ReviewMe is a service for sponsoring product and service reviews by bloggers. You pick your property (someone’s blog) from the many, many blogs in the system. Each blog has a fee (less than most insertion fees out there in PR/advertising world) based on popularity and traffic measures. The blogger decides whether or not to highlight your product/service, and if she does you get a highlight and pay the fee. No additional haggling required. Of course you don’t get to dictate the content, but people are predictable, and it is pretty easy to avoid prople who are hypercritical if you know your product or service stinks.

ReviewMe just updated their evaluations of blogs and now charges $250 for a sponsored highlight on this johnon.com blog. Initially, I was offered half of a $60 fee for johnon.com. With this update, I think ReviewMe is now a viable service. Since they keep 50% of the fee, sponsored reviews here at johnon.com will now result in a $125 payment to me, and $125 to ReviewMe. As a pasive form of promotion, we can both prosper with that.

I am often hired to write press releases and promotional copy. And I am just one of *many* marketing bloggers registered with ReviewMe. So think this through… if you hire me to write your press release, and then pay the wire service to distribute it, you’re close to $1000 typically and even then the PR wire service is usually placing some restrictions on how many links you can have, what anchor text you can use, and how it gets archived. With clever utilization of ReviewMe, you can get that professional marketer to write about your product or service, insert it into syndication for you (this blog pings over a hundred syndication alert systems), and archive it several times. What a bargain, no?

Take my advice. After you get a marketing blogger to highlight your product or service offering via ReviewMe, issue a brief press release about how Blogger so-and-so highlighted your product (whether they loved it or just liked it). You don’t need to pay a consultant to write than one, and the third-party linking will give Google goose bumps. It’s a career move for you junior marketing and PR folks out there. It’ll impress the hell out of your old fogey corporate upline.

So good luck to those of you who utilize ReviewMe to get popular Internet marketing blogs to highlight your offerings and activities, and who then reference those in your About blogs and the free press release services. Let me know how much you get for your $250. I’d love to hear the success stories.

Disclaimer: this was NOT a sponsored review of ReviewMe.