ReviewMe.com, a recently launched site has been making its rounds on the web during the last few days. Dave also blogged about it a couple of days ago. The basic purpose of the service is to connect advertisers to bloggers and publishers who are willing to review products in return for monetary compensation.

Since I tend to post opinion-pieces and mini-reviews of new software, web services, gadgets and electronics every so often here on e-piphany anyway, I decided to sign up for the service to see what it's all about.

The sign-up process is quick and simple. Registration is open to anyone who maintains a blog, but your blog needs to be approved before you can start using the service. I initially thought it would take a day or two for a manual approval process, so I was pleasantly surprised when my blog was approved immediately. It looks like ReviewMe automatically checks how many subscribers your RSS feed has, and what your blog's rankings are on Technorati and Alexa, based on inbound links and other factors. Your blog is then assigned a "Ranking" (x out of 5 stars) based on these factors, which is also used to determine how much you get paid for the reviews you post. In effect, publishers with more popular blogs get paid more.

Once you've signed up as a blogger, advertisers can see your blog in the repository and offer to pay you to review their product or service. If you accept, you are given a certain amount of time to post your review. The only real requirements are that your review should be at least 200 words long, and that you need to post a disclosure stating that you're being paid for your post. The latter, along with the fact that you're not compelled to write positive reviews of any product if you don't want to prevents bloggers from introducing bias into their posts. Bloggers who write glowing review for terrible products are bound to lose credibility (and lots of readers, probably), since they can't avoid having to disclose the fact that they're being paid for the review - nobody likes paid shills, after all. :) But for those of us that are willing to post honest reviews, this is a nice way to potentially earn some extra cash (to pay for web hosting, for example) while doing what we enjoy anyway.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what types of offers I receive. Needless to say, I won't be reviewing irrelevant stuff that is of no interest to me and all of you.

Disclosure: This post is sponsored by ReviewMe.com