Paid Reviews: Freelance Writer Boon or Bargain With The Devil?
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Are you a freelance writer who’s looking to do paid reviews? Should you do them or should you avoid them?
Paid reviews have become very popular (or perhaps infamous), as bloggers offer them on their own blogs and as services like PayPerPost, Blogvertise, and ReviewMe start trying to capitalize by connecting advertisers and writers.
Yet paid reviews are not without their problems. Should the fact that a review is paid be disclosed, in much the same way that you see “PAID ADVERTISEMENT” disclaimers in printed magazine articles? Can doing a paid review get you in trouble with the search engines, and if so, how can you minimize the problem? Are paid reviews viable to do for advertisers? Are they profitable for bloggers? If they’re not profitable, can we make them more profitable? If you do write paid reviews, do you have to agree with your client’s position?
Over the next several days I will be writing several articles about paid reviews to examine these issues and more.
To get all the articles in the Paid Reviews series, please subscribe now using RSS (learn more) or email.
Readers, What Do You Think?
Do you offer paid reviews? Have they been a good source of revenue to you? Are you opposed for ideological reasons? Opposed for practical reasons?
March 17th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Great stuff, John.
I’m not big on paid reviews, but I do recommend them as a way for newer writers to start. I cut my teeth writing web copy, and the paid reviews are, generally a bit below my pay grade.
(Did that sound presumptuous? God, I hope not. I think it did, though. Ah, well.)
March 17th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
No, I don’t think what you said sounded presumptious at all. Part of my point in asking the question and doing a series to look into them is to discuss / discover whether and to what extent they’re worth doing, both from an ad consumer’s (reviewee’s) point of view, and from the writer’s.
The fact that you’ve found other, more lucrative writing assignments is a legitimate contribution to that discussion.
It may well turn out that writing for your web site / blog inevitably pays more than writing about you on some other blog, because the former is intrinsically more valuable.
Anyone else?
March 18th, 2008 at 6:24 am
[…] Introduction: Writer Boon or Devil’s Pact […]
May 30th, 2008 at 1:54 am
[…] A version of this article originally appeared as part of the author’s series Paid Reviews: Freelance Writer Boon or Bargain With The Devil. […]