This morning I woke up to around 40 emails, over half of which was spam. I almost deleted a message with the subject, “Your Site Has Been Pre-Approved at Reviewme.com,” until I realized that ReviewMe is a new project by the great folks over at Text-Link-Ads.

So, I decided to see what it’s all about.

ReviewMe says that it allows advertisers to “get your service or Web site reviewed by bloggers, gaining your site traffic, invaluable feedback, and word of mouth buzz” and bloggers to “get paid to review services and Web sites that are of interest to your readers, and reap the benefits of conversation with advertisers.”

While it sounded enticing to get paid just to write up a review of something, it sounded a lot like selling out to me, and that’s never cool. However, ReviewMe is paying $25,000 to bloggers to review them, so I decided to take a shot at it to see exactly what it’s all about (in other words, yes, I’m getting paid for this…).

One thing that irked me about the site is that I was finding it pretty difficult to find out any sort of details. For example, how long do the posts have to be? Do the reviews have to be positive? What if I hate the service I’m asked to review? Do I need to say that I’m getting paid to write it?

Currently there is no “help” page or FAQ, and I couldn’t find anywhere that had answers to these questions. Eventually when I accepted an offer to review ReviewMe, they gave me this little snippet under the details for that specific offer:

You must disclose that the post is a paid post in some way. Here are some ideas: “Sponsored Post:”, “The following is a paid review:” “Advertisement:”.

Reviews must be at least 200 words. Use whatever length you feel is appropriate aside from the minimum of 200 words.

I’m still not sure whether this is the same for all reviews, or whether each advertiser decides on the rules.

Each site has it’s own price set by an algorithm pretty much just like that for Text-Link-Ads, and advertisers will find your site in the same way. If you get an offer to review a site or service, you do not have to accept it or review anything that you don’t want to.

Overall it looks like a good idea, and as I often share links to other sites and services I feel worthy, if somebody’s willing to give me money as an added bonus for doing so I’m not going to turn that down.

Just don’t expect me to be selling out anytime soon, because that just sucks. swan