In the past, The Internet Marketing Monitor has enlisted the services of the PayPerPost blogging community to review both our site itself and the IMM-Glossary WordPress plugin.  In both instances I requested completely honest and unbiased opinions and, for the most part, that's what we got. I'm willing to pay people to write reviews of the site and plugin because I'm curious about the things that work, the things that don't work, and what could be better. 

I recently decided to try a similar service:  ReviewMe. Each time I've used PayPerPost I've written up a review of the service.  So I decided to do the same thing with my ReviewMe experience.

The software that powers Review Me is pretty comparable to PpP, feature and ease-of-use wise.  But I still don't think it's as good as the industry could do.  The ordering process isn't really a cut and dry part of either service.  Both services could stand to retool their ordering procedures.  In fact, I think the first company that improves on the ordering mechanisms already in place would have a good chance to lead the entire industry.

Instead of the usual $100 bucks or so that I spend at PayPerPost, I decided to go all out and order a $250 review from John Chow.

John's review was nice.  It had lots of links and you could tell that, unlike some of the PPP reviewers, he'd actually spent some time looking around the site.  The "side effects" of the review were equally as nice.  Compared to the PpP reviews, John's single review sent us about 5 times more traffic than all 10 PpP reivews combined.  The additions to our subscriber list were also about 5 times as much with John's review than the PpP reviews.

The one thing that was similar between both sources of review, however, was the feedback received.  Except for a few exceptions, the PayPerPost reviews were all glowing and positive.  John's review was also glowing and positive. The whole "emperor with no clothes on" story reminds me a lot of my overall experience with paid posts.

I keep hoping that folks will write something negative.  Maybe I shouldn't say negative.  Let me clarify that.  I'm absolutely sure that IMM doesn't do everything right.  I know there are things we need to improve on.  And outside perspectives are a great way to discover what those things are.  It's hard to know what needs to be improved when very little constructive criticism is provided. 

I would definitely say that a review by John Chow is worth the $250 cost. Thanks for the nice comments, John.  It was money well spent.  My only piece of advice for future reviews would be to try to help site owners improve a bit more by either pointing out some real issues or by suggesting some improvements that could be made.  You have a unique view on things and I think your insight on those things could be very valuable to site owners.