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In Eight Questions Advertisers Should Ask before Buying a Paid Review, we looked at paid reviews from a consumer’s point of view, with a view to educating advertisers about how to find out if paid reviews should be part of their ad campaign. 

In this article we’ll look at the other side of the equation.  Should paid reviews be part of a professional writer’s repertoire, and if so, what should we understand about paid reviews before putting up our Paypal links and beginning to hawk our endorsements?  As before, let’s look at the questions one should be asking before getting started with paid reviews.

Six Questions Writers Should Ask Before Offering Paid Reviews

1. Does Your Blog Rely on Google?
   If your blog relies on Google, you may want to seriously consider whether paid reviews are right for you.  At the very least you’ll want to review our article on paid reviews and Google, and make sure your buyer understands that they’re buying a human endorsement and human click-throughs, not a page rank boost.  Even then, I would think twice.

   This issue came up for me recently.  Among the many web sites I have, one web site and blog has done more to support me than any other for the last five years.  The key to its success has been outstanding search engine placement for a group of profitable keywords.  Recently a gentleman contacted me from that blog to do a paid review for a client’s web site about Payday Loans.  To me the "no" answer was immediately obvious.  There was no way I was going to jeopardize a high-five-figure revenue stream for a $20 or $50 or even $500 review about a subject like that.  Not on that blog.  Hey, there’s an idea…

2. Can You Own (or "Rent") A Blog Where Paid Reviews Are Appropriate?
   One solution to the conundrum above, of course, would have been to sell the prospect a review on another blog.  This could be either:
   1. A third party blog. Your client may have approached you with the idea of buying a paid review, but does the review have to go on your blog?  Can you take a paid review opportunity and convert it into a paid article placement opportunity?  Article placement is great way to upsell your writing by offering not just the writing itself, but a brokered placement on an appropriate site.   Some marketing specialists offer article placement as a core component of their services, and there’s no reason why writers should not exploit this opportunity as well.
   2. A blog you create for reviews and other content.  One of the opportunities I envision for my writing business is to create and promote at least one "general review" blog along the general lines of TechCrunch.  Part of this blog’s mission in life would be to host paid reviews, since it’s a place where miscellaneous reviews would be entirely relevant.  And that brings me to my next point.
3. What’s Your Blog About, Anyway?
   Even if you can solve "the Google problem" with paid articles by dutifully applying a nofollow tag to your links back to your client, does having a link to "Great New Web Site About Canadian Pharmaceuticals" dilute the brand message that you’d otherwise be establishing for your readers ?  Also, assuming you’re trying to optimize for "Freelance Writer" or the like, what’s the SEO effect of having your content start to be "about" (at the page level) Canadian pharmaceuticals or pay day loans?
4. How Much Does It Pay?
   If this list were in order of importance, the issue of payment would have been item #1.  We’re running a business here, after all.  If the pay day loan fellow above threw a million dollars at me, my next question would have been "How fast can I run to my keyboard?"  Bob Younce rightly brought up this point earlier in the article series.

   I admit that I have a lot more to learn in this area.  I have not yet reviewed the "big three" paid review services (links to them are here), but I suspect I’ll find that if there are places where the money is good, the trade off will be that the reviews may be somewhat compromising to the web properties I already own.  Also, as with most jobs (in writing and everywhere else), the extent to which a job pays well is inversely proportional to the number of people involved in finding you the job.  The flip side of that coin is always the time it would take to find the work on your own.

5. If I’m Brand New, Will the Writing Credits Help Me?
   If you’re new in your writing career, paid reviews may help to give you some credentials.
6. What’s My Writing "Career Track"?
   "Professional writing" is not a monolithic thing, and neither is "Internet writing".  An oversimplified way to look at Internet writing is that there are "pro bloggers" on the one hand versus "freelancers" on the other.  The pro blogger group is a huge, diverse population consisting of twenty or thirty rock stars and about fifty million teenagers with electric guitars.  Paid reviews are almost always appropriate for this group, though interestingly enough one of the rock stars, TechCrunch, doesn’t do them.   The latter group, the freelancers, is considerably smaller and generally quite capable of hunting larger game than the paid review.  But remember:  even wolves don’t turn up their noses at a tasty mouse if it happens to walk right by.

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

This is Part II in our article series on Paid Reviews.

Should you write paid reviews on your site? Most bloggers would be honored to be asked, even if they’re not freelance writers and therefore already thinking along the lines of getting paid to write. For freelancers it’s a natural, that’s true by definition. You pay me, I write something.

Some bloggers make a few extra dollars writing paid reviews, and top bloggers make a lot of money at it. Do you want your site reviewed at JohnChow.com? That’ll be $500, please. That’s not a bad rate for an hour or two of writing.

Paid reviews do have some problems, however, and you should know about these before you start offering them on your blog. In this Article, I’ll discuss the main technical objection to paid reviews — that Google might penalize your web site for having them — and show you how to solve this problem.

Google’s Position on Paid Reviews

To discuss Google’s position on paid reviews, we need to understand why people would pay you to review their site. What is the customer for a paid review hoping to gain?

There are two basic reasons someone might pay you to write a review about them:

1. The Customer Wants a Direct, Human Boost in Their Reputation and Traffic
   We all know about celebrity endorsements. Where would the Craftmatic bed be without Lindsey Wagner, or the GAF Viewmaster without Henry Fonda? Celebrity endorsements are just a form of personal referral, where someone’s paying someone they hope you’ve heard of to endorse their product. Paid reviews are a small scale application of the same basic thing. You pay someone to talk about you and link to you, hoping their readers will find you and then buy something, or at least that they will start reading you, enjoy it, and tell someone they know to buy something.
2. The Customer Wants an Indirect, Computer-Friendly Boost in Their Reputation and Traffic
   Another reason a customer would want a paid review on your site is that search engine algorithms like Google’s also consider a link to your site to be an endorsement of its content. If Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com links to Inklit.com like this: Online Copywriter, then according to the Google’s page rank algorithm, Inklit.com is more likely to be about an Online Copywriter than if he didn’t. In other words, the link gives my site a reputation boost on Google that’s every bit as important as the human reputation boost I would receive.

OK, back to Google. As with so many “what is Google thinking?” sort of questions, the best answer to Google’s position on paid links comes in an article that Matt Cutts wrote. In this case the article in question is Selling Links That Pass Page Rank.

As you might expect, Google doesn’t care at all about item 1, but it does care about item 2. Google considers buying paid reviews to be a form of link buying, and devalues pages or sites that engage in it for attempting to artificially manipulate page rank.

Practice Safe Endorsement: Wear a Link Condom

With the invention of blogs, many people started commenting on other people’s blogs to get links back to their own site. To combat this, Google invented the “nofollow” tag. The idea was that you could add a bit of code to the link to mark it as being one that the webmaster himself did not endorse.

It wasn’t long before Google decided that not only should “nofollow” apply to links that other people write on my site — it should also apply to links that I myself write, if I’m being paid to write them.

So getting back to our earlier example, if I buy a review from Brian Clark and he wants to let Google know that he’s not cross-his-heart, pinkie-swear endorsing me, he’s just endorsing me because I’m sending him money to be insincere, he should choose the “safe” version of the following link:

So if you want to write a paid review and you don’t want the review to adversely affect your Google rankings, you should add a nofollow tag as shown above to your links. Many good blogging tools such as Live Writer have a way to do this without having to get into the HTML view and tweak the code.

Matt Cutts has also hinted that you should disclose in the article that the review is paid, though to my knowledge there’s no standard, machine readable way to say your review is paid, so it’s hard to see whether this is just Matt’s preference or something in the algorithm.

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?