AffiliateBrand.com by Gene Kavner

Amazon Customers Vote - A Great Lesson in Interactive Marketing

Over the last couple of weeks I have been following a great example of Interactive Marketing, an Amazon.com promotion called "Amazon Customers Vote". What makes this initiative interesting is that it introduces an interactive component to traditional online marketing promotions.

An Amazon Gift Certificate makes the perfect holiday gift!

Typically, online marketing involves merchants setting up either advertising campaigns or affiliate marketing campaigns. Advertising campaigns are those where merchants purchase advertising on third-party sites or via sponsored link brokers such as Google. Affiliate campaigns involve merchants setting up programs that enable almost any web site (also known as the affiliate site) to promote merchant's products or services and receive a referral fee for a product sold to a customer coming from the affiliate site.

The problem with these typical online marketing initiatives is that they lack any interactivity between the consumer and the merchant. Remember when you were back in school and you had a professor who simply lectured to you vs. a professor that engaged you in a discussion during the class? Certainly we all learned much more from the more engaging professor. Amazon has brought this interactivity to online marketing.

The "Amazon Customers Vote" promotion picks 4 tremendous deals each week and allows customers to vote on their favorite one. These deals are not your typical sale but a deeply discounted promotion, far below the going price for a similar product on the market. The deal that receives the most votes during the week is offered for sale on the following Thursday morning. What is the catch? Extremely limited inventory which may be purchased for the offered price.

Here are the current deals to vote on (votes counted until Thursday, November 30, 2006):

Here are the results from the week 1 vote (ending November 23, 2006):

Week 1 (Nov. 16-23)
Xbox 360 Core System Amazon Price: $299.99 Winning Price: $100	Prime Membership + $100 Toys Promotional Certificate Amazon Price: $179.00 Runner-up Price: $120 Mongoose Domain Dual-Suspension Mountain Bike Amazon Price: $139.00 Runner-up Price: $60 Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses Interactive Genevieve Doll Amazon Price: $49.84 Runner-up Price: $25

As you can see, all deals are excellent and they would quickly sell out of any such offers, so why does Amazon need you to vote on them? Because it creates a way for you to interact with the site, offer your vote (and who doesn't want to be heard these days?) and it gets you to come back again and again. While you are waiting for the deal, you may as well purchase something else at Amazon.

If you dig a bit deeper, you can see that this is a marketing trick (a good one at that). There is no real reason why you need to vote on the deals. The amount of inventory that Amazon makes available is so small that items sell out within seconds (if not fraction of a second) if you follow online discussions. The real reason is to get you to the Amazon web site and it works. So many people have tried to buy at the advertised prices that the Amazon web site came to a standstill at the time when these products became available for purchase.

So, the lesson of this campaign is... Try to include some interactivity in your marketing campaign. This is something I will be thinking a bit about and hope to have an example of something interactive here on AffiliateBrand.com.

Do you offer a way for your readers to interact with your site? Please leave a comment here and I will try to highlight your site in my later post.

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!

First Of A Kind Payment Of Fees On Sales of Gift Certificates

Can't decide what to get someone for the Holidays? If so, you are not alone. Getting that perfect gift is not easy.

Earlier today, Amazon launched a new promotion that allows Amazon affiliates to receive referral fees of 6% on sales of Amazon.com gift certificates -- the first time such promotion was ever offered to Amazon.com Associates. In a well-timed move for the biggest shopping season of the year, Amazon now allows you to offer your visitors an escape from the dilemma of what to buy for their friends and family.

This is an experiment for Amazon. At this time this promotion is due to expire at the end of 2006 but I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon were to continue it permanently.

Gift certificates have quite a number of great characteristics for merchants such as Amazon:

1. Gift certificate purchases are not redeemed immediately. This translates into positive cash flow for the merchant. When a gift certificate is purchased and not redeemed for a period of two weeks (as an example), the merchant collects interest on the value of the gift certificate for the two week period.

2. Some gift certificates are never redeemed. Some people just misplace or simply forget about a gift certificate they have received. For a merchant with small margins, this is the best outcome: they make a 100% profit on an unredeemed gift certificate.

3. Even a redeemed gift certificate is frequently not redeemed for the exact value of the certificate. Most often, the recipient of the gift certificate will spend over the amount of the certificate in order to not leave any portion of it unspent. Any product purchased that is higher than the value of the certificate automatically carries a benefit to the merchant -- they only need to pay a referral fee on the value of the gift certificate sale, not on the value of the products purchased with the gift certificate.

