Make Money Online

If you are a blogger you have most likely heard about making money online through reviews on your blog. Today there is no blogger that is not actually trying to put that game on the plate and increase his revenue online by making a review here and a review there. If there is no market then there is no one to whom you can sell your service (in this case, the review of a site), but the market for this exists and I will try to explain why it will work for a longer period.

Reviews do work and will work for a long period of time, it is possible that it will change shape in internet but it will exist in one or another way. Lets take a banal example, you are about to get your first web hosting account and host your website at since you got tired of the free hostings that limit your website functionality and you want to get more flexible on that regard. The first thing you do is look after a web hosting that has good testimonials. These testimonials are that same shape of review, where existing customers review the hosting company they are with and share their experience with them.

Okey, the web hosting testimonials and the website reviews that we see now on daily basis is not quiet the same thing. For example the testimonials are much shorters and hit the nail on the personal experience (like, the hosting company has great support staff which helped me within a short time, or the technical staff is polite and fast, their prices are cheap and the up time rocks).

While the testimonials are short and go right to core and expressing customers experience with that hosting company, with the reviews we do see lately on blogs we don’t read anymore those “first person experience” but rather they do write a review for the website owner in first place and then this review serves as a great marketing tool as well. When a blogger reviews a website he is exposing that website to his/her readers, readers which might turn out to become customers of the website if non the less visitors of the website.

Some smart folks did see these reviews as great money making opportunity and they created a online marketplace where advertisers could find blogs on which they could get reviewed and exposed as well as for bloggers to find websites to review and get paid for this, and here is where that middle man is making profits for introducing YOU as blogger to the ADVERTISER, simple and clean, but sometimes things flip out of hands when there is the middle man, even tho in many cases it helps you start growing.

The middle man has the power to determine the price for which you can charge their advertisers for a review, of course you can negotiate this or rather, you can try and prove them that a review on your blog is worth more then what they are actually paying you. But how does the marketplace holder determine the price of which you can charge? They take in account some small (and I would say useless) factors such as the PageRank of your site (and this kinda comes in first place), your websites alexa ranking (easily tricked) and then your technorati ranking (much better, but this works only for blogs and is being determined from links coming to your site from other blogs while the static sites are being ignored).

Based on these informations is determined the value of a review in your blog. Even tho this can sound pretty fair, some times it can become frustrating when the company is paying you small cash for a review based on the informations they have to determine this. What slips out is your “time” from their calculation, or rather they don’t put that in account when determining the price of a review.

To write a real review for a website you need to surf the advertisers website, take notes on things that work and things that don’t work, you have to take a close lookup on their history (you would not want to advertise with positive review a company that has a shady background), and then finally you have to sum up all that and write a detailed review for the website owner and as well for your readers. It takes close to an hour to come up with “decent” informations for a company which you are reviewing and writing the review. Now imagine the schenario, the middle man says that a review on your website costs $7 no matter how much time you will need to come up with the informations and write the review. Whats for sure is that you MUST write a review which is not going to be short and spammy (at least if you want to continue with them) and you have to link out from you site to the advertisers website.

When these scenarios show up to me the answer is simple and clear NO.

But, how do you handle this? Do you prefer to write a scam like review of few words without looking at who you are reviewing and take the money? Would you really waste all that time to earn $7 ? Or you’d actually ask the middle man to raise the price or you will try an alternative. I’d be happy to know.