You know what they say — everyone’s a critic! Blog reviews are one of the best ways to get you going in terms of getting constant content into your blog. One, because it helps train you to look at what works and what doesn’t in a certain type of blog. Two, because you’re giving link love to the sites you reviewed, and everyone loves a back link; who knows, maybe the blog may reciprocate by linking back to you thus increasing your own blog rank. Three, you may even notice that your own blog readership and participation increase significantly as you introduce new sites and provide useful commentary on the blogs you review.
Some time ago, RT at Untwisted Vortex highlighted two web sites that offer free review services for their users and more importantly reciprocate those reviews. In the Fair Review Project, you’ll need to first select a blog for review before you can submit your own request for a review. ReviewBack works the same way, but looks to have a larger database of blogs available for you to choose and review.
To be honest though, I am more of a post critic, and I don’t think I have the knack to be a a blog reviewer. Everyone has different styles and different priorities on how they want to lay out their content, and as long as the blog doesn’t look cluttered I’m fine with whatever and however the information is presented. I have tried to do blog reviews some time back as part of my daily blogging routine, but since I didn’t find it spontaneous enough, I decided to scrape that idea off.
Check out my other posts: « Malaysian bloggers will vote tomorrow / WordPress 2.5 and Top Commentators Widget matters »
That is a great site for beginners, it is helpful. Thanks for this.
That’s a great idea. I had never thought about that or heard of it. I’ll have to check it out.
I done a quick post about this too. Another way to get blog ideas would be to look at your stats. Maybe someone is landing on your site from a generic keyword or batch of keywords that don’t vaguely match your post. For example:
You write a post about CSS Effects -> Background images but your statistics show that a user came in to that post from CSS Effects -> Border Shadow.
Kind of “the customer is always right” attitude 🙂
Its a great idea for newbie bloggers like me. It provides topics to write about and also gets you some reviews with link backs in exchange.
Some of the comments offered really good advice too. I’ve been stuck on ideas for blogs before, but I try to read as many other blogs as I can to get my creative juices flowing.. I never thought about seeing the keywords that linked them to my blog before as an idea. hmm
I know what you mean, I like to link and introduce new blogs I find, but I’m not sure I’m up for writing a full review-perhaps I should try yours? 😈
It’s certainly a good idea for beating the block though, even if you never click ‘publish’.
Hi Lorna, thanks for the tips.
Sometimes I don’t know what content I should post on my blogs.
Maybe I will do this blog review..
If you review a lot of sites then you lost much of your readers because they will feel boring on your site and go to others.
I don’t think this is a good idea to get loyal readers. You have to have original content yourself. If you are just reviewing other sites you are getting success off the back of other people.
John
I agree with your post here. Other than make a review alone, you also can make money from it. There’s a few program that pay for your post on your blog ( Pay Per Post, Review Me, Sponsored Reviews and etc). You’ll earn $5 – $100/post review and sometime even more.