The reason why Amazon is experimenting is given the significant benefit for Amazon, it is almost a no-brainer to see whether this promotion works. The risks that Amazon faces are on two fronts:

1. Because it is the first time a gift certificate sale carries a referral fee, Amazon does not have historical analytics on how well affiliates will be able to monetize their sites by promoting gift certificates. If gift certificates do not convert well, associates could quickly switch to a better-converting promotion from another merchant.

2. If a gift certificate is sold via an Amazon Associate and then used to purchase an Amazon product from a different (or even the same) Associate, Amazon will have to pay a referral fee twice, once on the sale of the GC, and again, on the sale of the product. Amazon hopes to learn whether this is a frequent occurrence and possibly change rules if this double-payment of fees becomes frequent.

The good news is that almost any site out there can promote an Amazon gift certificate. There is not limitation on the genre of the site, it's content or demographic of their visitors. Anyone can purchase a gift certificate redeemable at Amazon.com with its multi-million product catalog.

So, how do you promote an Amazon.com gift certificate?

First, you must register as an Amazon.com associate. Very simple to do, just follow this link to Amazon.com and fill out their registration form.

Second, visit the "Build Links" section of Associate Central (the Associates dashboard site that appears after you log in).

Third, click on "Banner Links" section. You will see a link to "Gift Certificates" promotional links where you can choose a number of different creatives:

There are quite a few other creatives; above is just to give you the flavor.

Let me know what you think of the Amazon.com gift certificate offer!

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!

Gene Kavner Suggested Reading on Internet Marketing

Beware of Phishing Attack on Amazon Associates

We all know of phishing attacks from crooks spoofing various popular Internet eCommerce destinations. Most notable of those attacks spoofed sites such as PayPal and eBay.  I have personally received quite a large number of such bogus emails.  Those behind these emails hope that customers of eCommerce sites they claim to represent will click on the link and provide personal login information to the impostors while thinking that they are interacting with the legitimate merchant from who the email supposedly originated.

Obviously, the originators of the email do not typically know who is and who isn't a customer of PayPal, for example. What they rely upon is the fact that so many of us are PayPal customers that odds are high that if the email is valid, the recipient is the user of PayPal.

Thanks to Don Demsak of Don Xml's Grok This, I have learned that Amazon Associates have become the victim of the most recent phishing attack.  What makes this attack interesting is that certainly a very small portion of the typical user base is members of the Amazon Associates affiliate program.  If the attack was completely random, the perpetrators would be quite unlikely to find anyone who would be able to provide any kind of login information to them.

So, Don brings up a very valid question:  Whether the originators of the attack were able to somehow parse web sites, find Amazon Affiliate tag information, locate email addresses on the site and then send them an email spoof of Amazon Associates. If so, this would be a very sophisticated attack.

Take a look at the email that is currently going around:

Regardless of methods used for this phishing attack, it is fairly easy to avoid becoming a victim. The following 5 steps will be your good guide:

1.  Do not provide your email address in clear text on your site.  Note that my email address on the left sidebar is provided as an image that you will need to type into your browser in order to email me.
2.  If you do receive an email, make sure that when you mouse-over any links in the email, the URL that corresponds to it matches the URL in the text. In the above email, mousing over the link to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/sign-in.html yielded the actual destination in the http://p10.hostingprod.com domain.
3.  If you were to actually click on the link, make sure that the site is the genuine desitnation site, not based on how it looks but on the URL in the address bar.  Suspect any site which hides the address bar or otherwise does not exactly match the expected destination.  Watch out for misspelled domain names such as http://www.amzoan.com.
4.  Watch out for spelling mistakes in the email message itself.  Because of the stringent US laws, many of the perpetrators are located offshore where English perhaps is not their native language.  In the email above, you'll see "wich is securely incrypted with SLL." on the bottom line.  More properly, this should have read "which is securely encrypted with SSL".
5.  Lastly, I'm not aware of any legitimate organization requesting you to log in because your account needs to be verified.

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!

