Review sites are everywhere.

Done correctly, they’re a good way to get affiliate sales whilst providing a useful service.

Normally the process is along these lines:

• Buy or blag (slang for “get for free”) a copy of the product
• Use or go through it at more than a “cursory glance” level
• Write or record a review of the product
• If it’s an information product, be careful not to give away the “secret recipe” that it almost certainly includes
• Mention the bad points as well as the good ones
• Give some helpful information about how to overcome the bad points
• Include one or more affiliate links to the product
• Maybe give a score to the product

Ideally, all that happens on your own site because you’re more in control that way.

And if you look at near enough any review site, you’ll see most or all of those things happening.

The format varies a bit.

Sometimes there will be a bunch of reviews on one page – maybe in the form of a top 10 or similar.

Sometimes there will be one product per page.

Sometimes it’s not really a review, it’s a how-to on something in the niche that just happens to be easier if you use a particular product.

In my mind, all those are review site formats.

But I came across a neat twist recently.

I received an email asking me for a review copy of a Kindle book I created a while back.

Nothing new there – asking for a review copy still works well and is a good way to get products to review without breaking the bank and spending more on products than you earn in commission.

But about two thirds of the way through the email came the kicker:

They wanted a $30 fee to create the review.

For the particular product (a $2.99 Kindle book that had passed its peak) I didn’t feel that was a worthwhile price.

But it got me thinking…

You could offer this kind of review service to all sorts of people.

And some would take you up on the offer and pay money for a review as well as sending you the product.

Not everyone.

But if you’ve already got a decent looking site with a good number of reviews and reasonable scores in some of the metrics that people look for (domain authority and page authority are the usual ones that are quoted) and a reasonable amount of non-spammy backlinks then you could command a reasonable price for a review.

• You could put the review offer up on a site like Fiverr in much the same way as you can offer guest blogging there.
• You could offer to write a short review – maybe 150 words (if you were feeling lazy you could even get someone on iWriter to write it for you but obviously that wouldn’t be a real review) – and include it in a list of other products that you’d also written a short review for. Five such reviews would give a decent length page on your site and even if they weren’t all paid reviews that would help your economics.
• You could offer to write a longer review – upwards of 500 words and devote a whole page to the product.

There are lots of possibilities and you could earn money up front as well as when people clicked on your affiliate link and bought the product.

And if you’d like to know more about this idea (I’ve recorded a video that goes into more depth and shows you the site that offered me the paid review) and lots of other ways to earn cash with affiliate marketing then click here.