Internet Writing :: Inklit.com

Posted by John Lockwood on March 19th, 2008

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Continuing our article series on paid reviews, in this segment we want to zero in on paid reviews from the advertiser’s point of view. Are paid reviews something you should be spending your limited ad budget on?

You may have heard that a paid review can help you achieve your online goals, but the chances are you heard that from someone selling paid reviews. That’s not to say these people are dishonest or that their reviews might not help, but at the very least you should know what questions to ask yourself before you spend your money.

Here then are eight questions to ask yourself before you buy that paid review:

1. What do you expect to gain by buying a review?
   The more you’re looking to spend, the more time you should spend thinking about this. Are you buying sheer traffic and hoping to convert visitors to an immediate sale? Are you hoping to convert visitors to a subscription to your blog now and develop a client over time? Are you looking for links to give you a page rank boost and improve your position on the search engines? Are you hoping that a celebrity endorsement will help buyers accept your product?
2. Are you looking for incoming link love (a page rank boost)?
   If buying a review is a way of buying links, do you know for certain that you won’t run afoul of Google’s algorithm? We know that Google frowns on pages that contain paid reviews, and so, especially if you’re buying multiple reviews where Google can analyze the pattern of links pointing to you, do you know for certain that you won’t run afoul of the very algorithm you’re trying to game? Are you buying multiple reviews? Will your review appear on a site that sells multiple reviews? Either way, in my opinion there’s a decent chance that you won’t get the result you’re trying to gain.
3. What If you did this 100 times?
   Let’s say you have $2,000 to spend, and you can buy reviews for $20.00. That’s 100 reviews — not bad. However, will Google devalue a site that has 100 paid reviews pointing to it, and is that important to you? Now take the same $2,000, and let’s say you can buy about sixty blog pages on your corporate blog. Now you have sixty pages of blog pages optimized for long tail keywords related to your product. We know for a fact that Google doesn’t penalize unique content — it indexes it. Of course, if you’ve decided that search results aren’t a huge part of your business model, or if you’re only running a single review, you may not care about the issue of whether what you’re doing is sustainable over time. I think the best approach for most clients is the one that I myself practice here: when in doubt, produce unique content on your own web site. 70-90% of your activity and spending should be in this area.
4. Does it make sense for the reviewer to use my product?
   Making sure the reviewer is a potential user of your product increases the relevance of your review as well as its credibility. The reviewer may not be using your product yet, but does it at least make sense that he might? If someone’s blogging about brewing beer and I’m selling cool stainless steel beer taps, that’s a natural fit, and a review here might do me quite a lot of good, especially if the blogger is well known and likes my product.
5. Does it make sense for the reviewer’s readers to use my products?
   Even more important than the issue of whether the author might use my product is the issue of whether his readers might. To take the beer brewing case above, if the blogger’s target audience is home brewers and you’re selling 15,000 gallon commercial beer vats, then clearly you have a bit of a problem.
6. Will the reviewer disclose that the review is paid?
   Given the bad press that undisclosed reviews have received and Google’s suggestion that paid reviews be disclosed, I’d recommend that the answer should be yes. If the blogger is not disclosing that the review is paid, you should think about whether your reputation would be harmed if people learn that it was. If the answer is yes, make sure you ask for full disclosure.
7. How popular is the reviewer, relative to what he’s charging?
   All else being equal, I would go for the reviewer with the better cost per subscriber. Let’s take two bloggers I know. Both run good blogs that are very interesting to read. One blogger has approximately 21,000 readers and charges $500 per review. The other blogger has approximately 180 readers, and charges $25 for a review. Naturally you need a bigger budget for the first blogger, but your cost per subscriber reached is 2.38 cents versus 13.8 cents for the second blogger.
8. What else could you be doing with the budget?
   We’ve already talked about what would happen if you paid for a review 100 times over, and discussed some other marketing spends you could make such as blogging about your product. In my opinion it’s very hard to beat the benefit of keyword rich content that is keyed to your product or service. However, if you’re spending a smaller amount and just want to generate some immediate traffic, you might consider alternatives such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Pay-per-click advertising. The beauty of pay-per-click is that you have complete control over the keywords you bid on, and that the person searching for your product is searching for the very solution you provide. Someone who wants web analytics software may read Darren Rowse. He’s popular among webmasters, and webmasters often need web analytics software. Chances are, however, that you’d find a much higher proportion of buyers for “web analytics software” among people searching for that term specifically.

Ask yourself these eight questions, and you’ll be in a better position to spend your money wisely and get the best results for your advertising dollars.

Paid Reviews Series Articles

1. Introduction: Writer Boon or Devil’s Pact
2. Paid Reviews: Google’s Problem With Them and a Partial Solution
3. Eight Questions Advertisers Should Ask Before Buying a Paid Review