Savvy Affiliate

Sooner or later all bloggers reach the point where they decide it is time to start trying to make money.  I’ve gone on growing long enough, now for the rewards.   And of course there are several ways to monetize your site.  The one this post covers is ReviewMe

As you are probably aware, reviewme is a marketplace where bloggers can sell blog posts to advertisers for a price they name.  ReviewMe takes have the proceeds, the blogger gets the other half.  Some people like the revenue that this brings in, some people think that it is whoring out your blog.

I personally don’t have a problem with paid reviews.  But if I’m going to whore my blog, I better get a decent amount for it.  So in order to decide when I should post on the marketplace, I need to decide what the minimum dollar amount I will accept is, and if I can get that.

I think that in order to be worth the research and writing time I would need to put into a review, as well as the potentially negative effect monetizing my site can have on traffic and future growth, I would need to receive $50 from the review.  As ReviewMe takes half the earnings, this means that my reviews would go for $100.

Will I be able to charge $100 for a review?  Will people pay it?  In order to figure that out I need to scope out some of the blogs on the site which are charging similar amounts, and see if SavvyAffiliate can compete with them.

In order to do that I go to ReviewMe and look up my category, blogging, and pick several sites at Random.  ReviewMe grades a site on 3 categories, Alexa Ranking, Technorati Ranking, and RSS.  Since it will be hard to get the stats for their feeds, I will just compare Alexa Ranking and Technorati.  So how do my stats compare up?

 The Stats for Savvy Affiliate

                                 Alexa Ranking            Technorati Ranking      

Savvy Affiliate -    347,000                           59,000                     

Lets see how some other sample sites stack up

Deadprogrammer’s Cafe  -964,492             66,334

Jarkolicious            226,000                          6,564

Stephen Fung        80,500                             10,000

MaxPower             26,700                              8,300

ShandyKing           66,890                             22,020

Friday Traffic Report - 25,633                   25,847

Business Blog Wire     - 145,611                 6,199

Average                        219403                20,752

Clearly Savvy Affiliate isn’t quite popular enough yet to merit charging $100 for a review.  In fact further analysis seems to indicate that I would be quite competitive at the $40 price range, but that is not my threshold.

What does this mean to you?  This is just an example of the kind of analysis you can do with your site to find out if you are maximizing your profit from it.  If my analysis had indicated that my site was too strong for $100, I would have kicked it up a notch to charge all the traffic would bear.

Additionally it means that you, as a reader of Savvy Affiliate, can enjoy a while more of interruption free blogging tips.

Do you use ReviewMe?  Has it become a solid source of income for you, or merely an also-ran?