Blogging

Why do websites NOT show prices? And other things that annoy me!

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I would suggest that for visitors the key factors would be speed of loading:

  1. not too many graphics, eliminate large unnecessary graphics (esp. those in excess of a few hundred kb);
  2. accessibility – is it easy to find the key pages in the website;
  3. pricing – I HATE browsing websites and finding that the pricing is unavailable (what have they got to hide?) esp. when it is for goods or services that are traded over the Internet or are Internet products/services. That seems especially dumb.

There are a few other things I have noted in the years I have surfed, but those are important ones to me. A general tip: if it annoys you, it’s quite likely that it annoys others, so don’t repeat the mistakes on your own website.

ReviewME vs. PPP: Good potential, different markets

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With the advent of paid blogging, several websites now are quite prominent in the field. I recently signed up with ReviewMe and have been invited to give a review of the website.

Payperpost’s model for bloggers has been to create a market for the bloggers of offers from advertisers. Certain guidelines are required by advertisers, such as word limits, links, images, tone, etc. Such posts are then reviewed by the staff on behalf of the advertisers.

ReviewME has taken the opposite approach by creating a stable of bloggers that can attract advertisers who make offers to the bloggers, depending on the nature of the blogs, the writer’s experience, the traffic of the blog, etc.. The prices for the blogs are set by different criteria, including the relative popularity of the blog itself (using PR rankings, Alexa ratings, etc.) the topic field, the advertiser’s own criteria, etc.. so it looks like it’s following the intermediary route. This is quite a different model than PPP.

There are a number of other differences that over the long haul may make a difference to the bloggers, if not the advertisers.

1. There is already a wide variety of ads available for PPP. This information is easy to find out which gives confidence to the bloggers as well as advertisers that the outfit is around to stay.

2. For ReviewME, there is already a stable of writers that advertisers can find, and you can check out their weblogs to find out what they write about, how they write, and how well they write. It should be easier for an advertiser to find a suitable writer

3. There is no community of writers in ReviewME, as in PPP. So perhaps there is less loyalty on the part of the writers. I would hope that ReviewME can rectify this.

4. I would think that ReviewME would attract bloggers that standout in some way. I’m afraid many of the ‘lesser’ bloggers may find it difficult to attract advertisers for a variety of reasons. As a result, some bloggers will do very well in the ReviewME system, but many will not attract any advertisers at all. PPP may be more suitable for smaller blogs, though.
I will add further edits/comments in the future, depending on my experience.

This is a paid review.