Among the fastest growing money making schemes in the internet is doing sponsored reviews. It is like paid blogging, wherein you are paid a sum of money to write reviews about the products and services for a particular client. But not all reviews are accepted and paid, and not coming up with good reviews would turn to be a waste of effort on your end. Thus you should learn how to write better sponsored reviews, and here are a few effective ways in doing so:
1. Keep your reviews short and sweet.
This is the most important part in doing sponsored reviews: remove all the unnecessary words and phrases. What the boards look for are reviews which are straight to the point and provide all the valuable information needed by the audiences to come up with their own judgment about the item under evaluation. Adding unwanted details will only confuse your readers and as well make your review boring. Also, review boards scan all submitted articles before having them posted, and those which didn’t pass their standards will of course, not be accepted.
2. Replace some paragraphs with images.
Reviews are not all written text, and indeed there are instances where you cannot come up with the right set of words to describe the message you want to convey. Images, such as pictures and graphics meanwhile work better in this situation, and it is recommended that you add them to review. These objects give your audiences a more graphic representation of your review and hence make things easier for them to understand. They can see your idea directly on the screen, and there is no more need for them to wonder on what you are talking about.
Also, you must take advantage of human psychology: readers are more enticed to eye candy, thus they will easily read and recognize those articles with images. Your review will hence become more readable and acceptable.
3. Find the right advertisers.
Your review will always be of good value when supported by the right set of advertisers. Sometimes reviews are rejected because of low traffic and links meaning nobody reads or clicks on the links found in your article. Hence it is important for you to find the right advertisers who can bring in money to your reviews. You can find such advertisers on forums, and fellow niche blogs. Yes, you can sure get advertisers on sponsored review broker sites such as PayPerPost.com, but you tend to earn much lesser since a part of your earnings will go to these sites.
Another tip about getting the right advertisers is that you should consider their relevance to your niche topic. You can’t just get advertisers to sponsor your reviews out of nowhere; hence you must choose which ones are relevant and talk about your niche. Advertisers which are not that relevant to your niche may only result to pure results, thus lower pay on your reviews.
4. Be unbiased.
If there is anything you should avoid when writing a review, it’s being one-sided. Clinging to a particular side when reviewing an item is not bad, but of course you have to construct your review in such a way that it has good and sound judgment. Being biased either for or against the item under review will make things obvious that you are promoting another item or service, hence making your article less credible to the readers.
Also, before making a review, you must know the kind of writing style your client is looking for. This way you will know how to construct your review using your own personal judgment, while at the same time sticking to your client’s requirements.
5. Engage your readers to join the discussion.
Above all, a good sponsored review invites its readers to join the discussion and share their own personal reviews. Interacting with your audience shows that you care for what they are saying mainly because they are interested about the said item on review. Through user insights you will be able to see the item on a different perspective other than yours, hence coming up with a better judgment on your review article.
Also, by allowing your audiences to join the discussion, you not only earn money; you earn the people’s trust.
November 13th, 2008 at 7:30 am
The sponsored content idea is stupid in the sense that we people pick any thing that pays. Hence in some cases, it becomes very evident that it is a paid post and no soul nears it..
November 13th, 2008 at 7:31 am
btw, the comment box is very bigger than the frame.
i am on firefox on mac
November 15th, 2008 at 8:00 am
being unbiased is a bit hard to do, it really depends on the situation =)
November 16th, 2008 at 7:14 am
Don’t sound so down. It doesn’t have to be boring.
You can try a two fold attack. Write copy, break it with pictures and on the bottom of the post – add a video! Viddler lets you add links during the video. Make an informercial of sorts.
November 16th, 2008 at 11:04 am
6. Make sure the review is about something the readers are interested in
7. Don’t write based on pay
November 22nd, 2008 at 6:56 am
I think being unbiased is simply pointing out the obvious downsides of a product/service as well as the pluses.