How to make extra money online! Pay Per Review Networks!

Pay Per Review is exactly what you think it is. You are paid to write reviews about products or services. If you run a blog you probably review stuff more often than not, so why not to be paid for it?

There are numerous networks out there that can help you find stuff to review and be paid for your effort. What they do is to connect advertisers and publishers and if you have a blog of your own with some decent traffic you can take advantage of this kind of money making opportunity.

Don’t let yourself to be biased!

Reviewing stuff for money doesn’t mean you must approve the product or service reviewed. Try your best to express your true feeling about what it is you are reviewing and make sure you respect your readers. Nobody likes to be thrown useless stuff against them just because you are trying to make a couple of bucks. On the other hand many would like to know your unbiased opinion about something that looks interesting but they may don’t know if it is worth using.

Let them know you are getting paid for this

When you’re paid for your reviews make sure to let your readers know that. Be open about what you do! Nobody likes to be cheated on, so let everyone know that you are writing a paid review and if what you’re writing about is your true opinion about the product or service, detailing all the pros and cons it is going to be a win win deal. You get to be paid for your time and your readers are enjoying your expert opinion about the product they had their eyes on but wanted a second opinion about.

Review Me

Review Me accepts blogs with a decent number of citations, subscribers and traffic. They don’t disclose the exact numbers but if you think you have what it takes submit your blog and they will let you know if it meets their requirements.

Once you are accepted you can sit back and when an advertiser finds your blog within the Review Me catalog and thinks your site is suitable for their product they are going to contact you through the site. Your review posts should be at least 200 words up to what you think appropriate for the reviewed product and reviewMe instructs you to disclose that your post is paid. Payouts vary from $20 to $200 per review.

Sponsored reviews

Sponsored reviews is another way to make money online with your blog writing reviews for products or services. What you do is to create a profile of your blog in order to attract advertisers who are going to purchase reviews from you, which you can accept or decline.

Another way to get review tasks is to search by yourself for advertisers and bid on jobs. You can then use the site’s bidding system to negotiate your rates in order to make extra money. Once you have accepted a review opportunity you have 7 days to write your review which you then post on your blog and send Sponsored Reviews the URL. Sponsored reviews will then examine the review to make sure you are following their guidelines and once your review is approved you are going to be credited with the agreed amount and you will be paid every two weeks via PayPal.

They claim that since you are setting your own price you can make from $5 to $1000 per review or even more if you are a major site. I think this is a little bit optimistic though and I would be happy to earn some extra money from this and not counting on a full monthly salary from a single review alone.

Pay Per Post

Pay Per Post markets itself as an online marketplace that helps you connect with advertisers who will pay you to write posts about their products, services or sites.

They work by giving you review opportunities which you accept  as is, decline or negotiate. You once again create a profile of your blog to make it available for search within their system. All blogs are approved but this doesn’t guarantee that you will get an offer for a review.

You will have to carefully choose the category your blog belongs in and your optimal minimum amount of compensation you are going to accept per word or per post written. You are not going to be offered more than this amount so choose it wisely in order to outbid other bloggers and make a decent amount of extra money in the same time.

You cannot search for offers throughout the site so your blog’s profile, bid amount and category are the only ways to be found by advertisers and land an opportunity of reviewing a product and be paid for it.

Review sites

While you can write reviews that you post on your own blog you can be paid to write reviews on other sites too. Below you can find links to sites that can accept your reviews on various stuff and earn you some money in the process.

1. Helium
2. ReviewStream
3. Shvoong

Early Critique

Pay Per Review networks are not new and when they launched they enjoyed some pretty negative critique. They were people stating that these kind of networks were going to pollute the blogosphere by giving bloggers an incentive to write biased reviews and promote products in researching ways of how to make money online.

Some claimed that even search engines could penalize you of having paid reviews on your site which, as it seems, it isn’t true if you are just throwing a review once a while among other posts of yours, as guys from Yahoo, Google, Ask.com and MSN have pointed out to SeoMoz when they were asked about it. (You can read about it here).

The critique was also based to the fact that some services didn’t have a guideline for reviewers to disclose they are doing a paid review which isn’t the case any more.

On top of that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) makes it perfectly clear that you must disclose such reviews or promotions saying that “When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product which might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience) such connection must be fully disclosed.” (Download the full document here)

I personally think that if you are completely open about that you are doing a paid review and offer your personal unbiased opinion, you will be able to give your audience a useful insight to the product or service reviewed and earn some money in the same time.

If you still want to read what others were saying about paid review services when they first launched you can follow the links below to form your own opinion.

PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul by TechCrunch
Paying Bloggers to Post – First Impressions by Problogger
Paid to Blog: Mountain or Molehill? by inkBlots

Pros

– Make money online for writing reviews you would probably write yourself for free

– Earn extra cash while offering your expert opinion to your readers

– Promote interesting products and services while making money out of it

Cons

– It isn’t easy to make huge amounts of money with these. If you already have some decent traffic you can negotiate for bigger earnings but most bloggers should settle with some extra pocket money

– It is easy to get biased just because you are paid for this. Do your readers (and yourself) a favor and don’t compromise the quality and the objectivity of your blog just to make some more money. Your reputation is worth more that anything.

– Most networks have guidelines against adsense on posts with paid reviews and also have a policy that doesn’t permit no-follow or other affiliate links on paid posts