Webupon

I’d like to tell you about a way you can combine the best of two worlds: watching movies, and making money online. I’ve often used an analogy in referral – or permission-based marketing. You go to see a movie and come away absolutely loving (or hating) it. The first thing you do, especially if you loved the movie, would be to tell all of your friends about it (without giving away the ending, of course!). Based upon your recommendation, your friends would either go see the film, or avoid it if you gave it a scathing review. However, the theater showing the movie, as well as the studio that made it, don’t send a dime your way for the referral, do they? So, where online can you talk about movies you’ve seen, and make money at the same time? I’d like to point out three good ones, and let you explore them for yourselves.

The first, and perhaps the most enjoyable to use, is Squidoo.com. Started by Seth Godin over two years ago, it is a community of people, called lensmasters, who create webpages on specific, highly focused topics, called lenses. The idea is to produce very useful content that , like a microscope lens, zooms in on a topic, to give people an in-depth look at whatever interests them. Aside from simply creating an in-depth review of a movie you’ve just seen, you could do a lens on the actors or filmmakers involved, or the studio, or combine with another lens (called a dual lens) in the SquidFlix. If you loved the movie, you take the positive side while another lensmaster takes on the negative side. Connect to your other lenses, or other peoples’ lenses. By monetizing your lenses with links to Amazon, Ebay, CafePress, and others, every time someone clicks out and makes a purchase, you and Squidoo split the proceeds, based on a percentage that you specify. You can even specify various charities to have portions of your earnings donated to them. Very honorable concept.

The second site is called Review Party. At this site, you write reviews. Currently the categories are limited to books, dvds, movies, electronics and toys, but they are adding to this list, so check back often if you are not interested in the current categories. For our purpose here, you would choose either dvds or movies to write your reviews here. How this site works is, you write a review after signing up for a free account. Along with your account here at Review Party, you would set up or link your Google Adsense account ID and an Amazon Associate ID. What happens is, every time someone comes to Review Party and reads your review, and clicks on either an Adsense link or an Amazon link, you may or may not get paid. What I mean by this is the Adsense ID is yours 50% of the time, and Review Party’s the other 50% of the time. With the Amazon link, it is your ID 100% of the time, but you only get paid if clicking on the Amazon link results in a sale, obviously. To be honest, I have not played around much with Review Party, but I like its concept and plan to explore it more in depth in the very near future.

Aside from Squidoo, which gives the most flexibility when doing your movie reviews, another website I highly recommend is ReviewStream. Here, you can write not just movie reviews, but product reviews in multiple categories. The nice thing about ReviewStream is that they pay you in two ways. The first way is by writing and submitting a review. As of this writing, they pay $2.00 for regular rate. That means if they really, really like your review. If your review, in their opinion, is mediocre, but decent enough to publish, they will pay you what’s known as the bulk rate, which is 20% of the regular rate. In this case, just 40 cents. The second way they pay you is if you get traffic to your review to vote on it as helpful, you will get 10 cents a vote. Recently added is a referral bonus, which is a flat rate of 1% of the regular rate, regardless of how much they pay the reviewer you referred to them. How cool is that? A little labor intensive, but if you write a decent review, they accept most submissions (at 100 reviews and counting, I’ve never had one rejected), and they pay on time. Once you reach the payout threshold, which is $50 for reviews and only $5 for votes, you just ask them to send payment to your Paypal email, and they’ll have it to you the same day.

There are, to be sure, a multitude of review sites that pay you in one form or another, but I’ve chosen these three for fun (Squidoo), focused and interesting concept (Review Party), and income potential (ReviewStream). The main point is, with so many opportunities to get paid to write movie reviews online, you should find yourself making a decent extra income in no time, by applying yourself and getting out there to one or more of these sites and writing. So the next time you see a great (or horrible) movie, go to one of these great sites, and let the world know what you thought of it, and finally get paid for your recommendation.