There are different ways to earn money through your websites, such as placing ads or selling ads or offering services and products. Among such ways, one of the most profitable and efficient way to earn money with your blog is through the way of sponsored posts or sponsored review.
In this post, I am going to tell you everything about the sponsored review and will share the best tips to generate income with it.
Usually, when you use ad networks like Media.net, AdSense, PropellerAds or other, you have to wait for a long time to receive payment. Moreover, you can expect only a few numbers of clients per click. Alternatively, sponsored reviews let you make more amount of money in a single time.
Besides placing a sponsored review or post on your blog, it lets you make more money by publishing the post on various platforms and accounts but also not limited to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and many more.
What is a Sponsored Post or a Sponsored Review?
Sponsored reviews or sponsored posts are articles that are commissioned by the third parties, usually agencies or advertisers, where you typically write your thoughts, point of view, or experience of specific service or product.
Mostly, a blogger reviews products or services related to his niche in his blog and earns money from the review. With a sponsored review, the blogger earns money for his posted review. There are pros as well as cons of sponsored reviews, but if you think from your reader’s perspective, you will end up availing more benefits.
In order to earn money for the review, the blogger has to reach out to its potential advertisers who are interested in purchasing a review on the blog, or sometimes the sponsor’s contact blogger directly, asking them to review their products in a sponsored post in exchange for money.
It is possible to earn money with sponsored reviews only if you review products and services are in an ethical and professional manner. This way, you will have the advantage to make large amounts of money with such posts.
Ways to Make Money with Sponsored Posts:
There are different ways with which you can make money with sponsored reviews.
1. Connect to Advertisers and Publishers:
One of the finest ways to get started and earn money with sponsored reviews is by introducing yourself to a network that connects publishers and advertisers. There are various websites and social networking platforms where you can post sponsored reviews in order to earn money.
2. Create a Well-Designed Blog:
Another way to earn money with sponsored reviews is through a well-designed blog with a targeted audience. This method lets you earn a great amount of money with a single sponsored post. If presently, your blog has a cluttered and unattractive design, you must spend some hours to make it look more professional, clean, and attractive.
You can make your blog appear professional by integrating a logo into it. Next, the sidebar of your blog must include vital elements like a subscription box, ‘like’ box similar to Facebook, recent posts, updates, and other features and elements that reflect the personality of your blog.
Once you have redesigned a professionally looking and flawless blog, you then have to perform some additional tasks.
3. Draft an Advertisement Page:
One prominent way to get sponsored reviews is through the way of an advertisement page. Creating an effective media page or advertisement page shows what all your blog is about and the stuff, your advertiser is expecting from it.
You must offer advertisers the options to display ads and have the option of sponsored review. Usually, the pricing for a sponsored review is more than native advertisements.
4. Define Your Charges for Sponsored Posts:
Before you reach out to advertisers and those looking for sponsored reviews, you must first decide the price you would charge for your sponsored review. The price depends mostly on metrics such as traffic and SEO rankings of your blog. Based on this, you can define your pricing somewhere around $150 – $500.
While you set your rate, you must consider the following aspects.
- Estimate the number of sponsored posts, which you will be published each month.
- Check for additional services that you can offer such as social promotion or branding. If you are willing to offer additional services then you must definitely keep your pricing rates at the higher side.
- Decide the time you will be spending to review the service or product.
- Have a rough idea of a number of readers you have.
Considering all these aspects, you can establish reasonable pricing for your sponsored reviews. Once the pricing is defined, it is then important to check Google guidelines as well.
5. Check Google Guidelines:
It is best to get familiar with Google guidelines for sponsored reviews or posts. Not all the paid links violate guidelines from Google. Selling and buying links is an integral part of the online economy and when you are sharing them for advertisement purpose and not to manipulate the search results then it is absolutely fine.
However, if links are being purchased for advertising then they must be treated in the following ways:
- You must add a rel=’nofollow’ attribute to the <a> tag
- You must redirect the links to an intermediate page, which is blocked by the search engines in a robots.txt.file.
6. Extend Your Reach to Potential Advertisers:
This is another method that can help you make money with sponsored reviews. In this method, you have to do similar things that you would do to find direct advertisements. However, in this situation, your proposal must be for a sponsored review.
Just remember, you have to extend your reach to only those product owners who possess a good reputation as well as whose products most of the times receive good reviews. Definitely, you would not want to endorse a bad product that might end up losing your trust to the readers.
