Doing Paid Reviews

Paid reviews have become a norm for some bloggers.  The problem with paid reviews is that many of them sound all the same so I find that quite irritating.  I seriously do not do paid reviews on my blogs but occasionally I will do somewhat of a review on a product I like or don't like that I/we bought without any compensation.  The reason for this is if I like a product I am happy to recommend it but if I don't like a product I don't want to feel pressured to say something nice about it or the manufacturers.  Any opinion I express is completely my own so I reserve the right to be brutally honest since I feel my readers deserve that.  I don't feel that I can be brutally honest about a product unless I have bought and used the product which is something quite often you don't see on paid reviews.  The bloggers doing paid reviews tend to be reviewing products they received free in return for their review so they have already received compensation before doing the review which may cloud their final review.  I think this type of review is somewhat unfair to readers.

Recently I have been testing a particular brand of reusable canning lids so I will be doing a rather extensive review of them on my cooking blog.  These are lids that are considerably more expensive so represent an initial investment on my part and a substantial time commitment on my part to put these lids through their paces.  Since this is a topic of interest on my cooking blog I will certainly be sharing the results - good, bad and neutral.  I am able to do this simply because I am not being paid by the company to do the review.  It will be an interesting but honest review not skewed by being paid.

Garden Gnome
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