There are several relatively easy ways to make some money from your blog such as using
Google AdSense, selling private ad spots, and writing reviews. The downside with using Google AdSense and trying to sell private ad spots is your blog must have enough traffic to generate the clicks or page impressions. My guess is most of you aren’t getting hundreds of visitors to your blog each day (not yet at least) so you aren’t making much money from those methods of advertising.
So where does that leave us? If you haven’t heard of writing reviews on your blog to generate a decent stream of income then you might want to check it out.
How does writing reviews make me money?
It’s actually easier than you think. The first step is to sign up with a blog review network and submit your blog. Some of these companies have rules in place like the age of your blog (at least 6 months old, etc), where it’s hosted (blogspot, wordpress, etc), and page rank. They try to weed out spam blog sites which are usually not very old or of good quality. Make sure you read the fine print before you spend your time applying only to find out you don’t qualify.
Assuming your blog is approved, you can now browse the review marketplace looking for reviews to write about or another option is to wait for someone to approach you. I recommend you be the aggressor and sift through the marketplace so you can start making money asap.
Once you find a review you’d like to write about and meet the criteria to qualify, just take it and begin. You’ll create your blog post and follow the requirements of the reviewer, then submit it for approval. After it’s approved, you get paid. Pretty easy huh?
What blog review networks do you recommend?
There are several companies out there who pay you to write reviews on your blog but only two of them are worth talking about in my opinion. They are
Sponsored Reviews and
Pay Per Post.
Sponsored Reviews is great because they allow you to search for advertisers directly and bid on jobs. Their bidding system allows you to negotiate rates with advertisers in order to maximize your earnings. They also provide the largest payout of all review networks by only taking a 35% commission for their services. That means you can earn anything from $10 to 500+ for each review. Their user interface is one of the better ones out there and the only drawback to their service is the lack of advertisers. I’m sure it will continue to grow it’s advertising base so they are at least worth a look.
One other perk is their affiliate program. Earn up to $175 per Advertiser and $90 Per Blogger referred. Payouts are based on money spent by the advertiser and money earned by the blogger. See the chart below for payouts. Their average advertiser spends several hundred dollars so most referrals will be worth at least $25 (according to their website).
You’ll then want to put one of their ads on your site or a text link to start taking advantage of their referral bonuses. Can’t hurt to get an ad on your blog right? Get started with
Sponsored Reviews now.
Next up we have
PayPerPost which is another great pay for review site. They offer the largest sponsored blogging network with the greatest amount of offers along with a forum where bloggers can post questions, etc. They also pay you a $20 bonus after you complete your first review post. The review post is easy…you just need to write about
PayPerPost and they give you $20. Pretty quick way to make a quick $20.
One bad thing I noticed while browsing their marketplace is the restrictions on a few of the reviews. For example, you couldn’t write a review and post it on blogspot.com, wordpress.com, or myspace.com and you must be located in North America, Asia, or Europe only. That doesn’t mean if you have a blogger blog or wordpress blog using your own domain or hosted on your own site you can’t write a review. All I’m saying is make sure you read the review details carefully so you don’t waste your time writing a post only to discover you won’t get credit for it.
They also have a scoring system which might be a barrier to you on some post reviews. It’s usually the higher payouts that are looking for nice reviews from established high ranking sites. They utilize Google Page Rank and Amazon’s Alexa rankings to factor in what your site’s “score” will be.
PayPerPost also offers a referral affiliate program with some pretty nice payouts as well. You will get paid $15 for each referral once the referees first blog posting is reviewed, approved and then finally accepted 30 days later. This means they need to go all the way through the process in order for it to be a legit referral. Again, not a bad payout for just putting a banner or link on your blog. It’s cool because you can see which referrals you currently have signed up and the total amount you potentially could earn (assuming they convert all the way mentioned above).
SummaryIf I were you, I’d sign up for both
Sponsored Reviews and
PayPerPost and see which one works best for you. There is no rule preventing you from having two accounts and writing reviews from both sites and you can promote whichever you choose. That’s what I did and it also gives you a bigger selection of available reviews to write. After you sign up, make sure you get some affiliate banners on your blog so you have another avenue to make money. Just imagine if you write a dozen or so reviews a month and get a couple referrals. You could easily earn a few hundred extra bucks a month for some pretty minimal work!
I wish these sort of sites were available when I was in college because I had tons of free time and needed to make money. I could have easily earned $500+ a month writing a couple reviews a day!
