However, methods I’ve previously tried seem to be kind of hit or miss. (press releases, digg, etc). This solves the problem – you just pay for the review.

I think for some reason that people have this socialistic, utopian view of bloggers – that all bloggers should not be interested in making money or should just right their blogs for the good of humanity. I think that’s crap. If bloggers want to make money with their blogs, more power to them.

It is easy enough to do the same with various tools and plugins, display affiliate or CPA links on your pages or in your feeds with no personal recommendation.

There is certainly more money being made in niches, outside the IM marketplace than within it, you just have to find those niches.

From a search engine point of view, a paid link should be worse than a paid review. Often paid links have no relevance at all.

If the Blog Herald did another 100 blogs in 100 days, but accepted donations for inclusion for quality sites, at the Blog Herald’s discretion (similar to Yahoo), would the site reviews really be unethical and insanely biased?
In many ways the long-term monetary benefits of reviewing something on a “friendly” site are more significant, if they reciprocate regularly.

Good useful content doesn’t guarantee links, a prime example is my Disclosure Policy Plugin. It isn’t newsworthy to link to potential solutions to disclosure.

The difference, however, is that I don’t believe that people in the Internet Marketing world will actively question the motives behind their gurus to the extent that bloggers might about A-listers.

Which is a pity.

I find that there’s a lot of blind faith out there in the Internet Marketing crowd. I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I’d love to know if any of the numbers you describe involve JV deals that are NOT related to marketing Internet Marketing products.

And of course, I expect Jim Kukral to jump out of the wood work at any minute to debate the differences between affiliate marketing and pay per posting, but I think you illustrate an excellent point.

At the end of the day, advertisers are paying you to write about something — all that matters is how they compensate you … per post, per lead, or per sale.

Cheers
Tony.

Some people really do value their mailing lists that high, it was bound to come to blogging eventually too.

Here is just one example

(link to the Rich Jerk forum, not an affiliate link)
http://www.therichjerk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2574

http://www.sponsoredreviews.com/blog/?p=7

Thanks for the mention.

You make some great points. Your concerns about having no limit on the price a blogger can charge is well worth looking at in depth.

It will be extremely rare though that a blogger would take a large amount of money only to write a biased review. Most bloggers that could demand $1000+ per review have audiences that would never tolerate anything even closely resembling a biased review.

and our required disclosure insures that their audiences will be paying close attention, keeping them in line.

Having no limit on the price opens up the market to sites that might not have considered it otherwise. It also allows bloggers to be competitive, which will help bring prices down. I have seen lots of people complaining that their price in Reviewme is too high and they would like to lower it in order to encourage more sales.

We also have a stats system that will encourage bloggers to keep their rates reasonable.

Another thing to consider is the quality of reviews that have already been produced from sites like ReviewMe. It is very clear that bloggers take their responsibility very seriously. The reviews we have been seeing have all been well-balanced.

We will be keeping our eyes open for any abuses. It is something we take very seriously….