How Bloggers Make Money: Sponsored Posts & Product Reviews

This is a realm I’m just delving into so I don’t have much expert advise but I can tell you how it works and what I personally have done so far.

Sponsored posts and product reviews are often spoken of together but they are different things. Especially to the Federal Trade Commission (ack, the Feds!).  So let’s get some terminology straight.

A product review is something YOU do independent of any input from the company whose product you are reviewing. It should be unbiased and reflect how YOU feel about a product – good, bad or otherwise (there are different schools of thought on whether one should post a negative review but we must each decide that for ourselves!). While the company can provide the product for free, the distinction is that you are writing the review yourself based solely upon your experience with the product. The FTC does, however, require that when a product has been provided for you, that you disclose that on your blog.

A sponsored post reflects the company's voice, opinions and messaging. Basically you are giving them yours space to say what they want to say – either as themselves or as you. It’s sort of like in a magazine where they have those articles with the words “ADVERTISEMENT” in the top corner. Sponsored posts, by nature, are NOT unbiased because they are written by the company who has a vested interest in the wording.

Both of these kind of posts have implications on how you must communicate them to comply with FTC regulations, which you can find here.

Now, having said that, you can make money either way. I personally only recently started charging for product reviews and it’s simply because before about a year ago I didn’t know I could/should (hence this blog!).

I will say I was a bit ambivalent about the pay-per-review/sponsored post thing (I’ve still yet to sell a sponsored post on Bariatric Foodie). Why did it feel like I was doing something wrong? I don’t know, but here’s the reality:

•  By virtue of the fact that you’ve built an audience you are now a communication “channel” through which companies can promote their products or services.
•  Like any channel, there is an inherent value in your endorsement, whether it is explicitly stated (in a product review) or implied (by virtue of the fact that you allowed a company to sponsor a post on your blog).
• Both of the above being the case, there is no reason you shouldn’t be compensated for promoting products on your blog!

Having said that there are a few caveats:  

• Anything you promote should be in the best interest of your audience. This goes without saying. For instance, I’m never going to review a Doritos product on Bariatric Foodie because to do so would not be in the best interest of my audience.
• You should seek to preserve your authentic voice in any review you do. If a company or brand starts to try to dictate what you say, that is a sponsored post and you must treat it as such by adhering to the FTC rules about sponsored posts. The companies and brands you work with know what that means: they want to go through you because you have “street cred” with your audience. If you are forced to label the post so that it’s explicit that the words are not yours they lose that! But in short never EVER let a company write a post or review for you without following the FTC guidelines! It’s not legal or ethical or fair to your audience.
• Like I said above, you must decide for yourself if you’ll publish negative reviews. This can be tricky. To determine this, it might be helpful if you wrote an overall review policy. Here’s the one for Bariatric Foodie. You’ll see in mine I tell companies right off the bat that if you send me product, I’m going to publish a review. I do this because I feel there’s as much value in knowing what I hate as what I love (for my audience).
•  But here’s the kicker: YES you still have to pay me for that review! This is the risk that companies take in doing a review with me. In turn, I adhere to some pretty strict guidelines in how I review products (I review objectively using non-slanderous terminology). Thus far I’ve never been paid to review a product I categorically hated (I’ll tell you why in a moment).

So that is to say in all things “be you.” Do you. Whatever.

Now I just said I have never had to put out a negative review. How is this possible? Well it’s mainly for two reasons.

First, I vet companies pretty thoroughly before agreeing to work with them in any fashion. I poke around their website. I Google them. Since I deal mainly with food I check out the nutritional data on the product they want me to review. If there’s any red flags, I ask questions. Lots and lots of questions. This alone is enough to help me be reasonably sure it’s an ok product, even if I don’t personally like the flavors, etc. I usually only outright reject a review if it doesn’t meet my audience’s nutritional needs.

This is especially important with sponsored posts. While you SHOULD have final approval authority on all sponsored posts, you need to be reasonably sure the company is not going to say anything that violates the values or ideology of your blog. In my experience, payment for sponsored posts comes AFTER language is agreed upon because once the company pays you, simply put, you have to publish it (or return the payment). 

The second is that I’m a pretty open-minded person. Even if I personally don’t like something, I can see the merit it may have in others. This is why my reviews rely so heavily on objective language. What do I mean by that? Say I’m reviewing a protein shake I did not like.

Objective = “The shake was bitter and left a strong aftertaste that I did not find appealing.”

Not Objective = “This shake tasted like monkey’s ass!”

See the difference? This way my readers who like bitter flavors and who aren’t sensitive to aftertastes may (or may not) check out the product.

Moving right along.

So how much should you be paid for a  review or sponsored post?

That’s the million dollar question and I don’t have a definitive answer! But I will tell you it’s probably best to standardize everything onto what is called a “rate sheet.”

And a rate sheet is just what it sounds like. It’s a sheet that goes over all the things for which you require payment from a company (ads, sponsored posts, endorsements, etc.) and the cost for them.

I can tell you that I used a formula that took me through the following steps: 

1. Calculating how much time an average review takes (be sure to factor in not only the trying of the product but also photographing the product, writing the post, promoting any accompanying giveaway, promoting the post via social media and being available to answer any questions your readers might have).
2. Then my base level for the review was the minimum wage in my state.
3. To that I started considering value added stuff. Am I producing tweets and mentioning you? Am I developing special recipes? Am I being photographed in your t-shirt? And what rights do you have to those things? Can you republish my recipe? Is the photo of me in your t-shirt yours? All of that has monetary value.
4. You should also consider how much traffic you have. I assigned a monetary value to each potential person a company might reach through me based on my Facebook Likes, Twitter followers and the number of unique visitors to my blog (we’ll get to analytics another time).
5. All of this should give you a pretty good idea of what you should charge. Ideally you should run comparables with other blogs that are similar to yours, but good luck getting them to share their rates! We’re not gas stations. We’re bloggers. And our ability to sell ourselves is important!

So I’ll stop here because this was just supposed to be a beginning primer in how bloggers make money from reviews and sponsored posts. But there’s so much we will talk about in the future. Like how to recruit reviews, how to handle negotiations, etc.

Look forward to that!