I’ve successfully purchased a total of three ‘blog reviews’, as they’re called, from SponsoredReviews.com. However, what I bought were not actual reviews — they were called content re-posts, where I created an opportunity (my project with my own pre-written content), which allowed bloggers to bid on my project. Basically, I needed page-space on three different blogs for my content.
I’m going to break down my review of SponsoredReviews.com and their paid blog posting / blog review service into different sections and categories. Some may be low on content, and some may seem more like a service overview, but if possible, I aim to share as much as I can from my experience.
Signup process
The SponsoredReviews.com signup process is simple and shouldn’t be confusing to many people, thankfully. When you’re signing up, however, you need to be sure that you choose the right account type — advertiser or blogger. In order to purchase blog reviews, however, you need to sign up as an advertiser.
User interface
SponsoredReviews.com user interface is decent — not perfect, but not as bad or as confusing as others. Links to important pages are largely accessible, but I suggest that you look over their ‘Getting Started Guide’ before you dig into things too much. I didn’t, and even though I am quite familiar with websites, how they function, and using thousands (if not tens-of-thousands) of different websites and their administration areas, I stumbled around a bit looking for certain things.
Adding / managing ‘opportunities’
An ‘opportunity’ is their word for your project. In reality — it’s a very good setup. I didn’t have any problems adding, managing, or removing my projects. You have quite a bit of control over which blogs are eligible to bid on your project before-the-fact — you can choose the blog categories, the minimum Google Page Rank for the blog, and a few other factors.
One thing I especially liked was the ‘Maximum Price’ feature. Instead of specifying a fixed-rate price that you needed, you can input your max price, and bloggers can bid anywhere from (that must be a minimum) to whatever your maximum amount is.
Choosing bloggers for your opportunity
Choosing a blogger is fairly easy, or at least should be. Once you list an opportunity, make it available to the general blogger pool, and receive bids, you can go to a page within your SponsoredReviews.com account area to review the blogs that have bid on your project.
The setup is decent, though a bit cluttered. You have at-a-glance views of each bidding blogger, how much money they’re asking for your project, some statistics on the blogger’s blog, a direct link to the blog’s URL, and some reviews of previous transactions for the blogger. One thing I certainly do not like is the lack of details for previous transactions — a blogger’s ratings history might consist of ‘good’ with a positive mark — not much for you to base any reasonable judgement on.
You can filter your bidding blog results, which is very nice. The filters for this page allow you to further narrow your selection down — by price, page rank, types of blogs, and so forth. Quite handy because, as you might find out, you’ll receive hundreds to thousands of bids on your project within a very short period of time. It takes a long time to go through them and the after-the-fact filter options for bidding bloggers is a nice feature. Though, I did experience several instances where, when applying filters, the page more or less froze. It didn’t literally freeze or lock up my browser, but more like the application was stalled and wouldn’t refresh the new results.
Order process
Unfortunately, this is where I started having major issues — at least for my first couple of orders, which were actually unsuccessful. I ran into a major bug with their website — I purchased a blog review from one blog, but during the order process, it was switched with the most recent blogger website that I had rejected for the opportunity. So, instead of getting to purchase a blog review from the blog I wanted, I ended up ‘buying’ a paid blog post for a blog that I specified that I didn’t want to use. I’ll expound on this situation a bit later.
Something that was good while not-so-much so at the same time is that you can buy blog reviews with your credit card at the time when you purchase each review. The reason that it’s not-so-good is that this isn’t mentioned on their website that I saw. Their site states that you need to add funds to your account, at a minimum, to purchase reviews when that isn’t true. As I was trying the site out, and I didn’t want to pre-pay for a service that I might not like, I found out that you can purchase each review with direct credit card purchases. It’s kind of a mixed-bag for me.
Support
Here’s another place where I had a major issue with the service. I’ll start off saying that support responded to tickets and emails in a timely fashion (about 1 business day or less), and that they were always friendly. Support was also intelligent and mostly helpful. However, I did run into issues when they were trying to fix my problematic purchases for blog reviews. During their testing, they charged my credit card — without my consent — multiple times. Fortunately, that card had limited funds, so only one transaction went through.
The problem with support and this issue was that they offered a refund for the 3 charges, 2 authorized and 1 unauthorized, plus a credit to my account. Come to find out about a week later, the rep apparently mis-spoke and wasn’t going to refund my purchases or their unauthorized charge — just the site credit. Maybe it’s partially my fault because I didn’t come across as boiling mad for the unauthorized charges, but I thought it was unacceptable that they took money off my credit card — accidental or not — said they were going to refund it, but then just gave me a credit to their website instead.
That situation was eventually resolved, but only after me having to state, over and over again, that taking my money without my permission and re-allocating it to their website wasn’t acceptable. It was an unbelievably frustrating and maddening experience.
SponsoredReviews.com review breakdown
Good:
They have thousands of bloggers that will post content or write content for you
Pricing is great to reasonable for blog reviews — I received several links from a targeted PR 4 blog for
Their user interface is relatively easy to use, and is fairly straightforward
Mixed:
Overall, support seems helpful and good, but there’s something that doesn’t sit right with me about it. I don’t know how to word it, but from my point of view, they don’t go out of their way to resolve (from a customers’ standpoint) problems that they created either through their broken service or their actions.
While there are a lot of bloggers willing and ready to post your reviews, at least at the lower-dollar per review level, some bloggers’ comprehension levels are deplorable. In two of my three reviews, bloggers screwed up a simple copy and paste job — one of them three times before getting it right.
Bad:
Their website swapping my blog of choice for a blog review with a blog that I rejected for the opportunity, during my order, is a major bug. Bugs of this level shouldn’t happen with casual usage of a public website.
Charging a customer’s credit card while trying to debug a website error is unacceptable.
Support suggesting that I add credits to my account so that this bug (unauthorized credit card charge) doesn’t happen again was almost maddening.
Conclusion
Despite the nature of the problems I experienced with SponsoredReviews.com as an advertiser, I will continue to use their service on an infrequent basis. I feel that my experiences must be unique, otherwise they would have been shut down or driven out of business by the people who pay to use their blog review services. My issues with the service were eventually resolved, and what they offer is very valuable for a website owner, even if there are problems that you’ll inevitibly run into when trying to obtain those benefits. So, for now, I’m sticking with their service and generally recommend their service, but with a big caution: don’t give them your main credit card number, and start out small with your orders. They’re probably a good company, and they certainly offer a much-needed service. Hopefully some day I’ll be able to revise this review and have better experiences to share.
Disclaimers: These are my opinions, and they may not reflect your experience with SponsoredReviews.com. Also, my perceptions of the service and the reality of the service may differ. I have proof of situations stated in this review by way of screenshots of support tickets. At the end of the day, remember that this is an opinion piece based on a few transactions — nothing more.
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