One marketing scheme that has become popular lately is paying bloggers for doing product reviews. The idea behind this scheme is quite similar to that of a Tupperware party: promote products through a social hub, using that hubs credibility and contacts.
Writing product reviews is a difficult terrain, full of pitfalls and conditions. The usual payout is, in most of the cases, a free product and a one time fee. Some points to consider when doing product reviews:
- The advertiser often expects an entire blogpost dedicated to his product without any other advertisement on that page and, naturally, a link to the product's own website for a one time fee. This can easily lead into the murky waters of link selling, frowned upon search engines.
- Blogposts are usually permanent pages. Likewise, a product review will be permanent advertising. Companies are often willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a single review which may look like a lot at first, but compared to a TV commercial really comes in as next to nothing. The issue here is the "permanent" part. Paying a hundred dollars to be reviewed on a well linked, well read blog means peanuts, when the page exists for several years.
- The amount of money, advertisers are willing to pay for a single review naturally depends on the blogs audience. An important blog with a large readership and many inbound links will get much better deals than a freshly started one. Therefore it might not be a good idea to start with product reviews until the blog has gathered some momentum in order to not sell adspace under value.
- There is only so much advertisement, a readership will tolerate. Readers subscribe to blogs because they are interested in the blog's topic. Doing a lot of product reviews may easily result in the topic changing and therefore people leaving.