I am getting paid to publish my opinion about ReviewMe. This is what I think of the service.

I got an email last week from Text Link Ads [TLA] announcing the arrival of ReviewMe. I was first told about TLA by Valerie, and found it to be a well designed service. ReviewMe also seems to be a well planned and a well designed system that’s easy to use, and allows both the advertisers and bloggers to make some money.

Business Plan

The way ReviewMe works is simple: bloggers get paid by advertisers to give their opinion on different services and products, whether it be a positive one or a negative one. Each review pays a minimum of $20 and a maximum of to $200 to the blogger. ReviewMe pays bloggers via Paypal or via a check on the 1st of every month. As of right now, bloggers do not need to earn a minimum amount of commission before they are paid.

Participation process

Signing up with ReviewMe is very easy. The entire website is designed with simplicity in mind, and navigating around the site is very easy. Whether you’re a blogger or an advertiser, you would spend less than a minute or two to fill out a single form to create your account instantly.

Requirements

When it comes to writing reviews, there are only two requirements for bloggers:

1. State that your post is a paid review.

One of the only two requirements of ReviewMe for bloggers is to make sure that the post explicitly states that the review is a paid one, meaning that the blogger must write that they’re being paid to write that review. This is a good requirement in my view.

2. The post must be a minimum of 200 words in length.

This is fairly obvious. One should write something at length instead of writing a few lines just to get paid.

For advertisers, one of the only requirements is that the bloggers can write and express whatever opinion they may have. Thus, if you’re a blogger, you can write either a positive review or a negative one, or a combination of both. regardless of whether you like a product or not, you’ll still get paid for your review. Thus, just because money is involved doesn’t mean that one is being forced to write a completely biased review.

How to get reviews, and how to write reviews

If you’re an advertiser, you go through the list of bloggers signed up with ReviewMe to offer any blog of your choice a chance to write a review of your product or service. After a review has been posted by the blogger, the advertisers gets charged automatically by ReviewMe. Advertisers pay a minimum of $40 up to a maximum of $400 per each review. Half of that money goes to the blogger, should they accept your review request, and the other half goes to ReviewMe. It’s a very simple business model that uses the power of the internet and blogging to come up with results. The good news in this department is that there are already many reviewers and advertisers signed up with the service.

If you’re a blogger, you simply submit your site to ReviewMe and then wait for any advertiser to approach you through ReviewMe to write a review for them. My website was one of those preapproved by TLA, so I was offered a chance to write a review of ReviewMe [which you're reading now, by the way]. The amount of money bloggers can get is calculated automatically by ReviewMe based on the site popularity through Alexa ranking, the Technorati score and the number of people subscribed to the RSS feeds for that site.

Smaller things

The only thing bad that I can think of at the moment is that many people will find the waiting game to be a waste of time, since some other services out there pay bloggers instantly to write a review on things that are already available to be reviewed. Also, anytime money is involved, there is sure to be a flush of writers who accept any review offers simply to get paid. There are some services out there that will pay bloggers immediately to write something positive for them without waiting for a review offer to be sent.

However, the very nature of ReviewMe allows bloggers to accept or reject review offers, thus allowing a more balanced and fair review of the service or product in question. If I don’t feel like reviewing Monkey T’s shirts, I won’t accept their offer. If I feel like reviewing the online GAP experience, I will accept their offer. This way, money will still come in, but the blogger will get to choose what they write, instead of being forced to write on something even if they don’t want to. Can this system be abused? Of course, since every business plan can be taken advantage of. ReviewMe is counting on good faith to ensure that the service provides quality results to most of the participants. Only time will tell if such a model will work.

Conclusion

There you have it. My review of the service from how I came across the site to how the site works for both the advertisers and bloggers. Since the service is backed by TLA and created by the same people, it seems that the service should be able to fund itself for a while and have a better chance at surviving some difficulties in the future compared to startups who have to depend solely on their business plan in order to survive. Considering the popularity of TLA, it seems that ReviewMe already has a good word of mouth floating around.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thank you for taking the time to read this.