G'day All I am starting a blog / service, where i write a quality and detailed review of a customers website, and I post it my site, including a link to the site. My review is based on how there site looks and functions from a users point of view. I provide them with advice and suggestions to improve the site. Anyway I am trying to work out how much to charge for such a service. To build up my credibility, I will have to perform a number of reviews for free to begin with, however once I get it up and running, how much do you think customers will be willing to pay? Any advice would be much appreciated. I will post an example of one of my reviews below. Cheers Jake
Review: www.linkdirectory.com At first glance, the URL of this site stands out. I feel it is a top URL as far as your target market is concerned and it is SEO friendly. The site would benefit from a better colourscheme, as the current colourscheme appears a bit dull and glary. The site is also appears to be clustered in some areas and bare in other areas. A full review of the site is included below. URL: First of all, your URL. I feel that you have an extremely strong URL, it relates exactly to the purpose of your site, and I would imagine that such a URL would be in high demand. This is great, so you need to make the most of it. You are ranked first in google for the words “Link Directoryâ€, so you may want to play on that a bit. To be first on google for anything is fantastic, but to be first under such a high demand phrase is even better. You could possibly use this as a bit of a selling point. If people are aware that you are the leader of the pack in Google, they will respect you and your website more. You may want to put more emphasis on your title in the top left hand corner, to reinforce your website name. At the moment it is a bit small and intimidated. You need to bring it out with authority, so people know that you are the “Link Directory†and remember your site. Colour Scheme: Colour Schemes are very important, you seem to have some sort of a Colour Scheme, just not a very good one. Take a look at some of the more popular sites around, they all have a very distinct colour scheme. They also chose colours that work well together and that are easy on the eye. Warrior Forum is a good example of a good colourscheme. They keep it simple with Red, Black, White and Grey. These colours all work well with one another Red/White, Red/Black, Red/Grey, Black/White, Grey/Black etc. White, Grey and Black are there neutral colours, while red is the feature colour. The dont need to use a lot of red, they just need to use it well and they do use it well. They dont overuse it, and they dont use it for their text. Your colourscheme on the other hand seems to be a combination of Red, Black, White and 2 shades of blue, followed by a range of colours used in the many advertisements. I think that the 2 shades of blue, plus the overuse of red seems to the main problem. The 2 shades of blue are quite light in colour, so they clash with one another, and they clash with the white. When i say clash, it just means that it is hard to distinguish when one colour starts and when the other colour finishes. This can make it hard to differentiate different sections, and it can be distracting when someone is trying to read. The 2 shades of blue, also dont tend to work well against red, the mix just doesnt seem to work well. First of all, I would focus on trying to sort out your colourscheme. Why dont you drop the blue, and just try and run with Red as your feature colour. Red is a very strong colour on its own, so you dont even need a another strong colour if you dont want it. Red Text: Red is fantastic for grabbing peoples attention, however it is extremely hard on the eye when used on text. It can be good if you just want to highlight a heading, amongst a lot of boring black text, and it can also be good for emphasising words, however I feel that you overuse the colour red with your text, so much in a way, that it becomes hard to read all the red text, and when there is so much red text, it looses its attention capturing ability. I would not use red text to list each category. You want to make that as simple as possible. Maybe just resort back to black, or like a standard blue, that is easier on the eye. At the moment your “Link Directory†heading is red, your “Categories†are red, your “Submit Your Site†is red, your “Google Ads†are red, Links at the bottom of the page are red, and you have red header bars on the RHS of the page. I look at the page, and i struggle to work out what I should be looking at, with so much red, i cant tell what is important and what isnt important. Use red text, for the things you want to draw the most attention to. Red Header Backgrounds: The standard red background headers that you use on the RHS are actually quite effective. They are simple, look great and do the job. On the other hand, the blue background headers used towards the top of the page, dont look as good. They are hard to distinguish, dont stand out and simply just dont seem to work. They also seem to clash with the red headers on the RHS. Why dont you scrap the Blue background headers, and make them red, the same as the ones on the LHS. It would bring the site together, and make it look more professional and cleaner. Top Menu Bar: I cant work out why you have your top menu bar where it is. It seems a bit out of reach, and it is taking up room, that it probably