Is it wise to review to earn money ?

If I have to define 'Paid Reviews' , I will define it as- " Easiest and Deadliest way to make money from blogs."

I call it 'easiest' because the only criteria your blog has to fulfill is to be around for at least three months with average posting frequency (generally 2 posts a week will do). While in other programs like adsense you need decent pagerank and decent traffic on your blog to earn money.




I call it 'deadliest' way to make money because it can cause stunting of growth of your blog.The more reviews you will do the more stunting it will cause.



Most of the bloggers ,particularly, newbies fall prey to this trap because their attention is towards 'easy money' and they are just ignorant or overlook the darker side of paid reviews.If you are a person who has been reviewing sites for money or planning to do so, just halt here for a moment and take a look at the darker side of paid reviews as I am going to list some of the cons of paid reviews in the paragraphs that follows.

• You may loose credibility as a Blogger by writing paid reviews-

This is the 'deadliest' cons of the paid reviews.Most of the times you are asked to talk about only benefits of a website or product you are reviewing.Suppose you published a review post listing all benefits of a rotten and ugly website.Now since you have talked only about benefits of the reviewed site or product ,so, your visitors will see it as recommendation from you, only to find later that you have misguided them.Imagine ,how seriously it can hurt your impression as a blogger.

Your visitors will say you 'good bye' once you start hurting them by recommending wrong websites to them.This will cause stunting in your blog's growth in terms of traffic and subscribership.

• Paid reviews are too cheap.

Most of the times you have to give away at least three links back to the advertisers website.Next you have to keep those links permanently on your blog.Look at these sentences which has been used on the rules page of Blogsvertise and Smorty.

Your blog entry must remain online and be a permanent entry in your blog.

All blog posts MUST BE PERMANENT. Bloggers who remove posts after being paid will automatically be declined and will no longer be accepted into the Smorty network.

So, you placed some links which will always remain there on your blog and what you are paid is a one time fee, usually a few dollars.Isn't this cheap , I mean, a one time payment for something which will remain on your blog forever.

Also giving away links will cause bleed in your pagerank and will cause stunted growth of your blog in terms of pagerank.

• Sometimes you may review an off topic website or product

It is not always that you will find advertisers related to your theme of blog.This is the time when bloggers review something which is in related category but not exactly matches your blog theme.


Imagine a situation when someone landed on your blog in search of "dog breeds" and finds a review on "cat breeds".You can guess what impression you and your blog would have left on the visitor's mind.

• Google may slap your blog by penalizing it and removing it from its index.

I have already said earlier in this post that you have to give away links back to advertisers site.My point here is you are paid not just for reviewing a site but also to give away links.This is virtually link selling.

Google is against buying and selling links and there are instances when google has actually penalized websites indulging in buying and selling links.Now if somehow google finds that you have been selling links on your blog, it may penalize you by removing your blog from its index.



There are many other cons of paid reviews but those listed above should always be considered while you decide to review a website to earn money.Don't overlook the darker side while making a decision.


If you seek my advice on the issue then I will say you to refrain yourself from doing paid reviews.Paid reviews can bring some bucks in your pocket but in the long run they will never help you.Think big and see far !!!





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