As an example, don’t spend days evaluating a $5 review. Its not worth the time.
• Its not necessary to stick to the minimum words to be written. Well, I meant there is no harm in going beyond that limit. Good quality reviews will help you in the long run as more advertisers will eventually flock to your site for reviews.
• Stick to the time limit. Don’t leave it to the last minute prior to your review expiring to write the review. Spend quality time upfront to complete the review. Writing last minute reviews will more often than not lack in quality.
• Include as many linkbacks as possible to the site you’re reviewing. After all, that was one of the purposes of the review.

The Don’ts:

• Don’t have embedded advertisements in your paid review. I learnt this the hard way. You’re being paid to review a certain product and they won’t like to see advertisements of other products in their review. So how do you handle this scenario in your WordPress template? I have figured out a simple mechanism which is a one time effort to enhance the template. I have created a category called ‘Paid Review‘ and I tagged all the paid reviews with this category. For this blog, this category has an id of 37. In my theme, wherever I embed advertisements, I check against this category:

if (is_single() && !in_category(’37′)) {
/* Include advertisement here */
}

• This is a simple mechanism to control where you include advertisements. If you check the Paid Review category, you’ll not see any advertisments in the post, be it banner advertisments or inline advertisements. This is a one-time change and ensures you spend more time in blogging rather than controlling when the advertisments should be shown or vice-versa. After all, time is money!
• Stick to your niche. Do paid reviews for topics that are within your niche. Some advertisers might be okay with you doing reviews for their products even if its not in your niche. This is not a good idea for your blog in general as it will dilute the focus you have for your blog.

If you have any experiences in paid reviews that you would like to share, please do drop a comment.