Amazon Associates Team Releases New and Improved aStore

Yesterday, Amazon Associates announced the official release of its already successful aStore product which allows any web site or blog to easily create a custom store with suggested products for its viewers.  In addition, Amazon has also announced a significant jump in commission for those associates who take advantage of aStore to generate product sales between November 14, 2006 and the end of the year:  additional 4% in commissions (up to $500 per Associate ID), which represents 100% commission bonus for those associates in the lowest compensation tier.   This bonus was also announced for those associates using Amazon Omakase links which will be subject of my future post.

aStore, which has been in beta since August 2006 has proven very popular, with thousands of associates adopting it within just a couple of weeks of its beta release.  The following is the snippet of coverage in various blogs that aStore has received:

Amazon Releases an Early Update to aStore by Gene Kavner (my previous post about aStore)
What is Amazon aStore? by Dave Taylor
Amazon's aStore Creates Affiliate Storefronts by Shawn Collins
Amazon’s Everywhere Strategy by Mitch Ratcliffe / ZDNet
Criticker Shop - With Amazon aStore! by Random Good Stuff

New Features
Amazon has not only officially released its aStore out of beta but it has also followed through on a number of promised updates to aStore.

After releasing several updates in October 2006, this release carries the following new changes:

1. Creation of multiple stores per each associates id.

This was one of the most-requested features by the Amazon affiliates.  The beta version of aStore only allowed a single store, which prevented creation of multiple stores if an affiliate had multiple web sites or wanted to put multiple store with different set of featured products on various pages of the same site.  One could get around the problem by requesting multiple Associates accounts by that strategy would not allow you to combine your sold products to jump in the next commission tier.

The way multiple stores is accomplished is via Amazon Associates tracking ID’s.  You can create new tracking id while creating a new aStore or request a larger number of tracking id’s at a time by simply emailing Amazon Associates at associates@amazon.com.  You will then be able to see how well your stores are doing on Amazon Associates Central by simply selecting the various tracking id’s you’ve created. 

A maximum of 100 aStore tracking id’s are supported for each associates account, so each associate may create up to 100 aStores for each of their Associate ID’s.

One feature that would be nice to have is an ability to make a duplicate copy of any store under a separate tracking id.  This would easily allow you to track purchases from the store based on various campaigns you may be running.  Affiliates who would bid on different PPC inventory could bring customers to their aStore directly and then measure ROI generated by each advertising campaign separately.  Right now this is not possible without a very complicated process of recreating the same aStore for each tracking id multiple times.

2. Display up to 54 products in each category

During the aStore beta, you could only have 9 featured products.  It was a limitation to anyone wishing to offer more products in their aStore.  Overall, it’s a good change but I’m somewhat on the fence about it.  Your customers will still see only 9 products displayed on the front page and will need to click a small “Next” arrow on the bottom.  I wish Amazon would also give its affiliates a way to specify total number of items to show on the front page, so if someone wanted to show 24 products right there in the front, they could.  Hope Amazon takes it as a suggestion for the next release of aStore.

3. Create multiple custom categories containing products from multiple Amazon categories

This is a great addition!  Amazon gives you full flexibility to create as many new categories AND sub-categories as you wish, and add products to the category based 3 options:

a) Add individual products one at a time from any Amazon product line,
b) Add products by Amazon product line filtered by any keywords you specify, or
c) Products from any Listmania list.

This is a great improvement over a limited facility in beta. 

There are several other feature giving you additional flexibility with how products are displayed within various category and subcategory pages.

4% Commission Bonus

In addition, Amazon has also all but doubled the amount of commission most of you can earn from your aStore.  You will receive an additional 4% on the fees you receive (up to $500 per associate) for using aStore.  This means that if you are in the 4% commission tier, your fees double.  Even if you are in the highest tier at 8.5%, you will still receive close to 50% in additional fees up to the $500 bonus limit.  Nice bonus for the biggest shopping quarter of the year. 

To try aStore, you must be an Amazon Associate.  It is very easy to join, simply go to Amazon Associates Central and follow a very simple process.  Then build your own aStore in as little as 5 minutes.

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!

Cat and Mouse Games With Search Engines - Part 2 of 2

Read Part 1 of 2: Cat and Mouse Games With Search Engines

In my post yesterday, I outlined the ongoing battle between Internet marketers and the search engines, namely Google.  In summary, while Google is trying to provide what it considers to be the most relevant search results to consumers based on search queries they type, Internet marketers hope to offer web sites that may or may not be considered as relevant by Google, to appear high in front of the consumers in search result listings.

The problem for the marketers is that Google has taken away all the “easy” ways to game the search ranking algorithms, such as stuffing of keywords in the body of the page and setting up link farms to artificially gain popularity.  The most important ways to gain in the page rank index within the Google algorithm today are:

1. Get high quantity of back links from other “important” sites,
2. Generate unique content not available elsewhere on the Internet,
3. Change / update / add to content frequently,
4. Do the 1-3 above for a long time, consistently.