doesnt need to. I would scrap that entire Top Menu Bar, and simply bring the menu items down to the near empty bar underneath the title and banner advertisement. It will look more in place, and it will save you some room, so that you can fit more of your home page on the users screen. Site Partners Advertisement: On the RHS, the upwards moving advertisement is moving to fast. I cant keep up with the different headings as they scroll up. You need to slow this down, to give people a chance of reading the heading and brief description. Purpose Of Site: To me your site seems to be lacking a bit in direction. What is the main purpose of your site? Is it to encourage people to submit their link, is it to hopefully get people using your site as a directory (Probably not, because it is easier to simply just use Google). Is it to make money off advertisements like Google Adwords, or is it to promote your products on the RHS. All of the above may be the purpose of the site, but you need to place them in order of importance. The most important one, has to be customer focused. What does your website do for the user/customer? Advertising may be your goal, however it comes second fiddle to the needs of the customer, because it doesnt matter how many advertisements you have when you have no traffic. Focus on giving users what they want. Once you give them what they want, then mould the advertisements around that. News Section: News sections are good, because they constantly provide updated content, however your news items seem to be cluttered and i cant seem to tell what sort of news you are focusing on. There is plenty of news out there in the world, and the major sites will beat you every time when it comes to news, so why dont you just pick a select market. Focus on Web news, something that relates to your site. Also, try and display it in a way, that is more orderly and easy to read. All you need is the heading as a link, the source and some intro text, they dont really need much more then that. Make the Heading stand out from the intro text and you are laughing. At the moment you are trying to cover too much news, and it just isnt working because you cant possibly keep up, and it is only a secondary feature of your site. CONCLUSION In summing up, I think that you need to decide on a colourscheme, that does not involve that light shade of blue. Make your title a bit bigger. Get rid of all the red text, Run with red for all your header bars, relocate the top menu bar, slow down the advertisement on the RHS and focus more on your customers then your advertisements. Advertisements dont attract traffic, it is content that attracts traffic. So advertisements have to be a secondary factor. Focus on giving your customers/users what they want. This will inturn drive more traffic, and your advertisements will be receiving more exposure. Overall, with a very good URL and listing on google, I think your site has a lot of potential. Focus on giving people what they want, and making it as easy as possible for them and the results will follow.
Erm... a ton of people do this for free already to create content for their blog. You'll need to edit up your review a little. (Google is capitalized. "I" is always capitalized. Etc.) You could skip a lot of the excess and get to your opinion. You should also consider reading other professional reviews and see what they focus on. You'll need to really spruce up and look professional to be able to charge any sort of rate. Might I suggest you do the reviews free, but then offer to help improve the site for a fee? Or maybe you can network with people who do website design or SEO and offer their services. It'd be a much better marketing tool if you did the reviews for free. If you do it right, you'll make a lot more money.
yeh i agree with calissa. the fact that you get loads of keywords appearing in your blog benefits yourself. i wouldn't start chagring ppl unless it makes it bigtime
Well, do tonnes of free reviews for at least 3-6 months. Build links and your stats. Apart from just unique visits, try building the click-through rates as well to boost your credibility. When such stats go up, you can charge a $50-$100 easily. Again, this will be hard work.
Thats a nice review. Now how much you can charge depends on how much traffic you get, alexa rank, google pr... People look at those when they get reviews from a blog.
I think you should go check this site www.BuyBlogReviews.com to get paid for writing the reviews. You can also get the idea how the market is like these days..
Thank you all for your advice, it is much appreciated. To me, overall, payment is a secondary factor. My main aim is to give customers/users what they want, and provide them with useful information. To begin with, I am going to provide reviews for free, to build up my credtbility, content and traffic. Once I have got the site/service established I will then consider charging for my review, if the demand is there. If the demand is not there for charging, I will continue to perform free reviews, in the hope to build up traffic, exposure, and possibly revenue through Adsense and Affiliate marketing.
You can also review sites through the program avaliable with PayPerPost. This might help sharpen your skills and build content that'll help you grab top reviews in the future. I've seen many $10-ish paid reviews there but the content guidelines might require less than what you have here. Best & Take Care!