Do sponsors help you for reviews sites?

Mihx · 03-03-2009, 08:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kaktusan

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Another question i wanted to ask! Do you guys think surfers read that 2 pages boring text review, or they mostly look at the scores you gave the site and all the rest small notes? I think on starting with really really small and condensed review text with only the juice, free of blah blah.. and focus on the scores and side notes..

I don't know if the surfers that go ahead from one of my reviews and actually join a paysite, also tend to have read the entire review text.
Considering some of my most productive reviews are in excess of 1500 words (just the main text, but including updates done after the original review) I have a feeling they probably don't

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I just ran my VideoBox review through a word counter - around 2800 words

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Looking at my Google Analytics stats I can say one thing for sure though - contrary to popular belief, certainly not all review site visitors (well, at least those on mine) are "pre-sold" and just looking for a final opinion or alternative sites to join.
If my length of visit stats are anything to go by, my review site has just as many distinctly unimpressed first-glance visitors as the case was with my old blogs, galleries, freesites etc.
A whopping 55% of my February visitors only stayed on my site between 0 and 10 seconds - hardly enough to even check the scores for a single site.

Of the surfers I do manage to send to the various reviewed paysites, my average ratio tend to be pretty good though - most months for the last year and half or so it's been in the area of 1:100 in StatsRemote (keeping track of 35+ sponsors, most of them more or less unproductive, but also not receiving so much traffic that they have any particularly negative impact on my ratio).
As I also indicated in a previous post though, the overwhelming majority of the sites I've reviewed don't sell at all, or only once in a blue moon. More than 80% of my income for the last couple of years has pretty much been coming from the same six or seven sponsors for which I've reviewed a combined total of around 12 sites (counting site network reviews as single reviews, otherwise it's probably around 20 to 25).