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I was blogwalking when I got one referring me to a site that pays to review its advertisers. I followed the link and seconds later, I finished the sign-up process. The next day, an e-mail from Smorty congratulates me as its new member.

Now I can explore the site and take the opportunities available.Smorty’s site is simply designed and doesn’t contain too-deep links that often confuse navigation. It takes only two clicks to reach the member’s area containing all the review opportunities still available. On the left sidebar, there’s a statistic on our profile, how good our performance is and how much we’ve earned. The top menu contains links each leads to “Home”, “My Account”, “Referral Program” (everything we need to know about how to refer Smorty and promotional materials we’ll need), “Payment History”, and a “Log Out”.

We can select advertisers we find interesting and once we’ve taken the task, we must complete the post within 24 hours or the assignment will go to another person. Reviews need to be 150 words minimum and should contain backlinks to the advertiser’s site. Make sure that you are intending to do the post before you’ve taken any, as expired tasks can damage our Smorty Score heavily and degrades our reputation. Furthermore, Smorty Score can be collected by submitting reviews quickly and accurately.

Smorty also mentions to send new campaigns to all suitable bloggers. However, it appears that often they arrive not quickly enough. This makes us not to depending on email notifications, the best way is to keep an eye of new campaigns on our member’s area and grab opportunities faster than others.Blog advertising is found to be a smart method for advertisers and customers. That’s why, advertisers prefer objective reviews and don’t expecting just the shiny side of their products or services. This way, they can save time and money then doing market tests to know a part of their SWOT and also benefit from extra exposure with low-cost.On the other side, blog readers are in need of being educated about the products or services before deciding to sign-up or buy a product. Reading reviews on our blog is a thirst quencher. Having an objective review can also increase our credibility and trust as they are as important in online business world as it is offline.

Blog for money, sounds like a good source of income and easy to do, but when it’s done by the same source that pays you, it became like a dilemma. Whether we should write our every thought or just keep the downsides to make everybody happy can emerge an uncomfortable feeling as we write.

So just, write it! Don’t get distracted by how much we’re going to be paid, tell the community what we’ve been through and we’ll earn a lot more than just getting paid for burying a burden :).

PS: Smorty is proven pays! Here’s my PayPal payment

Update 16 April 2008: Smorty has just launched its Post Exchange program (BETA). The purpose of this program is to establish a strong and ongoing inbound link structure and increase your online traffic. It works by writing a post about another blog and in exchange, another blog other than the blog you wrote about will write about you. Get what I mean?

For example, I wrote about blog A. And then, instead of having blog A post back about my blog, Smorty is assigning blog X to write about me. Simple, huh?

The program is free and it costs nothing to have your blog reviewed. You only need to make a review on another blog. Quite a good program, in my opinion