Should You Write a Paid Review? Ask Yourself These Six Questions

One attractive opportunity for freelance writers to make money online is to write a paid review of a web site, product, or service. Software companies and other technology companies especially are often eager for product endorsements. Yet paid reviews do come with certain risks, and can even cause the search engine to penalize your site.

Should paid reviews be part of a writer’s repertoire, and if so, what do we need to know about paid reviews before we begin selling our endorsements? Before getting started with paid reviews, you should ask yourself these questions:

Six Questions Freelance Writers Should Ask Before Offering Paid Reviews

1. Does Your Web Site Rely on Google?If you get significant amounts of traffic and business from search engine positions on Google, you’ll want to think twice before writing a paid review. In an post entitled Selling Links that Pass PageRank, Google engineer Matt Cutts revealed that paid reviews that pass on page rank are subject to possible Google penalties. So if Google traffic is important to you, you should make sure your buyer understands that they’re buying a human endorsement and human click-throughs, not a page rank boost. You should read Matt’s article for specific recommendations.

   This issue came up for me recently. Of the many web sites I have, one site 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 site requesting 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 web site. OK, then how about another web site? Read on!

2. Can You Own (or “Rent”) A Blog Where Paid Reviews Are Appropriate?One solution to the problem of paid reviews penalizing your site is to offer the client a review on another web site or blog. This could be either:
   • A third party blog. Your client may have asked for a paid review, but does the review really have to go where they asked you to put it? 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 also 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.
   • 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 Web Site “About”?Even if you can solve “the Google problem” with paid articles by dutifully applying a nofollow tag (sometimes colorfully called a “link condom”) to your links back to your client, does having a post about to “Texas Holdem Poker” in the first place 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) pay day loans or Canadian Pharmaceuticals?
4. How Much Does It Pay?If this list were in order of importance, the issue of payment would have been in first position. The answer to the important “how much?” question is going to vary considerably from one opportunity to the next. Before you check out sites like ReviewMe.com, however, keep in mind the following simple economic fact that applies to 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. So if you can sell your review directly you’ll do better. The flip side of that coin is always the time it would take to find the work on your own. So you should expect that rates for paid reviews will be higher if you have a popular blog and can sell direct to the advertiser than they will be if you sell your reviews via one of the many paid review web sites that are springing up.
5. Will the Writing Credits Help Me?If you’re new in your writing career, paid reviews may help to give you some credentials. If you’re an old pro, you probably could care less.
6. What’s My Writing “Career Track”?Professional Internet Writers come in many forms. An oversimplified way to look at the field is that there are “pro bloggers” on the one hand versus “freelancers” on the other. The pro blogger group is a population consisting of twenty or thirty blogging rock stars and, to extend the metaphor, about fifty million teenagers with electric guitars. Paid reviews are almost always an appropriate sideline for this group, though some bloggers like the authors of TechCrunch won’t touch them. The latter group, the freelancers, is much smaller and generally quite capable of hunting larger game than the paid review. However even for a freelancer an occasional paid review may be welcome.

Note: Matt Cutts’s article Selling Links that Pass Page Rank can be found here.

A version of this article originally appeared as part of the author’s series Paid Reviews: Freelance Writer Boon or Bargain With The Devil.

John Lockwood is a freelance Internet writer who lives just outside of Sacramento, CA.

He realized one day he was a professional writer after the top-ranked web sites he’d written for his real estate business totalled more than 3,000 pages. He is the author of Inklit.com, an Internet Writer’s Blog as well as many other web sites and blogs about real estate, software development, and Internet marketing.

This article is Copyright(c) 2008, John Lockwood Associates. Permission is given to copy this article, but users of this article must maintain the article and the author signature box in its original form. No other use is permitted.