I’ve tested out the ReviewMe service previously, but after they opened their campaign marketplace I’ve been tempted to try them again and run a few campaigns – especially after Shoemoney’s recommendation and decent quality of some of the paid for reviews.
Anyway, results have come in from the weekend – so far variable as expected.
There’s a fairly even mixture of junk blogger blogs just after content, plus decent blogs who’ll give a straight and useful post.
However, I can already see a lot of benefits and hazards coming out of this.
The main benefit is the potential to generate buzz and engage a wider range of bloggers and audience than on a Pay per Post basis – plus cheaper than many paid link baiting services.
Another benefit is that you get a fairly natural link pattern, with people using different anchor text on the target URL, plus deep links if you have content provision for that.
In theory, so good so far in terms of marketing & SEO.
Here’s the problem – a lot of these blogs probably won’t be running 1 or 2 years from now, so these are best viewed as short to mid-term link solutions.
Another is that Google are actively seeking to devalue paid links, and “Paid for” or “Sponsor” is a big give away Google can easily crack down on. So I see paid blog posts as only offering shorter term benefits for SEO purposes.
Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is that in the long term I can see people feeding this market and generating tons of junk blogs to derive the income from it.
So advertisers are likely to see diminishing returns, in my opinion, if they continue to run constant and unvarying campaigns – because all they’ll be paying for is posts on blogs created with the sole purpose of being paid to publish. Zero Authority/PageRank/Trust/Traffic, etc.
So my strategy is – invest now, reap later. That means I’m getting a string of my higher quality sites prepared for a big splash out on paid blog reviews.
Will I get a return on my investment? I treat SEO as an art, so as long as I create art, I expect the investment will bear fruit in the longer term.
However, because I’m aiming to target higher quality websites with engaging offers – revenue share, free stuff, etc, then I’m hoping to generate a little buzz at least as well. If I can get people to join my communities and stay there, the long term benefits are potentially excellent.
In the meantime, I’m pushing on my webdevelopment as I portalise a number of websites, either moving foums to news sites, or adding news & blogs sections to forums.
Then it’s a big investment as and when ready to really start pushing on promoting these sites – because I don’t think the window of opportunity will stay open for long.
