Why You SHOULD Buy Paid Reviews!
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Just to be completely contradictory, I’m going to follow my previous post on “Why You Should NEVER Offer Paid Reviews”… with… why I think BUYING paid reviews is a good idea.
I don’t know WTF I’m thinking at the moment. Perhaps it’s my head cold. But posting potentially inflammatory stuff just seems really fun right now. (That blowjob logo was particularly amusing to me.)
Anyway, there are some very important guidelines I would encourage you to follow if you’re going to buy a paid review:
- Get on the phone with whoever you’re going to buy a paid review from and tell them what you want. Make a personal connection with the person, because you’re going to want that personal connection conveyed through the post. Blogs are personal things, and readers will feel the authenticity of a connected post; as opposed to a “wham bam thank you mam”.
- When you tell the reviewer what you want, make sure you tell them that the biggest thing you want is HONESTY. Blogs are 100% PERMISSION BASED. This means readers have the power to vote “no” at any point, and disregard the paid for post, or (worse) stop reading the blog it was on.
- Ask for the reviewer to explain what THEY see as your promotions biggest strengths/weakness’s. If you can’t trust them to make this call in their words and way, then you shouldn’t be paying them to review you in the first place.
- Educate yourself on “no follow”. You may need to request the reviewer use the “no follow” attribute in any links they give you. Call me anal retentive, but with Google’s new “Rat on the paid link webmaster” strategy, you don’t want to make yourself vulnerable to a “bad tempered” competitors tendency to squeal on you.
- Don’t expect or try to make sales from the review. For real. If I were to pay for a review from one the Bloggers I respect the most - Andy Beard (who is part of the 1% my previous post doesn’t apply to) - my only goal would be to get him talking about what he does and doesn’t like about my blog, and make his readers aware that I exist. Blog reviews aren’t email list promotions and it’s a mistake to think of them as such.
- Focus on long term readership. Keep your eye on the prize: which is a large group of people who read your blog regularly. You can monetize “the heard” once you have it, but before you get it, keep your eye’s OFF OF your readers wallets, and on their SMILE or their FROWN.
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September 18th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
I certainly don’t get things perfect, but the one thing I do try is give a little value on reviews, and I will refuse them if I don’t feel I can do that.
Some people thank that paid reviews shouldn’t give someone value, that somehow giving value is unethical. I feel if you can’t give value then you probably shouldn’t be writing the review.
A review can give value in all kinds of ways and still be highly critical. Sponsored Reviews requires that any criticism be constructive.
Ideally I always want to contact anyone who orders a review. With PPP this is almost a necessity because I want to claim all links are editorial, and the interface doesn’t allow for that.
Even something simple such as price - if something is good value, it is good to mention it.
If something is slightly higher priced than some might want to pay, and the site has a long form sales letter before mentioning the price, maybe it is better to give the sales letter a chance to do its job.
As to your blog, I am not a big fan of Kubrik - I think you could benefit with a sidebar on the single pages if only to give you space to encourage people to subscribe. Links you provide in the sidebar don’t have to be followed.
September 18th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Cheers for stopping by Andy - yeah - I’m not a huge fan of Kubrik either, and if I get the time I’ll update the blog to something clean, but more functional.
September 19th, 2007 at 8:23 am
This is probably one of the best “pro but do it the right way” concepts I’ve ever stumbled upon (well this is how I found it).
There’s a lot of debate in the blogosphere about whether paid reviews are ethical or not, but what people seem to forget is that everyone uses an advert of a kind to make a business known. All businesses pay for buzz, one way or another.
Now, about your other entry I couldn’t agree more: the icon is fun, but it’s not really professional to display it on a page, although it is honest… It’s a disclosure of sorts, you know…
I am experimenting pretty much with sponsored reviews. I think I have accounts with all possible services offerers and I post enough sponsored reviews on my blogger blog, just to know how much is a company willing to pay for a contextual link. Because, in the end, this is what most of them want: links.
They do not care about what the blogger has to say (well, they start caring as soon as you post a negative review - LOL), they just want the link juice.
Or what would they base their choices on PageRank?
You said it yourself: “educate yourself about nofollow” - but guess what: people are not bots. They follow.
My opinion is that the advertiser shouldn’t look about follow and nofollow, but about authority, experience and full critique. Only this way they can actually benefit from a review.
September 24th, 2007 at 2:33 am
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