Posted on May 21, 2010 - by Kwame

Five Reasons Why Paid Reviews are Great for Internet Business Start-ups

A paid review is a promotional method used by many online businesses to spread the word about their products or service. It is a promotional technique used by both big and small business to get new business for new products and services. We are going to delve into its importance more but let’s start by defining what a paid review is.

What is a paid review?

A paid review is a review whereby one is paid to write about his or her evaluation or appraisal of a product or service. The reviews are based on personal knowledge or experience with the item being reviewed. It is a cheap way of getting news of products and services out.

If you don’t have enough cash to spend or if you have the cash but don’t want to take a lot of risk, you can pay someone who has a big follower base to tell their followers about your product.

Five reasons why paid reviews are great for start-ups:

• Your brand gets some recognition: Your brand will be put in front of an audience who may be having problems that your products can solve. If you find the right audience for your products, pay the leaders of your audience to tell their followers about your products or services.

• You will get traffic to your website: The readers of the blog on which your review is published will flock your website to find out more or take a free trial (if you have one available). Some readers might tweet about it on Twitter and some will share it on Facebook, Linkedin, et cetera.

• Other people will start reviewing your product or service for free: Whether you pay them or not, people will start reviewing your products on their blogs. I have seen this happen on a lot of blogs.

• You save a lot of money: You will save money since paid reviews generate free word of mouth marketing (the best form of marketing in world if you ask me).

• You get back links: This will help increase your website’s page rank and your search engine rankings. If your product or service is reviewed on an authority blog with high PR (page rank), your own page rank will get some credit and if other bloggers review your products for free, their page ranks add up to help increase your own.

You don’t need to spend a lot of money on reviews. You can have a small budget and still get it to work.

Before you pay someone to review your product or service, you need to do your due diligence. You want to get lots of traffic to your site right? 

Three tips you can use to help with you get great results:

• Make sure the blog has a lot of RSS subscribers: This will help you get more eyeballs to read the review, thus, increase the effectiveness.

• Make sure the blog’s readers are targeted or suitable for your product’s market: For example, if you are selling an eBook about internet marketing, make sure the blog is about internet marketing or internet business.

• Make sure you are paying a reasonable price for the review: Some bloggers charge higher than others but provide little value in terms of all the points I have made above. 

If you are lucky, some bloggers will share the review article with their email list. Most bloggers have thousands of newsletter subscribers and it will be your lucky day if they decide to share it with their email list too at no extra cost.

You can ‘manipulate’ readers and bloggers a little bit if you also offer an affiliate program. That will even spice things up more since people will get a commission just by telling other people about your product on their blogs, on Twitter, and all over the internet.

You can also spice things up a little more if your review includes a promo code or discount code with an expiry date. This will create some sort of urgency for people to buy your product before the price is regularized.

You can also try and add a competition to your review where you give out prizes to people who visit your website or who also write a review of your product on their website. Just play with ideas.

What do you think about marketing with paid reviews? Any experiences, thoughts or ideas questions? Let me know in the comments box.