While marketers clearly understand what they need to do for #2 and #3, accomplishing #1 is not easy.  Somehow, they have to “convince” other popular / important sites to link to them.  Without additional incentives, this becomes long and unpredictable process for marketers, something that their investors will clearly not be patient with.

And thus, PayPerPost and most recently, ReviewMe were born.  Both services provide means by which marketers are able to pay popular / important publishers to provide back links to them, embedded in the middle of other content that search engines will find and process. 

Interestingly, both PayPerPost and ReviewMe have advertised a different business model with some subtle differences between them.  They have both touted the value of using bloggers to generate the buzz for the advertising sites.  While PayPerPost allows marketers a way to solicit mostly positive reviews, ReviewMe offers bloggers an opportunity to be more impartial in their reviews and get paid for any review, whether positive or negative. 

However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the battle is not about traffic that marketers would generate from the reviews of their sites / products / services.  If it was about the traffic, different compensation mechanisms would prevail, such as cost-per-click (CPC) or even cost-per-impression (CPM) business models.  Furthermore, there would be no need to restrict blogs to a certain size – any blog should then be able to generate traffic and receive proportionate compensation for it.  Witness Google AdSense or Amazon Associates which allow almost any publisher into their programs, tracking payments as low as $0.22 for clicks or sales they provide. 

My opinion is that PayPerPost and ReviewMe are really in the business of gaming the Google algorithm much more so than they are in the business of generating the marketing buzz.  Having reviewed various advertising offers on these networks, it is clear to me that advertisers are primarily interested in direct links than they are about publicity.  All require bloggers to link to certain pages on their sites.  And all prohibit small blogs from receiving any compensation, even though this long tail of blogs could conceivably represent 50%+ of their traffic.  The main issue with small blogs is that their links are worth nothing in the algorithm of Google and thus are dismissed. 

For a very similar perspective, check out  Deep Jive Interests post titled How Advertisers REALLY Benefit from the ReviewMe “Revolution”.
Another good analysis from Greg Yardley titled Optimizing Your ReviewMe Purchase.

What we are seeing are the new players in the old Internet marketing / findability game.  History is repeating itself and Google may already be hard at work to figure out how to defeat the new challenge to its algorithm.   In the end, I am very low on the business model of ReviewMe (see my previous detailed analysis titled ReviewMe.com, a Business Model With Nowhere to Go). While I think that the PayPerPost model is slightly better, I am not sure I would endorse it as a long-term success, especially if Google figures out how to “punish” sites using these networks the same way they have done with the link farms.

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Not a member of Amazon Associates? -- Join Amazon Associates, Internet's Largest and Most Successful Affiliate Program -- it's Easy and FREE!

Cat and Mouse Games With Search Engines - Part 1 of 2

Read Part 2 of 2:  Cat and Mouse Games With Search Engines

“If you build it, they will come”, these words from Ray Kinsella in the movie Field of Dreams ring hollow in today’s Internet world.  The big challenge for today’s Internet marketers is that ensuring that your site is the one being visited in the vast ocean of Internet web sites is no simple matter.

On the flip side of the Internet marketing coin is the average consumer surfing the web.  Always searching for something, consumers have turned to the Internet for significant percentage of their shopping needs, or at least for learning about products or services they will later purchase off-line.  Finding relevant information, as I personally discover as one of these consumers is not a simple matter either.

Between these two groups stands one gigantic gate-keeper, namely Google (and to a lesser extent, Yahoo and MSN).  Google did not invent Internet search or search marketing. In the early days of the Internet, there was Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, Alta-Vista, and scores of other smaller search engines.  As consumers do today, they also tried (much more unsuccessfully) to find relevant information on the web. 

Search engines had to ensure that when a consumer searched for something, that they would find the most relevant sites as quickly as possible (in other words, above the fold on the first page of the result set).  Because search engines have always had to determine site relevance to the search query using a scalable, consistent algorithm, Internet marketers have always tried to crack the algorithm in order to get their sites as close as possible to the top.

The tug-of-war that has begun in the dawn of the Internet and continues to this day unabated is between search engines trying to provide the most relevant sites to the consumer searching for something and the marketers trying to get their, possibly not-so-relevant sites in front of those consumers.  This means that Internet marketers are basically playing the cat-and-mouse game with the search engines, trying to game their unpublicized algorithms.

