Recently there has been a lot of buzz about advertising via. sponsored reviews. I wasn’t sure what all the talk was about, so I decided to research it personally and then publish my findings. There seems to be two minds about sponsored reviews. There are people that love them and people that hate them. Actually, this opinion is hardly surprising.
Let me start at the beginning. Some of you out there may not know what advertising via. sponsored reviews are. Sponsored reviews are products that you review on your blog. Companies will give you their products to recommend, and you give them a nice plug on your site. If you love the product it can be quite the symbiotic relationship. The problem comes when you don’t really like what they have to offer. But I’ll talk about that later.
There are many different sites and places to find sponsors that want you to review their products on your blog site. Of course, to get many offers, your site has to already be fairly popular. This can be achieved through other advertising methods. Once you get the sponsors you have to write a post about their product, usually in a positive light.
There are a few companies that like honest reviews, but let’s face it, a poor review of a product is hardly going to make people want to run out and buy it. If you are OK with fudging the truth a little for extra cash, then sponsored reviews will present no problem to you.
Most people seem to be fine with the idea of advertising via. sponsored reviews as long as the bloggers mention that this particular advertising post is a sponsored review. A lot of bloggers are not comfortable with reviewing products and pretending to like them just to bring in some extra money. They want to show loyalty to their visitors and only recommend something that they really feel is a good product.
However, there might be more benefits to advertising via sponsored reviews than there are drawbacks.
One of the main benefits to advertising via. sponsored reviews is that of link building. When the links and keywords are embedded into your posts, they stay there for as long as you keep the post. This is a great unique form of advertising for your blog that will continually bring in new visitors to your site for as long as people are interested in the product that you reviewed.
Another advantage to advertising via. sponsored reviews is the fact that your review is completely original content. Sometimes if articles or other forms of advertising are used those articles and ads appear elsewhere on the Internet. This makes the search engines throw out some of the duplicate data from their systems to keep their systems streamlined. If your blog has the same content as another site, then you run the risk of not showing up in search engine results.
Adding sponsored links to your page also increases your chances for back links. This is the process of having other sites link back to your site with the original link. It seems confusing, but in the online world this is one of the best ways to validate your site and to prove that you have an awesome site worth visiting. It also improves your chances of appearing higher up on search engine results.
All of these reasons to place sponsored reviews on your blog may or may not outweigh the ethical issues. You have to decide if sponsored reviews are something you want to offer. No one can make you decide one way or the other.