This is a Sponsored Review:

Good news for us writers and bloggers. There’s another potential income stream for us called ReviewMe.com, from the creators of Text Link Ads. It’s like product placement, but a bit different. What you do is you create an account with ReviewMe.com and submit your blog or your site –- you can submit up to 6 sites. If your site is accepted, advertisers can then commission you to write a review –- 200 words minimum -- about their products or their sites if they find that your blog or site is a perfect fit for their products or services. The good thing is that you are not required to write a positive review, but are rather encouraged –- by ReviewMe.com -- to write a constructive write-up.

Signing up is easy. You just create an account, and then submit your sites one by one. In my case, when I submitted WriteLit.com and FilipinoWriter.com, both sites were immediately listed in their directory. I’m not sure if this is because I am already a user of their other service, Text Link Ads, or because their system is hooked to the ranking service Alexa.com. My guess is that it’s because of the latter. At any rate, FilipinoWriter.com was rated with a one star, which means that the advertiser will pay ReviewMe.com 40 US dollars. And since a reviewer always gets 50% commission, I will earn $20. Not bad eh. WriteLit.com meanwhile was automatically rated with two stars –- perhaps because of the quality and the number of links it gets –- and is priced at $60. So that means I will be earning $30 for every review -- sponsored that is -- I will post on WriteLit.com. Which is exactly what I will be earning for this write-up. You see, ReviewMe.com, as a marketing come-on, is giving away a total payment fund of $25,000 for new users who will review ReviewMe.com itself.

Now, of course, there is a question of whether this service is ethical. In my opinion, I think it is, since ReviewMe.com has put in place guidelines to avoid deception. For example you may have noticed the ‘This is a Sponsored Review’ line at the top of this article. ReviewMe.com requires you to place such a notice before your reviews. Also, advertisers are prohibited from requiring positive reviews. But there is the side issue, of course, of won't this deter advertisers from seeking ReviewMe.com’s services if they won’t be assured of a good review? I think that ReviewMe.com is banking on the advertisers realizing that the payoff lies more on the most likely effects of reviewers talking about your site or product. First, it will create an online marketing buzz, and second, there’s the most likely outcome that the links generated by these reviews will increase the advertisers’ rankings in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).