Interesting Observations

blogging, social media and self-improvement!

Community

Dilemma of Paid Reviews!

pearl 38

Darren’s article asking people if they have written paid reviews on their blog came at an interesting time since I just got notified by pay per post rejecting the review posts I wrote sometime back!
Looking at the survey question responses on problogger, its clear that the blogging community is heavily divided on this issue and emotions run pretty high on both sides!

AEFDG4
I wrote 2 (supposedly) paid review posts and both were a negative experiences for me. First one was on the car garage guy which got rejected because I included a video in the post! Well, I thought Tim Allen’s video would make an otherwise boring review post interesting but obviously the advertisers didn’t think so!

Second post was on pay day loans, a concept that I had never heard about, before reading on their site, and was titled Strapped for cash. This post also got rejected because pay per post guys cannot find a record of me first ‘reserving’ the ‘opportunity’ before writing about it! Even if they had found the record that I did everything I was supposed to do, they would have declined to pay because there is a link to another site in the post, my bad. Sometimes including interesting links only makes these otherwise bland posts a bit better, I thought – well, so much for what I think, they refused to pay!

I also thought the post headline was pretty good, if not better than a lot of the headlines Lyndon thought up if he were to write the same article!

Although I was pretty hesitant to write these kinds of posts to begin with, I confess I got tempted to earn $7 for some 50 to 100 word post!  Now that this blog got page ranked 4, I see some ‘opportunities’ for as much a $20 per post, which can add up to a nice pocket money at the end of the month.

But as soon as I wrote the posts, I received a few emails from my readers suggesting I shouldn’t take sponsored posts! I haven’t tried Simonne’s guide for excluding the sponsored posts category from RSS feeds yet , which I think is a brilliant idea, but I am wondering if this would really work with people!?! Hiding these posts from the feeds doesn’t mean people wouldn’t be upset if they decided to come to the blog to read the articles and we do want to encourage them to comment and participate in the discussions, don’t we?

So, there, as much as I would like to write some sponsored posts, I’m afraid of driving readers away from here. I am thinking of building another blog (without fresh perspectives of course), but building content to get it approved would require time!

What about you? Are you writing paid reviews on your blog?

Visited 1 times, 1 visit(s) today
Related Story
38 comments
pearl

hey Simonne… that is a real fun post (just commented there) … it was only recently I started looking into these and you are right, one has to be very careful of selecting only appropriate reviews; but you saw the ones I did, (links are in this post), okay they were a little off topic, but I tried to make them interesting …. these darn ad agencies have too many stupid rules :)

Oh about comments, I live to see them … I love each and every comment on the blog, honestly! Oh you are being modest now, you do get them and get a lot too….. i still remember your top 5 project about fingers :D

pearl

Hey Maurice: RT is definitely a PRO at writing reviews, without a doubt! I agree with you a 100% that it has to be interesting and engage the readers, and if I decide to write reviews on a regular basis, either here or on another blog, I’d definitely have to learn the art. If you take a look at my first review post on car garage guys, I thought it was funny to keep readers on the post engaged for a while and let them click at the advertiser’s link but they rejected the post and thats beyond my comprehension!

thanks for commenting Maurice… tc and kit

PS: ‘they’ meaning the advertisers rejected the post and when some readers showed concern, I had second thoughts!

pearl

thats a good way to make the transition Frank C… people are already used to your free reviews so they probably won’t mind if you get paid for them also…..

thanks for stopping by to comment….. tc and kit

Maurice (TheCaymanHost)

I have no problems with paid posts although I haven’t written any on this blog I did post a few on some older blogs I used to run.

Some people seem to get it far more right than others. RT over at Untwisted Vortex does a good job and many could learn by his example. I often see reviews that people have written that are so lame and strained it does turn me off as a reader. One springs to mind where a lady was trying to say that she had finally narrowed down her vacation choice to some exclusive five star resort, on a blog where she constantly whined about her financial woes, her out of control debt, her unemployed spouse……it was so obviously untrue, well, you get my drift. That kind of thing is what turns people off and gives the critics and blog snobs all the ammunition they need to bash PPP and all the others.

I see nothing wrong in writing sponsored posts, but writing awful sponsored posts will probably bring you your just rewards. If I can find relevant subject matter and an advertiser who accepts a warts an’ all opinion on a product/service that I can write an informative post on, then I’d go right ahead. (Unless you are well established the reward is often hardly worth it though).

pearl

Hi Ad Tracker: I’m glad you swung by and took the time to write here… I’d be delighted to have you share your ideas and opinions more often here …..

No one complained really, the emails were more like friendly advice and I was glad they were vocal enough to alert me, ‘coz I’d have hated to lose any of my subscribers…

you are absolutely right, adsense or any of these other ads are mere distractors and haven’t made me any money so far… signing bonuses for some affiliates is better than what I have made with these! So, yes, they will all be gone as soon as I change themes…

thats a great point to not let the reviews sit there by themselves and have a rather good post immediately above it… I’d definitely make that a must if I continue with them…

hey, like I said, thank you so much for the support and sharing your views… take care and stay in touch…

Frank C

I do plan to write them on OpTempo once it gets old enough to do it. I don’t plan to write them on my software development blog that is old enough and is PR4. It’s just a matter of it being an appropriate fit for one and not for the other.

On OpTempo I already do free reviews so the transition to paid would be easy.

Simonne

I agree with you Pearl, I thought your review about that garage organizers was good, they should have appreciated your creativity. Unfortunately, regarding the loan stuff, everybody is probably so sick of loans and mortgages advertising, that even well-written articles look a bit cheesy.

For writing about such things, I set up a special blog about personal finance issues (not yet accepted by PPP, but I’ve got some assignments from SponsoredReviews.com).

kaylee

how are you? am back home now :)

Ken Xu

I’m also having the same problem. Some reader complaining about it but I have some that like the post, especially the one that pretty useful for them/ related to the blog subject.

pearl

Simonne: pay day loans was a bad choice I agree… just googled it in blog search, my God, there are million of them reviews already, no wonder people get sick of looking at them… and I agree, theres only so many creative ways to write about it… I’ve already set up a couple of blogs for something like this and we’ll see how that goes… thanks Simonne for the moral support though :)

Ken: having a separate blog is a smart idea. This has been a learning experience