I am thinking about buying a review for my site on other people's blogs. Its not a commercial site, but a service.

I got some decent budget for this and I am wondering about

1) What would be the reasonable price for that? (of course differentiate between sites with different popularity, pageranks, theme etc)

2) What you think about services that offer brokering of this service such as pay per post?

3) Would you do this on your blog? If not, why?

Thanks!!!

Ahhh...paid reviews. The next great white SEO hope. Sooner or later, this is bound to be crushed by the hand of big G, possibly taking innocent sites with it, and the webmaster community will get its collective shorts in a knot. I'm predicting a late 2008-first half of 2009 announcement on this.

But I digress.

1) It would depend on the quality of the review to me. A good review would be worth more to me since the comments on the service would allow for improvement of the service. Most comments in that regard aren't worth anything simply because they say things like "its good" (sic) or "i like it, nice job". The more thought put into the comments and review, the more it's worth. I wouldn't consider the rest of the review factors you listed (PageRank, theme, etc.) because there are cases where a blog that seems unpopular can send a lot of traffic to your site and cases where a blog that seems popular can send next to none.

2) I looked into them at one point because I was interested in the concept, but then found that they were a complete joke. PayPerPost, ReviewMe, LoudLaunch, etc. don't care about actual reviews; it's all about the SEO and sponsor ***-kissing.

Not only that, what bothered me from a potential SEO point of view about them was the ease in which I could register, log in, and see all the prospective advertisers. It would be fairly simple to build a bot to do that work, if you were say an SE and wanted to find out who was screwing with you.

3) I would review any product or service, but in lieu of payment I'd expect free product or service just because that's what I'm reviewing. I would also endeavor to be as honest and objective as possible about my review, even if it were negative, simply because the comments I provide would help the person giving me the free product/service shape the product/service to better suit the needs of his/her customers.

This is what a review should really be about: objective evaluation of products and services.

The word "Review" has a loose meaning in terms of what many are looking for in getting their site noticed. I think Adam_Web_Design has the correct idea of a "Review".

You'll find I have the correct idea about a lot of things.

Originally Posted by pcoptimized

The word "Review" has a loose meaning in terms of what many are looking for in getting their site noticed. I think Adam_Web_Design has the correct idea of a "Review".

Ahh...let's not grow his ego any more than we have to

Thanks for sharing the thoughts Adam.

I agree that the services are a complete joke too, just wanted to hear some opinions about them......... or maybe I am wrong thinking 300% posting fee is a total ripoff :-D

I never said I want to purchase a positive review. Not at all.

Unlike many others, I DO believe that my service is well done, its completely custom written, unique and I AM very confident about good experience it provides to user. Paying for the review only means I am paying to a blogger for his time to review the site with his own words, either with positive or negative sentiment.

As for the "free sample". I cant do that, just because the service itself is provided for free

Personally I dont think Google will crush on paid reviews, positive "***-kissing" as you said is well known marketing strategy called affiliate marketing :-D

Why would anyone bothered abt getting fake reviews...? for money? Instead why dnt you make it a good site and a good service and then you will get plenty of FREE genuine reviews.

It sounds like you want a real review, and not advertising. It's perfectly reasonable to pay someone to take the time to work with your service, help you figure out how to improve it ... but that generally falls under the heading of r&d or qa, not marketing.

It completely depends how much you want to spend on how helpful this review will be. Consider hiring a writer/blog owner who runs a larger website and has some real skill analyzing.

One idea might be to do what the Eclipse project did when they came out with a new version.
They gave away shirts to people for writing reviews (I got one)
http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-rel...opareviews.php

Of course, Eclipse is very well known so that kind of thing is easier for them. Not all of the reviews are positive, some are down-right critical. But, it did get the word out.

It works like this, people write a review on their own site/blog. They promote their review. They are promoting their own site anyway. Eclipse gains the benefit of lots of people talking about them.

Shoot, I may have to work with Cafe Press and do this myself :-) shirts are cheap.

Check out payperpost: http://payperpost.com/

This can bring a lot of traffic...if done right.

$50 can get you about 4-5 posts on different blogs.