I’ve not looked for a little while at the different systems that you can use to earn an income from your blog, so time to take a quick look at the next one on the list, and that is SponsoredReviews.

I have to say that I am very much in two minds about this system. When it works, it works well. But, it can take a lot of effort and then totally annoys you!

First, you register and set a base price for your blog. You can then see relevant opportunities, which you can bid on up to your base price. Given that some can be up to 300 words and quite involved, I would like to bid higher. But I can’t, because the base price is the upper limit.

If you are lucky the advertiser will review your bid and might extend an offer to you, but I find the success rate even lower than leads in PayPerPost, by quite a lot!

The other way of getting work is by sitting there and doing nothing and then some advertisers might see your blog and extend an offer at the base price, hence the reason for not setting that stupidly high!

You get the details of the opportunity and then write it up, usually 1 to 3 links in 200 – 300+ words. The T&C of the system state that in a month your whole blog must run at a rate of no more than 1 paid post for 3 content posts, so you need to make sure that you are maintaining that and not just with their work. But, from accepting the offer, you do have 7 days to write the post.

The plus side is the speed of payment. They pay out by PayPal once every fortnight, regardless of whether you have earned $2.50 or $250. The prices aren’t too bad, although you have to remember that you are seeing the whole price, before they have taken their 50% cut. So an offer for $5 is actually only going to earn you $2.50.

What I don’t like about the system is the amount of time you spend putting in bids for opportunities, only to never hear again from the advertiser. I’m sure that could be better worked!

The system measures you on various factors, including inbound links, Technorati Rating and Alexa Rating. Your Page Rank is also displayed to advertisers. I suppose this does make it a bit different from other systems.

Work with SponsoredReviews seems to come and go in waves, but that might be more because I have only added 2 blogs and they are only PR2. There can be nothing for weeks then suddenly a few come together.

What I definitely do not like is their heavy handed approach. 2 opportunities that I have recently completed were, without any warning (I only found out because I was looking around the pages), removed from future payments and the entire account suspended for a rolling week.

Why did I lose payments for work I had done and lost the ability to bid for more work? Well, quite simply I had a banner in my side bar which contained a link and I no followed that. It seems that was enough to effectively get me kicked out of their club, even though the banner is nothing to do with them (it’s a link to my ezine articles page). Using rel=nofollow within pages is perfectly normal and what it is there for. So I am a bit upset that I’ve lost 2 payments for 300 word articles for that reason.

In summary, if you have a blog with a good page rank, plenty of Yahoo links, a Technorati listing and a good Alexa rating (mine is 500,000 and that is not good enough) then you should rank well and might get plenty of the work that you bid for. They pay well and quickly, but the system is not that flexible.