10e20 Blog

Yesterday, two very well-known search engine optimization industry leaders, Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans, announced the launch of ReviewMe, a service that enables blog writers to write reviews about products. ReviewMe intends to address fundamental problems in Internet marketing, including the difficulty driving people to a new product (especially from a new company), the concern that website ads are often ignored, the fact that product development can be time consuming and costly, the “unwanted” exposure to ads, and the inherent problem that you might have to seek out unwilling reviewers to give you feedback on your product or service.

In a nutshell, ReviewMe allows bloggers with well-known communities to write about what they want, offering feedback early on in the game (thereby reducing costs), and bloggers who want to review products are easy to find. Once you sign up as an advertiser, you can pitch your business idea to them, offer your desired payout amount, and let the reviews come in. For bloggers, especially casual bloggers, this is a good way to monetize your blog.

The announcement of ReviewMe comes not long after the controversy surrounding a similar blog service, PayPerPost, which was deemed absurd by many prominent bloggers, because the older service did not foster honesty, instead paying bloggers to write only positive reviews of products and not displaying a disclosure that you are reviewing the service for money. ReviewMe eliminates this problem: bloggers must disclose whether they are writing a paid review (yes, this one is paid) and the reviews can be either positive or negative.

Signup is simple. Bloggers provide their personal information and specify whether they want to be paid via PayPal or check. Once signed up and logged in, they then can submit their blog URL, and it is accepted based on certain blog ranking criteria, including Technorati, Alexa, and RSS subscriptions.

Of course, there are times when the blog isn’t accepted, and the problem with ReviewMe in this regard is that it actually doesn’t provide you with the exact reasons why it was rejected (and unless you have an accepted blog, you actually don’t get information regarding what criteria is used to rank the blog).

I personally would find ReviewMe a lot more helpful if it gave me a breakdown as to why it rejected one of my blogs. That way, I’d know where to focus my energy for improvement.

But the good news is that not all my submitted blogs were rejected, and once accepted, you get an interesting page that gives you information regarding your blog’s ranking and your payout amount. The 10e20 blog was just launched on Wednesday, so we have a ways to go:

For bloggers who maintain more than one blog, you’re not limited to just one — a maximum of six are supported per user:

For advertisers, ReviewMe entitles users to review products, services, site design, or page content. You simply get to provide the blogger with the product type, product name, product URL, and a description.

To start the trend of reviewing, ReviewMe is currently giving away $25,000 (not all to one person) to anyone who reviews their service.

Spammy? With ReviewMe in its infancy, it’s quite possible the system can be abused, though there’s no way to tell at the present. But just like bloggers are entitled to write about what they want, readers will read what they want to read, and that’s the beauty of this model.