PayPerPost vs. ReviewMe

Let’s say that you have not even started having clear ideas about what to blog about, when you think about monetizing it.
Somehow it may not be as silly as it sounds. Why? Because if you don’t have any preconceived ideas or a specific niche to target, maybe it’s better to know what is on the market in terms of making money on the net, then create and develop a blog accordingly.
For some people, paid reviews are one way to go; others are going to heavily promote affiliate programs.
Let’s start with the easy one: paid reviews.
If you are like me, you are going to use your favorite search engine to get some information and it’s very possible that you are going to find two programs: PayPerPost and ReviewMe
I am not going to elaborate again about ReviewMe. If you want to revisit my post, it’s here

What I am going to do, is to try to make a comparison between PayPerPost and ReviewMe.

What do they have in common:
- Free to join
- Mandatory to disclose that the post is a paid review

What is different:
PayPerPost:
- No minimum traffic requirement. But the blog should be at least 90 days old and have minimum 20 posts distributed evenly over the time
- Low paid reviews; it starts at $5
- Allows the advertisers to set the tone of the review. Advertisers may ask for only positive ones.
- MarketPlace with advertisers’ opportunities. Advertisers list the requirements of the post (minimum number of words, if blog is to be on self-hosted domain, some blog hosting sites are excluded) and how much they want to pay.
- Publisher chooses the opportunity.
ReviewMe:
- Traffic requirement: takes into account Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking and RSS subscribers. I may be wrong, but I believe that Alexa rank of minimum 100,000 is desirable. My site has Alexa rank of….. 5,987,895!!! How lame is that? It makes me sick on my stomach.
- Review is paid at between $40 and $500, depending on the site’s rank
- Review must be at least 200 words
- MarketPlace is for advertisers to choose what publisher they want, the opposite of PayPerPost
- Does not allow setting the tone of the review
- No control over review offers

PayPerPost levels the playing field for almost anybody to join it. ReviewMe is considered kind of elitist.

Final note: Be careful when transferring blogs from one site to another.
I transferred by blog from Blogspot to WordPress and PayPerPost rejected it with the reason that the blog did not belong to me and that I copied and pasted entire posts.
The mistake was mine: I forgot to reload the pictures. I was lazy and happy that everything showed up perfect in my new template, pictures included and I did not double check the code. The pictures listed blogspot as the source.
I made the appropriate changes and resubmitted the blog to PayPerPost for approval, but I am not sure I would get accepted. Apparently PayPerPost uses real life persons for checking the submitted blogs. In such a case, I guess they should have given me the benefit of the doubt and maybe check the blogspot to see that there is the same picture of me in both of them.

Edited to add an important thing:
You have to have a self-hosted blog in order to use PayPerPost, ReviewMe or other affiliate programs. WordPress.com won’t accept sponsored or paid links.