Also, you can ask for a review copy of services or products to try so that you can provide an honest review. This particular area is quite touched where sponsored posts are highly concerned and you have to manage them carefully. There can be situations when you have to spread the news about a specific service or product, regardless of the fact that whether you have used it or not.
In such cases, you must make attempts not to insinuate that you have used the product if you have actually not used it. It is because making false remarks can damage your credibility and your readers will lose trust in you. Hence, make sure you provide honest reviews all the times to achieve long-term sustainability and success in this field.
While doing this, select products, services or brands that are trustworthy and reliable for sponsored reviews. Furthermore, if you try a product and you did not find it good enough then straight away deny offering a review for it. It is best to have a clear association and avoid engaging and reviewing low-quality or sub-standard products. Most importantly, it is best to add a disclaimer to your post confirming the sponsor of the post.
Sponsored Post or Reviews – The Legality Associated to Them
When you publish paid content online to your audience, you automatically become accountable with legal responsibility. In most of the countries, publishing sponsored content is legally restricted. For instance, as per the US laws, it is mandatory to disclose your post as sponsored content.
If you are writing sponsored reviews in the US, you have to include a concise and clear statement with every sponsored review, identifying that the post is paid by the sponsoring brand. A large number of website owners and bloggers even put their disclosures at the end of a post, the disclosures must really be placed at the starting. How you want to word your disclosure depends exactly on you. Even, you can get creative with disclosures.
However, don’t make your disclosures too creative as they will lose their important meaning for the readers.
Tips for Publishing Sponsored Post or Reviews:
By now you must be familiar that earning money with the sponsored review is not rocket science. If you wish to start a blog and earn money then we have already suggested the steps to follow. However, there are some additional tips that you must consider while publishing sponsored reviews on your blog or website.
1. Include a rel=’nofollow’ tag to Sponsored Link:
A lot of agencies, particularly SEO agencies will insist you to not add a tag like this. You can definitely follow their rule, but if you do include, make sure you charge more money. It is because if you are doing so, you are risking your own website for rankings.
2. Publish Your Sponsored Reviews on a Timely Basis:
If you release five sponsored reviews in just one go, most likely your readers will not read all of them. Hence, it is best to create an editorial calendar and publish sponsored posts on a timely basis and at regular intervals.
3. Make Sure Your Post Connects to the Audience:
Even if it is a sponsored post, it offers your readers with some solution. Your review must solve a problem for them and must intend to make their lives easier. If your sponsored review does not have a purpose and is not helping your readers, you must not accept the assignment. It is because writing and publishing it will not earn you any benefits.
4. Select Your Projects Wisely:
When you are writing sponsored reviews, you are writing it for others. Make sure you select your clients as well as projects wisely. For this, you must choose a niche yourself, develop a specific field of expertise and must be courageous enough to say no to content that does not meet your set criteria. If a product does not meet your quality standards or will not be solving issues of audiences specific to your niche, then it is of no use.
5. Include High-Quality Images:
In order to add more value to your content, you must justify higher rates across the board. One easy and efficient way to do it is by including high-quality images in your content. This way, your audience will enjoy the sponsored review more and will find it more relatable.
6. Use Authentic and Relatable Tone:
Finally, you can hit the prominent talking points of your audience by using a relatable and authentic tone. But make sure you do it in an organic way. Using a professional yet friendly tone will keep your audience educated and entertained at the same time.
Websites that Pay You for Sponsored Post:
Some of the websites that pay you for sponsored reviews are:
PayPerPost:
It is one of the reliable and popular websites to post sponsored reviews. The writers have to write posts based on instructions and guidelines mentioned by the sponsors. Once you start earning money, you can upgrade your plan from basic to pro.
SocialSpark:
This website is quite similar to PayPerPost. It aims to create a complete disclosure sponsored review system so that the sponsored reviews are not questionable.
Famebit:
This website is a great platform for both brands and creators as well as for publishers on social media. It is because Famebit connects the two to promote sponsorship partnerships. Whether your social media channel is Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Tumblr, it must have a certain minimum level of followers or subscribers in order to join Famebit.
PayU2Blog:
This website gives you paid posting assignments on a weekly basis depending on your blog profile. In order to qualify for this website, your blog must be at least 90 days old, you must be more than 18 years old, and you must have made posts over the past 90 days.
To Sum Up:
If you practice the above-mentioned ways then you can conveniently earn somewhere around $100 – $500 by writing just 2-3 sponsored reviews. Just make sure you always target advertisers in your specific niche, keeping the fact into consideration that the most important thing for you is the trust of your readers.