Reviewstream
Unlike most review sites, when you write a review on this website, you automatically get paid. You don’t need to spend hours promoting your review. At the moment, the regular rate is $1.50; there is no explanation of the criteria to fulfil for getting this rate, but if you submit your reviews without checking the rate box, you might get lucky and get $1.50. If they don’t accept your review at this price, they will let you know by email and you can re-submit your review and get the bulk rate of $0.3 (one fifth of the regular rate).
The minimum payout is $100 and they pay you via PayPal; if you get the low price, you will need to write 334 reviews in order to get paid, but the good news is that you can write on absolutely everything you can imagine. You also get an extra $0.1 anytime somebody rates your review so it might be worth advertising a little bit, make friends on the site, rate their reviews, get them to rate yours. I reckon there are possibilities there.
One disadvantage of working with Reviewstream is that you cannot submit the same reviews anywhere else, if you do you will get banned from the site, but they allow you to import a block directing people to your reviews on your blog or website.
Another downside is that the support department is practically nonexistent. I asked them a question that did not feature in their FAQs and they sent me an email telling me I should be more attentive and read the FAQs; also, after writing my first review, I never got the email telling me it had been published and I had to request my balance twice before they sent me the email containing the eagerly awaited information.
On the plus side, you don’t have to rely on people buying the product reviewed to make money, so this is one of the websites where you can find truthful reviews.
This is a site I would use as a second resort to write lots of quick reviews about products that don’t fit in other review sites.
Epinions
I had to register with this site in order to study their terms so this is the first thing I did not like.
After going over the help page, I found that there is no set amount being paid per written review; this is one of the websites where you have to work harder at promoting your reviews than actually writing them and this is the second thing I don’t like. They have an elaborated Income Share program which determines how much money reviewers get. How this system works remains obscure; this, they claim, is because they want to prevent people from to abusing it.
As I understand, you write a review which is rated by other people like you. Epinions is adamant that whether your review is positive or negative does not affect your income, it is the popularity of your review that is the key, therefore the reviews on the site should be truthful enough, although I can’t see how they could possibly assess how one particular product review will affect buying decisions!
Something that annoys me very much also, is that U.S residents only have to earn $10 before they can get their money via PayPal, whereas we, unfortunate rejects living elsewhere, must wait until our income reaches $100 before we can cash in! How fair is that?
There are so many other review sites that will clearly explain to me how I can make money, I don’t think I will gratify Epinions with my contributions.
Reviewsarena
This sounds to me like a clever scam. If somebody makes money from this site, and I don’t doubt they will, it is Reviewsarena themselves!
This is a Clickbank products review website so you can only review certain categories of products available on the Clickbank site.
You have to have a Clickbank account, but you can easily get one and it is free.
Here is how you make your money: you write a review for one of their products; inside the review, you will have your Clickbank ID so you will get a commission if anyone buys that product after reading your review therefore it is in your best interest to promote your review as much as you can. I think this is a very good way to make money but the big downside is that after 30 days, your Clickbank ID within the review will be replaced by Reviewsarena’s own Clickbank ID, which means that you will have spent a month promoting your review and your campaign will probably start to attract customers just at the right time for Reviewsarena to take all the credit for your hard labour.
It is unlikely that the reviews on this site are truthful as the authors’ only motivation is to sell products in order to get commission.
This made me think: I could create a few blogs specialized in different subjects and write positive reviews about related Clickbank products with my ID in them. This way, if I start making sales after 6 months or a year, I will still get commission.
My verdict: I will not be joining this website but I am thankful to them for giving me a new idea for making money online.
Shared Reviews
This looks like an interesting site. They are testing some beta mumbo jumbo that I don’t understand, I was just blinded by the money so I signed up to get all the facts. You can get $10 per 5 reviews submitted on this site, plus $2 if you tell them who referred you to their site, so if you decide to join, just indicate my nickname (Sophielc) in the space provided for an easy $2.
I don’t know how long this will last as they will distribute $20,000 this way and at the time of writing, they have reached almost $4000. The good news is that they pay you via PayPal after each 5 approved reviews written. So far, this is the best deal I have found.
They have product categories to choose from so you can’t just review anything that takes your fancy but the choice of products to review is still wide enough to allow anyone to earn some money.
This website does not accept duplicate content so if you decide to write for them don’t use the same reviews on some other website or even your blog, at least during the beta phase.
The forum there is very helpful; I did not find a FAQ section but I got answers for all my questions in it.
This is the most lucrative review website I have visited but when the $20,000 has been fully allocated, the payments’ system is going to change so if you want to make money with them, you need to join quickly.
Shvoong
This is a website for submitting abstracts. At first I thought these were only for books but when I looked at the website more closely I realised that you can review books, newspapers, articles, or even websites.
Here, you also get paid via PayPal according to your page views, which is not my favourite system but I still like this site because it gives you a profile page allowing you to promote your websites if you own any. They also give you the option of writing abstracts for your articles, which could be handy if you write articles for money on a different website (as I do).
Shvoong works in collaboration with Yedda, which is a platform where you can ask and answer any kind of questions, a bit like Yahoo Answers but it gives you more freedom for posting links.
This website is well worth signing up to, especially if you read a lot. I might not make much money from Shvoong, but I will definitely use their forum for self-promotion!
Associated Content
You also have the option of writing reviews on this website. Of course, the problem is that you must get 1000 page views in order to earn a meagre $1.50, unless you opt for upfront payment. As a resident outside the U.S (here goes the discrimination again!), this option is not available for me, I must contend with my page view payments.
The secret to making money here is writing good articles, promoting them on blogs, network websites such as Facebook, posting your article links on related forums, etc.
What I like about this site is that it allows you to post comments on other people’s articles and rate them. This way you can also see who is leaving comments on your articles, which gives you great feedback!
If you can invest the time and effort in promoting each of your articles or reviews, this is a very good programme to sign up to.
