How to ask for a site review
Most bloggers will happily do a site review or a product review for just about anyone, given that all the right things are in place for someone to do this kind of work. Things to remember though are that most bloggers will do a site review for the following things:
1. Money – money is always good, but unfortunately it is not always easy to get enough money together to have someone do a site review for you.
2. To build links – if they do a site review, they might do it for a link, IE we love web 2.0 sites, and review many of them, sometimes we get a link off their blog pointing to the site review.
3. To rebut a good story – we often want to rebut well thought out stories, like this one from ReadWriteWeb to test the Long Tail theory – this is the RWW story, and this one is ours
4. Goods – Schwag, good old fashioned swag, sometimes we get lucky and someone will send us a t-shirt for the review
5. Product – Sometimes, very rarely will we get a product, something that we can keep and hold in our hands forever, this one is harder to do
6. Prizes – sometimes sites will offer prizes for the best article about the web site that someone can write – with a link back to the prize page. We have thought about this and will probably do a prize campaign for our one year anniversary in April 2008.
If you have nothing, can offer nothing, other than good will and a link back, some bloggers will happily do this as it is reputation building. Which often is enough for a starter blog, get those links working, and site reviews are often something that can be easily done in the blogging format. Usually, just ask, and they will let you know if they do that or not.
Never send unsolicited press reviews, or pre-written site reviews or marketing material and expect a blogger with some respect to just simply cut and paste. Odds are most likely especially if they are a technical blog, will want to touch, taste, and play with the service before doing anything. We did this with multiple sites like Mixx, Trinod, RescueTime and Techmeme.
In all, depending on what you have to offer the blogger, their worries about their own reputation, and how busy they are, will decide if they can do a site review. There is always Izea though, for 500 dollars you could get 100 site reviews very quickly, with links, and other neat stuff at 5 dollars a pop if you are not too worried about the possible dangers with Google and page rank.
Really, the bottom line – ask away, see what happens.
Good post. I have been asked by others to review sites and a lot of this has helped shape my idea on me wanting to review a site or not.