In the early days, this involved Internet marketers stuffing important keywords in the meta tags and in the body of the page.  At the time, search engine algorithms assumed that sites played “fair” and any site that is most relevant to the query would have the right keywords in the right places.  Marketers, however, have figured it out and quickly gamed search engines by placing enough keywords in the body of the pages to get their irrelevant sites resulting high in consumer queries.

Resulting frustration by consumers with existing search engines gave rise to Google which had figured out a new and different algorithm for search.  Google figured that any site with links pointing to it has to be more relevant than a site with fewer links pointing to it.  Cat and mouse games continued with marketers setting up link farms between irrelevant sites in the attempt to game the new Google algorithm.  Google figured this out and has modified its algorithm to include a complex set of requirements for any site to become important enough to be listed high on search query results.  While the Google search rank algorithm is guarded as closely as the formula to Coke, it is commonly accepted that the algorithm involves weighting of sites based on a number of criteria, some of which are:

1. Quantity of back links from other “important” sites,
2. Uniqueness of content,
3. Frequency of content change,
4. How long as the site been around and had items 1-3 above satisfied.

And this brings us to the most recent battle between Internet marketers and the search engines and to the recent headline-generating entrants in the space of Internet marketing: PayPerPost and ReviewMe.

How these two products play in the new cat-and-mouse game between the Internet marketers and the search engines will be the subject of Part 2 of 2: Cat and Mouse Games With Search Engines.

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!

Live by Google, Die by Google

Gene, I started my site at the end of September and got it linked to many high PR ranked sites. Because of this, the site got indexed extremely well with Google and linked from Yahoo as well. All was going great up until 4 - 5 days ago. After my indexed pages went from 47000 on Google up to 97900 indexed pages there - my traffic dropped to almost nothing from around 550 -580 uniques a day now it is like 65 - 75 uniques a day and all my sales have dropped to 0. All is working just fine. All the links still point to my site. All is as it was, except - all my traffic is gone, and so are sales. What could be the problem according to you?

           

Well, I wish I had good news for you.  Your situation is very similar to many others I have personally observed.  When you live by Google you sometimes die by Google as well.        

What happens is Google wants to make sure that the sites that rank high have the following criteria satisfied:

a) they have unique content (something that no other sites have).        
b) they change frequently.        
c) they have been doing this for a loooong time.        
d) they have back links from sites that have a) and b) and c) and d).        

Basically this is how Google determines whether a site is popular.  Popular sites are sites that have links from other popular sites.  Google made the process of obtaining high page rank especially difficult by weeding out fly-by-night web sites and sites that do not have any unique content to offer beyond what is offered by other sites that are already popular.  I cannot tell you why you were actually getting traffic for a while.  Unfortunately, it is a known fact that Google changes its algorithm frequently to ensure a)-d) above is maintained by popular sites.

I suggest you make sure your site has additional content such as product reviews that you collect directly from consumers (if you simply re-syndicate reviews from Amazon, you will not get page rank because Google will consider this redundant).  Also, make sure you add to your content frequently.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
Join Amazon Associates Today -- it's Easy and FREE!

ReviewMe.com, a Business Model With Nowhere to Go

A brand new business, ReviewMe was launched yesterday with a model to help bloggers monetize their blogs by reviewing various advertisers' products and services.  This model is quite similar to the controversial model recently introduced by PayPerPost which is also promising to monetize bloggers' posts.  However, there are several significant differences between the two models.

The main reason for controversy behind PayPerPost's model is that PayPerPost:

1.  Allows advertisers to reject paying for bloggers' posts based on what they write.  This effectively encourages bloggers to only write positive reviews or risk that they will not be paid.

2.  Does not require bloggers to disclose that they are being compensated.  PayPerPost recently launched DisclosurePolicy.org, an organization devoted to setting industry-wide guidelines for disclosing how bloggers are being compensated for their posts.  However, no requirement to disclose is required by PayPerPost, thus potentially leading blog readers to not be aware that the writer's bias may be based on compensation rather than by genuine, impartial motives.

On the other hand, ReviewMe has taken a vastly different approach to compensating bloggers.  Namely, ReviewMe requires that:

1.  Advertisers pay for product reviews ahead of time, with no guarantees that review will be positive, but only that it contain 200+ words, and   

2.  Bloggers explicitly disclose that they are being compensated for their posts.  While this condition is widely talked about on various blogs (see below) and even mentioned on the ReviewMe's own blog, I could not find this requirement anywhere in ReviewMe's Terms and Conditions.  Not sure that being mentioned in a blog entry is good enough to make it policy; however, I'm sure this is just an oversight and ReviewMe will address this in their T&C's asap.

