A Review of the Top Blog Advertising Sites
Posted June 21st, 2007 by Brian Gilley Unless you've been living under a rock for the last year, you already know about blog review web sites. In this post I'll list some of the top contextual blog advertising companies with a brief description of what you get from each service. The attraction of blog review web sites from the perspective of a web site owner is contextual one-way links from blogs. You can buy a contextual one-way link to your site starting at around $10 per review from a few of these services, such as the one from Blogsvertise.com. Let us know if we missed a site that should fit in this list. We'll continue to add to this list of blog advertising sites, so bookmark it for future updates. Thanks to Alex (from Merkados Interactive Marketing ) for help with this list.Blogsvertise.com
Blogsvertise.com offers webmasters lots of blog categories to choose from such as travel, web design, and health among others. Blog reviews ordered are fairly easy to control, i.e. it's fairly easy to pick and choose from relevant blogs to review your site versus blogs that may be way off-topic. Advanced controls offer sorting by PageRank, Alexa score, and even number of Yahoo back links! Decent ranked blog reviews start at around $10 each. Good ones run upwards of $20 or more though.
Payperpost.com Blog Reviews
Payperpost.com is the most popular of the blog review web sites online, with a huge network of bloggers who are part of their network. A good quality blog reviews from Payperpost.com will set you back around $30 or more. You don't have any real control to first review the web sites that will review your web site. But they do allow a few goof sorting methods for choosing bloggers and (hopefully) eliminating most junk blogs from writing a review. Other sorting includes industry niche, Alexa score, and PageRank. You can also exclude those free hosted blog platforms like Myspace.com and blogspot.com (which have little to no value in many cases).
ReviewMe.com
ReviewMe.com is perhaps one of the more pricey blog review sites out there. Some reviews can run upwards of $2,500 each - not bad for a 300-500 word write up, heh Shoemoney? Typically, you could expect to pay around $40-80 for a web site review though. ReviewMe lets you search by tag, starred ranking system (their own 1 to 5 star system for ranking the quality of the blog), and price. The effectiveness of ReviewMe blog reviews we;ve purchased would receive 4 out of 5 stars for overall quality. We'd recommend a manual review of each blog you'd consider relevant in the search engines before buying. Determining which one gives the most value is the key picking the right blogger to review your site in ReviewMe.
SponsoredReviews.com
SponsoredReviews.com is much like ReviewMe.com and allows for advertisers to search by "Total Rank," a score SponsoredReviews.com gives based on several measurements such as PageRank and Alexa score. Other features include a low 35% transaction fee, meaning the blogger gets 65% of the total, so on a $150 blog review the blogger would get $98! This is the lowest transaction fee versus other competitor in the contextual advertising marketplace. Their Hybrid system is also the only one that allows both advertisers and bloggers to search for each other. Their bidding system also allows bloggers and advertisers to negotiate pricing.
Smorty.com
Reviews written from Smorty.com bloggers must have a minimum of 150 words and a maximum of about 400 words. Bloggers get paid for the reviews approved by advertisers. The interface for advertisers is really simple to use. All of the available writing opportunities are listed on the panel for you to accept/decline. Something which I found lacking at Smorty was the lack of RSS feeds in the system. From experience with other blog review sites it would be easier for bloggers to keep track of available opportunities via RSS feeds. Many similar services have integrated RSS feeds and this system works well for bloggers. Additional Notes: Payment through Paypal, weekly payments for bloggers, and no minimum payout!
B5media.com
B5media.com seems to be a little more off the beaten path and not really formatted like the other blog review sites listed so far. We have not used b5media yet, so cannot comment on exact pricing or their interface. Their blog network seems to be limited at 200 or so blogs total, but worth inquiring about if you are looking to expand from the more well known sites above.
Reviewback.com
Reviewback.com is a slightly different approach for bloggers. You can find bloggers that are interested in the same topics and subjects that you are. Using their search features, you can contact and organize reviews with fellow bloggers and copywriters. Registering is free, but I would watch for reciprocation of links. Contextual reciprocation isn't necessarily a bad thing unless done in large numbers between blogs. If mixed well enough within posts and categories, it shouldn't be much of a problem though.
Blogitive.com
We've used Blogitive.com for several clients over the past few months. The return and pricing was pretty good. Here are some things to consider. The post must have at least 100 words. There must be at least two posts between each sponsored post and these posts must have at least 50 words. Each link will be on it’s own page, with no more than three other links on that page - Each Blog post is usually stored on a unique permanent URL from the rest of the posts of that particular month. Last, each link will be left up indefinitely, guaranteed for up to 1 year.
PayU2Blog.com
PayU2Blog pays you a flat rate of $5.00 per completed assignment regardless of your blog’s PR or traffic level. Payments are made every 2 weeks via Paypal and bloggers cannot express a negative opinion regarding the advertiser’s product. From reading reviews of other blog review sites online, PayU2Blog doesn't really provide much information for bloggers or advertisers. It looks like the payout to bloggers along with inefficiencies of their process might be playing a role in their lack of followers.
Bloggerwave.com
A fairly new contender, Bloggerwave.com looks to have some catching up to do in comparison to Blogsvertise.com or Payperpost.com. Several other blogs have mentioned making $10 with minimum 50 words in their post from Bloggerwave.com. That's a quick 10 bucks! We have not tried this service out but will test it over the next week, so we'll update on the ease of use and quality of their blogs and interface. Perhaps in the meantime someone over at Bloggerwave will see this and at least update their homepage title tag to something other than "Bloggerwave Default(Home)" - not very descriptive or useful if you ask me...
Weblogsinc.com
Perhaps we should've moved Weblogsinc.com up on the list but since this service will likely only cater to those with deep pockets, we decided it doesn't necessarily fit into the same mold as several of the mainstream paid blog review sites. Several of the popular blogs within the Weblogsinc.com network are Engadget, Autoblog, and Joystiq. In order to receive pricing you have to contact a guy named Steve so that he can "tailor a solution that best meets your needs."
InBlogAds.com
If it's monthly recurring fees you're into and a relatively small and oblivious network of sites to choose from, then InBlogAds.com might be for you! I'm not sure why a web site offering contextual links would charge monthly for them when so many of their competitors are offering the one-time fee. Their network of sites seems tiny, at less than around 75 sites in their whole network. My advice to InBlogAds owner(s) would be to change over to a new flat-fee business model like their competitors and use another platform. Theirs was definitely free of useful features.
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