The Hunt for Free Products

Every time I see a free product offer I post it up here. However, these are generally free samples or small items. They are appreciated, but are nothing huge. For more work you can get a greater reward by joining a company like Nielson or MyPoints. There you earn points towards free rewards and products for filling out surveys and doing tasks. This is a step up but it comes with a time commitment disproportionate to the reward. The holy grail of free products is to be a product reviewer. In this case you are sent great products, sometimes in advance of their release to the general market, for review. Your reviews do not have to be positive and you get to keep all the products.

Sounds great doesn't it? The problem is, most product review programs are highly selective. In fact you often cannot apply to  be a member. They find you. Through librarything I have gotten several free books to review but that is about as far as my free product reviews have gone.

Today I decided to go after the best product review program out there : Amazon Vine. Through this program Amazon sends you free products to review and rate. The catch? It's invitation only. They invite people who are top rated reviewers on amazon all ready. So how am I going to make this happen? I am going to write more reviews on Amazon and hope for the best. I am analyzing hte stats of hte best reviewers and the kind of products they review. It's going to take a long time but I am hoping to slowly climb up the rankings.



In general you need about 60+ votes per review to score highly on the reviewer rankings. In order to do this you need to be reviewing high traffic products like electronics and you need to have a real knowledge about the product and what consumers want to know. I'm giving it my best. I don't expect to move up quickly, but I am certainly excited to see where this goes!

In the meantime I am scouting out other interesting reviewer programs and will let you know the results!