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Posted by John Lockwood on March 20th, 2008

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.