On the surface, ReviewMe has addressed all of the controversial aspects of PayPerPost and has received a warm welcome from a number of influential pundits in the blogging community, some of whom have been quite critical of PayPerPost:

• ReviewMe Launches: A Better PayPerPost by Michael Arrington / TechCrunch
• ReviewMe.com Launches With A Model That Makes Sense by Jim Kukral / ReveNews
• ReviewMe Launches by Darren Rowse / ProBlogger

Despite the welcome ReviewMe has received, I see significant and critical problems with their business model that makes ReviewMe effectively dead on arrival.  Let me analyze all of the reasons for my conclusion:   

1.  What advertiser is willing to pay for a product whose quality they cannot review ahead of time?  While PayPerPost gives advertisers ability to review the final product before agreeing to pay, ReviewMe takes this critical component away from the advertiser.  Besides, the fact that advertisers do not want to pay for negative reviews, ReviewMe does not offer any guidelines as to the quality of the review the blogger needs to provide (only the quantity of words).  What happens if the blogger only casually mentions the advertiser's product while discussing something else?  What if the advertiser's product is not even mentioned? While this lack of advertiser oversight is touted as a "feature" by ReviewMe and is certainly to keep it out of the controversy, this lack of "customer (advertiser in this case) is right" attitude will cost it in the eyes of the very group it needs to recruit to be successful.

2.  Forcing bloggers to disclose in each ReviewMe post that they are compensated for making the post will automatically minimize the buzz behind any positive mention of the advertiser's product.  In the eyes of readers, any disclosure of a writer being compensated for the post will automatically discredit the review due to perception of bias, even if no such bias exists.  Besides building scepticism behind the product being advertised (umm, reviewed), this disclosure will also discredit the blogger, raise bias allegations, and potentially affect overall trust placed on him/her by the readers.  No reputable blogger will risk losing his audience by even remote appearance of impropriety.  For example of this, see comments Darren Rowse made in his post I mentioned above regarding him not willing to accept payment from ReviewMe.

3.  By forcing advertisers to pay whether review is positive or not, ReviewMe addresses perception of bias on paper without eliminating any actual effect on bias that exists with bloggers using the PayPerPost model.  When advertisers review potential blogs from which to solicit a review, of course, they will read through history of that blogger's posts.  If the blogger has history of negative reviews, advertisers will automatically shy away.  Thus, bloggers will clearly recognize that while they will get paid for the current review, whether positive or negative, their ability to get paid for future reviews will be greatly impacted if they write negative reviews.  Thus, they will tend to stay on the positive, exactly the same way they would be with PayPerPost.

4.  ReviewMe pays bloggers based on popularity of the blog.  For some reason that was not documented on the ReviewMe site, ReviewMe will automatically reject bloggers if they do not meet certain criteria.  They are told to "come back in a couple of months". However, no specific reason is given to the blogger and the blogger does not in fact know what criteria he/she did not satisfy. This approach makes no sense.  ReviewMe again takes decision out of the hands of the advertiser and imposes its own constraints, potentially eliminating opportunities for advertisers and bloggers to interact.  Instead, ReviewMe should allow any blogger in and let advertiser decide whether to request a review from them.

By focusing on addressing the perceived controversy surrounding PayPerPost, ReviewMe has forgotten to address some elimentary business model issues that any company has to have in its business plan.  On the other hand, I clearly see value proposition in the PayPerPost model to both sides, advertisers and bloggers and see it as a better business proposition. 

As far as all the controversy behind PayPerPost encouraging bloggers to "lie" in their posts, I refer to my previous post, Should Bloggers Disclose That They Are Compensated?.     Bias always exists, whether disclosed or not.  Being compensated for the post does not in any way mean that a blogger is not honestly recommending a product they have evaluated and found useful.  Just as not disclosing compensation does not automatically     dupe the reader, disclosing does not automatically mean the writer is biased.     Credibility of the blogger is built on consistent, interesting, thought-provoking perspective, based on months if not years of publishing.  If I respect a blogger, I will not mind if he is compensated.  And he doesn't need to tell me.  I will trust that this blogger will not want to ruin his reputation which had taken years to build over building bogus positive reviews based solely on getting token compensation paid him by the advertiser.

Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.