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So, I decided to give ReviewMe a try a few weeks ago. Now, first things first… I am not a whore and am not being paid for this write up. ;-) I’m simply doing it because it was something new I tried and I figured I’d share my experience. Now that we have that out of the way…
The site is incredibly easy to use and you’d have to be missing some intelligence not to figure out what to do and how to do it pretty fast. Click the advertisers button and get taken to a page explaining in short and sweet fashion how it works. Do a search for your topic and get a list of sites in your category.
Now, I’ll admit that some of these sites on the cheaper end weren’t attractive to me as someone looking mainly for traffic and exposure. But, I wasn’t looking to go cheap. I wanted a big site that could give me big exposure. I’ll be honest in saying the link wasn’t a huge thing for me. I recently had gotten exposure on another major blog in the industry this site falls under (for free) and the traffic was amazing. I was happy to repeat that exposure by paying for it.
I quickly found the top sites and was impressed to see a huge blog, with an Alexa rank in the 10-15K range with over a quarter of a million backlinks in Yahoo. This site obviously has a lot of readers and a lot of traffic. Sold. I signed up for an account and ordered my review. I was told that if the reviewer accepted the assignment, the review would be posted within 48 hours.
My only disappointment with the service came when there was no way for the reviewee and reviewer to communicate. I never even got notice of whether or not the reviewer actually accepted my request. I only knew they had when it showed on their blog about 44 hours later.
The site brought me a couple hundred visitors initially, which was a little below my expectations. But, it has continued sending visitors daily since the review launched (and yes, it has long been off the main page now, this site blogs several entries per day). Those visitors have also made the site money.
The site I had reviewed was given two links to the homepage with the site name as the anchor. The review was close to 300 words and they also added our logo to the review (which was also linked for a third link to the homepage from the review page). The blogger clearly stated that he was paid to review the site, but that all of the opinions about the site were his own and that only his time to review the site, not his thoughts *about* the site had been paid for.
Another thing to note is that the site I had reviewed is most certainly a good one. I might be biased, but I think it is one of the best in the sector. So, the great review we were given as a result no doubt helped with bringing traffic through.
All in all, it seemed like a good service. As long as they don’t sink to allowing crap blogs in and keep this on the higher end of the quality scale, I’ll definitely be back for more exposure in the future.
And speaking of reviews… you may have noticed that since the launch of this blog there has always been a button linking to Restaurantica, which is the baby and creation of my good friend Ryan. It was originally aimed at Ontario and it’s a pretty big deal there (we’ve actually been to restaurants that have had their Restaurantica score hanging on their wall). And now it’s expanding, with its first new target being Nevada restaurants.
Since a lot of us were just in Las Vegas and likely ate at many different places throughout the week, get your asses over there and review the best restaurant you ate at during the week or destroy the worst one. And next Vegas PubCon, be sure to remember to hit them up to see what the best restaurants in Nevada are. No, really… go… now. ;-)
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Hey Rae, thanks for the feedback on ReviewMe.com as you can imagine we have a health “to do” list but we we will get a messaging system in place and you should see it in the coming weeks. Thx!
Very encouraging. Have been thinking about taking part in the ReviewMe experience. This has given me a push to do so.