ReviewMe.com - Paid Reviews Of Your Products

One of the best ways to generate traffic and buzz about your products is to have people in the public eye review it. You get not only honest feedback from a real user but generally a spike in awareness of your product, good links to your site and an increase in revenue. If you are willing to pay a little bit to a lot for these things, then ReviewMe.com may be for you.

ReviewMe.com is a service that allows business owners to sponsor reviews of their products. The site has a large listing of blogs from which an advertiser, which would be you, chooses a target blog. The blog would review your product, working it into the blog somehow that it is a sponsored review, then post the review on their blog.

It's hard to argue with the idea: small business owners pay for reviews, hundreds of people read reviews, website gets large spike in traffic and revenue. But, there seem to be a few drawbacks. Blogging is really a form of communication built on honesty and transparency. Being paid to write something opens up the door for dishonest reviews, and the whole idea of being paid to post something on a blog is unethical to many bloggers. It's hard to imagine bloggers writing unbiased reviews if they're pocketing cash to write it.

Advertisers can't pay for a positive review; they say the reviews are positive in the majority but they may be negative, and then you've got that sitting out there in the blogosphere. On the other hand, the value of honest information just may be priceless.

ReviewMe.com says the blogs in their marketplace must meet a "minimum number of citations, subscribers, and traffic," but they don't say what those minimum numbers are. An email was sent to ReviewMe.com on 8/15/07 requesting this information, but as of yet there has been no response. This makes me question how responsive their customer service or support staff would be if you really needed information. Naturally, the more traffic the blog gets the more expensive the reviews are. They say their service costs $40 to $500 per review, but after browsing through their marketplace I found several that were listed at $750 per review.

For a person with a niche market who is able to find a blog that meets their criteria, this could be a valuable service. The blog marketplace can be browsed by going to ReviewMe.com>>FAQ>>Popular tags>>Blogs, to review all blogs, or by choosing a tag related to the type of blog you are interested in, like "Food" for a food related blog.

We are always looking for new tools to introduce which may help our clients grow their businesses. This sounds like a good option, although we haven't heard from anyone who has actually used this service. If you try this, let us know what your experience is!

About MightyMerchant

MightyMerchant specializes in developing e-commerce and database driven, content-rich websites for small business customers across the US. The company as listed as one of Practical eCommerce Magazine’s “Top 100 Notable Shopping Carts” in September/October 2007. Hundreds of site owners use MightyMerchant to manage their online stores. For more information visit www.mightymerchant.com, and for ecommerce knowledge and tools visit the MightyMerchant eCommerce Blog.