Deep Jive Interests

[UPDATE 2: Seems like I'm not the only one who has this opinion about ReviewMe. Check out Yardley's better and fleshed out opinion (the disintermediation of ReviewMe?) and Scott Karp's opinion of ReviewMe as an influence marketplace.]

So ReviewMe debuted a few nights ago, and I posted my own attempt at reviewing which was met with very limited results (as I wasn’t accepted). But, with its $25 000 contest, all of the bloggers who have now come out of the blogosphere to grab their “fair share”, it got me thinking about the Real Benefit for advertisers who go with ReviewMe and its ilk.

The Obvious Benefit is the review. Advertisers are paying for buzz. “But”, you might say “ReviewMe doesn’t necessitate that its reviewers write positive reviews” — and this is good, because no company wants to be branded with buying cheap buzz.

The Real Benefit is actually related to optimizing search, and has less to do with “reviews” or “advertorials” than it does with ReviewMe’s parent (or partner) company Text-Link-Ads.com.

How? Consider this.

At one point, buying text-links could you boost your google juice because even though they were ads, they were still links with presumable anchor links back to your page. You could, essentially, PURCHASE in bound links — the currency that Google deals in. For businesses, no more begging for reciprocal links; they could set aside money to buy them. And for the right price, you could buy links from very high ranking blogs or sites for really great investment.

This is how ReviewMe.com REALLY works.

What a company or advertiser is doing is picking the blog they want a link from, and essentially buying that inbound link. And if they’re really lucky, the blogger will mention it over, and over and over. Even better — ReviewMe has a marketplace of bloggers and advertsiers can pick and choose which blogs it wants to “buy” links from.

ReviewMe.com gets a cut — but advertisers can pick from some pretty high page-rank sites.

This represents an incredibly easy short cut to getting inbound links and boosting your search engine results placement; and if you’ve got the bucks, you can get even get a link or two from people like Paul Stamatiou.

Another benefit? Regardless of what the content is, the business and link, since its not an ad, is featured directly within the post of the blog, likely generating a higher, or warmer, pedigree of traffic than people coming through ads.

Sure, there’s the potential downside of a your business getting dogged when it comes to the review; but then again, if that’s the case, traffic will find out about it through your search engine strategy anyway.

And how is ReviewMe better than PayPerPost? Its the marketplace they’ve set up. Whereas PayPerPost sets a topic, or whatever to post about, and then offers $x/blogger/post its the opposite at ReviewMe — empowering the advertisers.

Bloggers have a set “rate” that is calculated by an algorithm based on inbound links, traffic and so on (and is broken, in my opinion), and then from that list that is broken down by that “rate”, advertisers can select which bloggers they want a review — and inbound link from. And because the rates are set so high relative to PayPerPost, its an incentive for both high-ranking (and page ranking) bloggers to sign up, and ReviewMe to aggressively market it to high ranking bloggers, since it gets a huge cut of that post.

So, if you’re an advertiser, don’t think of ReviewMe as a way of simply “buying” reviews.

Its a sophisticated way of buying in-bound links, and therefore, purchasing your way to improved Google search engine placement (and other search engine placement). Unlike paid text-links, I find that this will be hard to “police” from Google’s point of view, and I have no idea if they’ll ever penalize companies, or disqualify links that come from “bought” reviews.

But while Google is still pondering over the idea, its a wide open field.

And the blogosphere will never be the same again, I think

UPDATE: ReviewME has “bought” $25000 of inbound links from bloggers who have participated in their contest — such as John Chow, Paul Stamatiou, Cameron Olthuis, Make You Go Hmmm, and a whole other plethora of long tail bloggers.