Who Can Benefit from Sponsored Reviews?
March 28th, 2007 | Advertising Tips
People tend to associated sponsored reviews or paid blog posts with a company trying to launch a product and looking for some buzz. While companies certainly can benefit from this type of online marketing they are not the only ones. Below you will find an overview of the groups that can leverage sponsored reviews to promote their product or services. Stay tuned for the next articles on the series where we will analyze each group individually.
Companies: as mentioned before companies can reap a lot of benefits from a marketing campaign based on sponsored reviews. There are plenty of research confirming that “word of mouth†marketing produces better results than traditional advertising, and that is just what sponsored reviews stand for. Getting bloggers to review and talk about your product will produce both tangible (traffic, search engine ranking, valuable feedback) and intangible (brand awareness, trust) results.
Bloggers: blogs appeared on the Internet as personal diaries where people would share their thoughts and day-to-day experiences. Over the time, however, they evolved into more specialized websites providing a wide range of useful information for the readers, from tech news to photograph tutorials. Blogs are certainly becoming mainstream, but creating a popular blog is no easy task given the crowded market place. Many bloggers are starting to realize that sponsored reviews represent an efficient method to kick-start a blog and gain readers on the initial phases.
Webmasters: the concept described on the previous point applies to webmasters as well. Whether you develop websites for yourself or for clients it might be really difficult to inject that initial traffic that will get the ball rolling. Sponsored reviews are no substitute for a well-designed and functional website, but provided you have those in place the reviews can certainly make the difference on the overall success of the site.
SEOs: sponsored reviews represent another useful tool on the SEO expert belt. Check out the article “10 Reasons Why Sponsored Reviews are Great for Link Building†and you will get a good idea why investing some money into reviews could definitely be a good idea. Benefits include links blended into the content, second-tier links, high relevancy and so on.
Affiliate marketers: Affiliate marketing is all about click-through rates and conversion rates. What if sponsored reviews could provide an equivalent or even better solution to Pay-per-Click schemes? Smart affiliate marketers will certainly be able to leverage paid reviews to create successful affiliate programs, after all they are in control of the sites where the links will appear and of the price.
Daniel it looks like you have a good system. Do you have an affiliate program so we can promote it?
Left by CVOS on March 30th, 2007
CVOS,
We will have an affiliate program soon.
Based on the initial feedback we have gotten in the first few weeks being live, we are making some great changes to our core functionality. Once that is completed we will be launching our affiliate program.
Left by Jarrod Hunt on April 2nd, 2007
I am very happy with the initial results of the advertising campaign that I purchased with SponsoredReviews.
I am covering a category not mentioned above, political websites, campaigns and political organizations.
Not only did I see an increase in links, but I have seen an increase in comments, visitors, dialogue and interest in our brand new website at NoMoreIncumbents.org.
We launched our campaign the first week that SponsoredReview went live. They reacted to several of our requests for improvements (such as the group approve/deny capabilities) and more.
The service is new, but does have much promise.
As a blogger I have not personally taken an opportunity yet through SponsoredReview (through my tech blogs and other sites). I plan on trying this more over the next few days.
In that regard I’d make one quick suggestion. Blogs need to be able to be setup with a desired price range. Depending on the review requirements I might take an op on a PR4 blog for $$7.50, $10, $20 or $50. If you want custom built graphics and video tutorials maybe even $75 or $100, depending.
But as is there are limits on what I can bid up or down on that sometimes slows things down.
Best Regards,
Brett
Left by brettbum on April 4th, 2007
Bret, using sponsored reviews for political campaigns and organizations is something very innovative, and I am glad you had positive results.
A price range could be used, but it would also confuse the advertisers a little bit.
There are several changes and new features coming soon, so stay tuned and thanks for sharing your experience.
Left by Daniel on April 5th, 2007
Thanks Daniel.
I agree that the price range could confuse things a bit, but as there is a natural ‘haggling’ aspect to the market place on sponsored review, sometimes it is difficult to bid things out to their natural price point.
Maybe the price should be a buy it now price and leave another option for negotiations.
I am noticing that some advertisers are requiring more than one link. The system is not automated to check for this but I think its a desirable option to consider adding.
I had a different review campaign that did not go through SponsoredReview as I need to insure that a particular review would have 3 links (1 to the target site, 1 to an example review, and one to a download page where a reader could take action and get the services desired).
I sampled a different service for this campaign as it was possible to put multiple links in the offering. I’d like to sample the same campaign here (partly because your service fees are slightly cheaper & Partly because I like having the ability of pre-approving the blogs for this particular type of campaign)
Best Regards,
Brett
Left by brettbum on April 5th, 2007
Hi Brett,
In regards to the system automatically checking for links. We will have that functionality very soon. Within 1-2 weeks. There will be a few other features being added soon.
I also wanted to comment about the price ranges for the bloggers.
I think its a good idea, and it fits well with some of the other plans we have. It is something we will be giving more thought too as we roll out new versions.
Left by Jarrod Hunt on April 5th, 2007