After reading much about ReviewMe last few weeks, I have decided to give it a try and join. I am sure there will be some discussions and debates down the road about the SEO “hat colors” in connection to ReviewMe. If you look around the blogosphere, there are already countless topics around the issue. In my opinion many miss the boat by starting such debates. Why? Well first of all ReviewMe is not being marketed as way to improve your SEO efforts. Improve traffic, virtual buzz, feedback- yes. SEO? No where on their website do they claim that reviews will improve SEO. But I guess there will be always debate over SEO every time money are exchanged for links.
In order for your blog to “qualify” at ReviewMe, it should meet certain criteria. It is a combination of Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank and estimated number of subsribers to your RSS feed. So it is not so difficult to qualify. If your blog does not qualify, the message comes up suggesting to improve these factors and come back in a few months.
After registering my website, a price of how much an advertiser would have to pay to be reviewed on my blog was automatically assigned. My blog was given a whooping $60! Of course my initial reaction was that it is very unlikely for any one to request a review on my site for two reasons: niche and my website’s popularity. So considering these two factors I would gladly settle down for a $20 per review. Nevertheless I have no choice but to trust that ReviewMe is right and I am wrong. But on the other hand big sites may see that $500 (maximum price per review at ReviewMe) is simply not enough. If you consider a website that has 10,000 RSS subscribers, $500 is not that big of a price. While I would love to have more control over the pricing, for now I just need to trust the ReviewMe team.
I personally believe that in the near future we will see more and more models like ReviewMe and I am looking forward to all of them. This kind of model opens a door to develop a relationship with your potential advertisers.
There were two things that caught my eye about ReviewMe. Advertisers are not allowed to require a positive review and publishers required so disclose that he is being paid in exchange for the review.
The downside that I see with ReviewMe, is that you in order to get tapped for a review all that you need to is to “sit back, and let the reviews offers come to you“. As a blog owner I would love to be a bit more proactive. I visited few blogs that are participating in ReviewMe, and there is no way to tell that owner of a blog offers reviews or not. You will never know, for example, that you can purchase a review on my blog unless you stumbled on this post or found my blog on ReviewMe.
So for now, I will “sit back, and let the reviews come to me”. Or will I?
Disclosure: No money were exchanged for this review.