jordan willms on business, entrepreneurship, technology and the web

At first glance, ReviewMe.com looks like a great service. Pay reputable bloggers to post about your product or service and receive feedback good or bad. I decided to take ReviewMe.com for a spin as an advertiser and see if it was worth the dollars.

I decided to purchase some blogging reviews for my fitness site gimme20.com. I selected a number of fitness related blogs with reasonably high PageRanks and Alexa rankings. After all, product feedback only goes so far: It is nice to get a quality link sometimes.

Two fitness blogs responded to my request and decided to write articles on Gimme20.com. The first blog, Self Help Daily, wrote an excellent blog post, outlining negative and positives about our product. The article appeared on the front page (where latest posts usually do), and could easily be found by browsing the helpful menus in the right sidebar.

Tim O'Reilly recently posted an article about the Economics of Online Advertising. Immediately, he cites a Mark Jacobsen article which discusses Three ways to build an online media business to $50m in revenue. Do you really need that much?

Here is the math:

* At the $1 RPM (CPM/CPA/CPC) level achieved by most general sites, you need 4 billion page views/month.
* At the $5 RPM level achieved by demographically targeted sites, you need 800 million/month.
* At the $20 RPM level achieved by highly targeted sites, you need 200 million/month.

Most sites can hope to roll in within the $1 through $5 range. So these are scary figures to get to $50m. (Although, revenue isn't that important. I could get $50m revenue easily enough by selling dollars for 99 cents).

The past year has given rise to a number of services that offer advertisers the ability to pay bloggers to post about certain products or services. While there was initially quite a backlash by the blogging community over issues such as disclosure and forced-positive reviews, other companies have sprung up to make the service more ethical and transparent.

With traditional marketing failing, many advertisers are turning to bloggers, who have been proven to deliver excellent results through 'pseudo word of mouth marketing'.

PayPerPost.com, and ReviewMe.com are two of the most prominent players in this field.

If you haven't heard of Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA Program, then you've already missed the boat on the emerging trend of educational entrepreneurism. The Personal MBA is a collection of books that can increase your knowledge of business with a fraction of the cost of a full blown MBA, "all without setting foot inside a classroom".

Josh, after being motivated by marketing guru Seth Godin, created a manifesto detailing some 42 books and periodicals. He claims that by investing time and effort in using these resources, once can progressively develop a greater understanding of business and increase your effectiveness at work.