I have written several posts on the topic of monetizing a blog and have mentioned number of ways to do that. Doing paid reviews is one of the easiest ways to make money from your blog. In this post, we will talk about how do to it properly without annoying your readers and still make a good amount of money from it.
Monetizing your blog through ads (Adsense or any other click based or impressions based program) requires a huge traffic. One of my friend (A), who owns a popular technology blog which over 1.2 million pageviews per month, make overs $1000. While another friend (B), who makes $2000 from their blog which gets less than 100,000 pageviews per month.
Now there are many factors other than the fact that my friend A uses Adsense to monetize their blog and my friend B uses different methods including paid reviews.
Why would anyone pay you to review their product?
Well, the answer is in the question itself. You are REVIEWING their product, you are telling your readers that there is a product that exists to solve a particular problem, you show them how effective it is, you tell them why (or why not) should should use it.
This kind of post will put their product in front of their potential buyers. Even if they don’t make any sale from your review, they have a source to tell their potential buyers about the trustworthiness of their product. They post is going to be there on your blog forever, perhaps it will keep getting visitors from Search engines.
This is an amazing thing for the advertisers, and that’s why they will pay you to review their products.
How not to annoy your readers from your paid reviews
It has been a very controversial point whether or not you should do paid reviews, some bloggers are against it and it counts as the 90% of the revenue for many bloggers. But there is a way to do it properly by not overdoing it.
Here are few things you should keep in mind.
Create a disclosure policy on your blog that clearly mentions all the methods you use to monetize your blog. Make it a point for your readers to understand that it is a way to support the blog and keep it free.
Review the only products that are related to your Niche, which means, if your blog is food related, try not doing a review of a health product, or a tech product or anything that is not related to food or cooking. Your readers won’t be interest in that.
Review only the products that you would like to use by yourself, that being said, do not review a product just because they are paying you a good amount of money, because, if by any chance, any of your reader gets really dissatisfied with the product after he bought it based on your review, it can ruin your blog. I have seen blogs going down just because of that.
Only 1 out of 10 (or more) posts should be a paid one, Try not posting paid reviews every other day, your the post publishing frequency of your blog is quite high, make sure you keep enough gap of posts between your paid posts. If you are someone who posts 10 to 15 posts a month, I recommend you to do only 1 or 2 paid reviews and not more than that.
How to get advertisers offer you paid reviews
The first thing you should do is to create an advertise page, something like yourblog.com/advertise. This is the most common link advertisers look for when they want to see if you offer paid reviews on your blog. Mention your price, requirement, payment methods clearly on the advertise page for paid reviews.
Creating an advertise page is not enough, you need to go out an tell people that you are open to reviewing their products. Post this in related forums, put the url in your signature. Do everything you can do to let everyone know, this is how you support your blog so there is no need to be embarrassed about it.
Make a list of products that is related to your niche, and search for their reviews online. If you find more than 2 detailed blog reviews of a product, you may want to contact the product owner and ask them if they would want you to review their product.
Remember: Making money from paid reviews is so easy that many bloggers get carried away too easily and start doing paid reviews aggressively and end up ruining their blog. An advertiser want you to review their product because of the quality of your blog, because of the trust you have build over time, don’t let it ruin for few extra bucks, because there are endless opportunities if you keep blogging successfully.
