No offense to all that do, but hear me out anyways and you’ll probably change your mind.

I was talking to Jim @ The Net Fool yesterday on MSN… he told me that he was interested in buying a paid review on TUK and enquired about the cost. Now, I could have taken the money quite easily – this blog makes nowhere near what it should – I however advised him against it. Why? That’s what I’ll be talking about now.

You Are A Moron If You Think Buying Paid Reviews Will Get You A Decent Chunk Of Exposure.

Let’s take the biggest blogger in this niche right now – that is the “make money online” niche that everyone craves to dominate. Despite well… not talking about anything that has helped make anyone money over the last year and a half, John Chow does fairly well with his blog – so well in fact that he charges $500 for a review and gets at least ten or so a month.

Now fair enough – the man does have 30,000 RSS subscribers, and quite a chunk of traffic. However, I will say this once, and some of you may disagree (feel free to add in a comment, those are always good ) – if you have bought a review on John Chow ever, you are a moron.

Sadly, 90% of the time these reviews do not convert – in the case of the Social Millionaire, it did because the hype built up was pretty decent. However, how many of you can remember which website John reviewed last week? Go back two weeks – nope, nothing. Whereas reviews build buzz short term, in the long run they are worthless – should a website that buys a lot of reviews stop doing so, their traffic will near die off completely (and there are a few very good examples of this in the blogosphere).

Before someone points this out – I have bought a review in the past, however to the best of my knowledge I have only paid for a solitary one. That is the review of Blog Premiere on Can’t Get Rich – I however did not buy it for the exposure. I bought it a) because it was a cheap price b) because I wanted some feedback from someone that is not afraid to call shit, well – shit and c) because I wanted to support CGR, as it’s a blog I like. The picture was pretty cool too

Apart from that, I have never bought reviews with the money out of my own pocket – if I have, it was when this blog was a baby blog (and that was a big mistake) – I cannot remember, to be honest as that was ages ago. I do not believe I have bought much advertising either, in my time at TUK – it is the lesser of two evils, but you still do not need it.

A review is a one time thing – and then bam, it is gone forever. As little as 24 hours of exposure – you are paying $50+ on most blogs for this. $50 for 24 hours of exposure on a review gets you a day or less exposure for around $2/hour; buying an ad slot on a trafficked blog from around $30 – $35 gets you a month’s worth of exposure for $0.05/hour. See the difference? If people see your brand image around enough, they will visit – it may not even be from the website you bought advertising from, but say they see the same name of X who is advertising on Blog A and has left a comment on Blog B. That’s twice they’ve seen your name, so when they come across that comment at Blog B – you’ll get a visit.

You should only buy paid reviews if you don’t have time.

Now fine – companies, people that run organizations and stuff – I can understand them not having time, and I fully agree with the buying-paid-reviews-on-every-blog-under-the-sun thing. On the other hand, blog owners like you and me – social bloggers – stop trying to pretend you’re busy, you’ve got the time. If you have the time to run a blog, you have the time to build free exposure for yourself – and the best thing about free exposure is that it is well – FREE. (for the slightly dense ones out there )

Two things – I may sound like a stuck record that continues droning on, but take my advice and you’ll understand why.

GUEST POSTS

I cannot believe how many people pass up guest posts on medium sized blogs. Heck – even the big ones; why pay $500 for the Chow review (which isn’t even written by him) when you can have a guest post put on there… free? This is why I cannot understand companies that pay for reviews – heck, pay me a couple hundred and I’ll write you a killer guest post for Chow; bang, you’ve saved $300

Jokes aside, a guest post allows you to showcase you and your blog far more than a paid review ever would – what if the writer of the paid review say – had a bad day and doesn’t really like your site? Negative exposure. On the other hand, with a guest post you are pulling the strings – to take a lesson from my Psychology class, it is very easy to shape people’s minds if you know how.

That’s not all. A paid review is say – a one time thing. With guest posts, you can further them – why stop at one? Submit a guest post once a week for two months and run a “Series of X” – you are eventually going to stick to the minds of that blog’s readers and there is a good chance you could nick about half of their community. I’m not talking about big blogs, but the little guys – between around 100 – 700 RSS subscribers. You nick half of my readership over the course of two months, you nick half of Blog B, C, and D’s readership, and you’re doing pretty fine.

Another thing – contests. Do you guys remember Gyutae Park’s? He had hundreds of reviews about him – completely free, and the total value of those reviews probably surpassed the value of the contest prize. How hard is it to get prizes worth a lot? Heck, bump up them values – an hour consultation with me is probably worth a couple dollars (hehe ) but people have decided to value it at $50 – $80. There are also simple things that can greatly inflate the value of contest prizes – see, I could donate 10,000 copies of my $1 eBook to a contest, and bang – prize value is over $10,000. Is it really? No, as no more than a few hundred will be given away, but people like to see big numbers and that it how you can do so. Give away PLR – heck, rewrite a PLR product, stick it up as your own, value it at $xx and give away one hundred copies. People will be clambering over themselves to join your contest.

Will this post hurt review sales for this blog? Probably. I don’t really care much, to be honest – I make a lot more elsewhere than this blog ever will, and I can take a bit of a loss financially to save newbies from doing the same.

This is a rant of sorts, but one hopes I raised decent-ish points. What do you think?

Yes, I am looking for guest posters, so if you feel up for it you can start the above tomorrow. Also, I have received more than one hundred domain suggestions, so I will look over them and announce the winner over the course of the week.