Colin Charles Agenda

A recent edition of Business 2.0 had the cover story titled Blogging for Dollars. It seemed to highlight how advertising dollars was bringing in money for bloggers. I’ve known people say that they’ve become “full-time bloggers” just by writing product reviews (of products they don’t even own/touch - so they just lift off Gizmodo, etc. and add opinions), and say that AdSense (or similar) pay-offs is all you need to survive.

This is what led me to try ReviewMe. It calculates a blog’s worthiness by a mix of Technorati rankings, Alexa ratings, and estimated RSS feed subscribers (probably taken via the Technorati rankings? Or maybe blogs that have a FeedBurner ranking might help?). Once its given you a ranking (via stars), it gives you a price tag as to what your blog is worth.

Assuming your blog is worth $250, the moment an advertiser decides to “hire you”, ReviewMe gets to keep 50% of the earnings, and you, the blogger, get to take the remaining 50%. Thats $125 richer you can be, just for writing a review. All for anything over 200 words.

Thats a range of 10-62.5 cents per word! Way more than struggling newspaper writers are expected to get. But that’s not what interests me. I’m interested in if this entire idea itself can work.

So I took a gander to find the rather (once-famous) Ubuntu Blog. Its got high Technorati rankings, not so high Alexa rankings, and the ReviewMe algorithm decides its worth $250. However, this blog in itself, has not been updated since the end of September 2006!

How does an outdated blog get such high rankings? What about potential advertisers that don’t perform sufficient due diligence, and trust ReviewMe’s ratings? The Ubuntu Blog is a clear example that its statistics might be a bit skewed, as blogs tend to lose readership if they’re not updated frequently.

And Googling for information about increasing one’s Alexa rankings are suspect at best. Everyone that has something to say about it, says you need to install the Alexa toolbar. Which ironically, only runs on Internet Explorer. Why doesn’t the Google PageRank play into getting a higher blog rating, then?

This world of search engine optimization (SEO) is an interesting one. More interesting, its great to see people getting to sit at home in their underwear and blog, podcast, videocast, and experiment with new media, and get paid for it.

And the ReviewMe way is very much like how Zooomr tried to get customers - by giving away 2.5gb account to bloggers. Who wins the game? Its hard to say, but I’m still a Flickr user. This ends my paid experimentation for now; more thoughts to come, I’m sure. (yes, ReviewMe are paying people who have blogs to review them.)

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, media, newmedia, reviewme, seo