Are you a blogger looking for sponsored reviews to monetize your blog? In this article, I am sharing my 15 years of online experience in making money from sponsored posts and paid reviews.
Many of the new bloggers know only one method of earning revenue, which is nothing but Google AdSense. There is no doubt, that AdSense is one of the easiest ways of earning money from online content. However, once you gain expertise in online publications and have a blog with a reasonable number of visitors, there are many more opportunities. One of the best online opportunities is, earning by writing sponsored reviews.
What is a sponsored review?
Sponsored reviews are genuine reviews of any sort of business, published with the intention of promoting the products. Typically, the business owner, a.k.a advertiser, pays you for writing reviews of their product. In theory, there is no commitment to write a positive review but in most cases, the advertiser will expect you to focus on the positive aspects of their products. Obviously, no one wants to pay you to write bad about them, right?Some professional companies will ask for a genuine review. Their intention is to get honest feedback from some experts like you. They will pay you for spending your time and efforts looking at their products and finding their positive and negative aspects of them. If you find a lot of issues with the product you are reviewing, the advertiser may ask you not to publish it, but you still have the rights to get paid for your work.
How to get paid reviews for your blog
There are a couple of different ways advertisers and companies look for bloggers to review their products.1. Search for reviews of competitor products
2. Search for popular bloggers in their niche
3. Use PR companies to get the products reviewed.
The above are the most common ways companies find bloggers to review their products. If you are looking for paid reviews for your blog, promote yourself so that your blog will fall into the above list.
How to promote yourself as a professional reviewer?
Most businesses do a detailed market analysis before they develop or launch their products. For most small companies, the market analysis is nothing but searching for their competitor's products. So, to get the attention of those potential advertisers, the best thing to do is, to write reviews of their competitors.Typically, you should focus on a certain niche and not just write about anything under the sky. For example, when I decided to accept sponsored posts on my blog, I started by writing a few genuine, unpaid reviews of video converter software. I did a lot of research on video converter apps, tested many of them myself, and published a couple of good reviews. I focused on the positive aspects of the apps and briefly mentioned some negatives too.
In a couple of weeks, my video converter reviews started getting a good number of visitors through Google searches. At the same time, I started mailing the video converter developers asking if they are interested in publishing a review of their product. I also included a few links to some of the best reviews I have written.
When I showed my existing reviews, most of the companies responded to me. I negotiated the price for sponsored reviews and was able to get several sponsored reviews at a price range between $100 to $250. Several companies were willing to pay $50 or $75, which I didn't accept. Also, I refused all the sponsored review offers that required a do-follow link to their website.
Links from paid reviews and impact on search engine ranking
You should not accept sponsored reviews that require a do-follow link to the advertiser's websites. Such paid links will be penalized by search engines like Google. Even if you get better pay for reviews with links, it can affect the search engine ranking of your websites in the long run.How to get paid reviews?
Let us discuss some of the best approaches to get sponsored reviews for your blogs:1. The most efficient way is to contact the companies directly and ask if they are interested in paid reviews. Focus on one or two niches and identify the products in that niche. Contact the companies and ask if they are interested in getting their products reviewed. If you promote yourself as a professional blogger, you will get good responses. As I explained above, if have a few good reviews to show in your blog, that will definitely improve your chances of getting a positive response from advertisers.
2. Register yourself on some of the websites that provide a platform for advertisers and bloggers for paid reviews: You can search in Google and find a list of websites that offer such services.
3. Offer paid review service through your blog itself: You can add a link at the bottom of your blog, that links to a page with information about rules and policies regarding publishing sponsored reviews in your blog.
How to contact advertisers effectively?
Most companies will receive a lot of offers for sponsored reviews. It is challenging to get their attention to your blog and get paid by them. Here are a few points to keep in mind when contacting companies for sponsored reviews:Prepare a professional email template that you can use to contact companies. Get this template reviewed and make sure it has no language errors and uses the best language to impress the reader.
Make the email short. No one has time to read huge emails.
Write only 1 or 2 lines that best describe your website. Write something that gives an impression that your blog is a professional app review portal and have done a lot of such reviews in past. Also, mention your traffic and user stats, if you have good stats to show off.
Write a personalized message and mention your expertise and past experience in reviewing the category of products you are talking about. The advertiser should feel that you are contacting them personally, after studying about their product personally. If you feel they are receiving an email, which is part of a mass marketing email, you may not get any response.
Include a few links to some of the best reviews you have written. Avoid links to any negative reviews.
You may mention that in the sponsored review, you will focus on the positive aspects of the product since it is more like an advertorial.
Do not mention the price for review in the first email. Instead, get a communication channel opened first. Once the advertiser spends some time discussing with you, they may not run away even if you quote a higher price at a later stage of the discussion.
Give some confidence to the advertiser by showing your confidence in writing a professional review, that will be impressive to the advertiser. Tell them, they need to pay only after you make all the necessary corrections in the blog. Offer them that you will show the review to them before publishing. $ads={2}