PayPerPost and ReviewMe are the top two contenders offering sponsored content marketing.

Through their service, you can purchase a link from another blog. The blogger actually writes a blog article about your product, service, or website, on their blog, and it includes a link to your website. So basically, you're buying an inbound link from a blogger.

The way it works is like this...

1. The service has a large base of bloggers signed up with them, and categorized into subjects.

2. An advertiser can buy a review from the service, either targeting a specific blog, or opening up the offer to any blogger who wants to accept it.

3. Buying a review from a specific blog is usually much more expensive, ranging between $40.00 to $200.00, depending on how popular that blog is.

4. While opening up an offer to any blogger often costs as little as $5.00 to as high whatever you want. The higher you offer, the more bloggers will accept.

Does it Work?

Actually, yes. I purchased a review over a year ago for my dog blog. I targeted one particular blog, that seemed to have a pretty good ranking on Technorati, and had several inbound links according to Google. I paid $100.00 for it. The blogger earned $50.00. She gave me a good review, with a few inbound links to me.

Eventually, Google did credit that inbound link to me, and it still shows up when I do a "Backward Links" search on Google.

Recently, there's a lot of talk that Google is penalizing bloggers that participate in PayPerPost, though I've disputed this here.

The question becomes, how much is an inbound link worth to you?

Remember that the end goal of all this is to get Google to credit that inbound link to you, and there's no guarantee of that. Google will not credit all inbound links to your website. Many are ignored, actually. But inbound link from blogs seem to have a high success rate in getting credited by Google. Services like PayPerPost and ReviewMe have popped up because of this high success rate.

And by the way, I sell paid reviews directly from this blog, click here. (shameless plug).

Labels: Paid Reviews