Hey SharedReviewers,

It’s been a very busy month here at SharedReviews, we’ve released some important and pretty dramatic changes and we’re gearing up for even more over the coming months.

The biggest change we’ve made revolves around publishing, and how we’ve added a new parent category called “Articles”. These new categories allow you to publish unique content on pretty much anything you want that is helpful and informational to other surfers online. They can consist of “how to” articles all the way to instructive pieces so you can share your knowledge on topics that go far beyond just product and service experiences. The subcategories will be counted towards cash rewards the same as any other product review category, so have fun and make sure you share your feedback on whether we’re missing anything or if there are new features you’d like to see.

We also gave a pretty big facelift to our review pages, which includes a brand spanking new url structure based on the category and title of the review when published. Now you no longer have to publish non-sensible links with numbers and a strange category of “/r/” when trying to drive pageviews on other sites, but share links that will be much more attractive such as “http://sharedreviews.com/electronics/cellular-phones/detailed-review-of-the-palm-pre”. Don’t worry, we made sure to re-direct the old urls to the new ones, so you don’t have to update the old links everywhere you’ve ever posted them, although it’s highly recommended to help with building more visitors to your reviews. This also applies to links to your profiles, which have been changed from “http://shardreviews.com/profile_home?member_id=3” to “http://sharedreviews.com/authors/Peter”.

This means that not only do we hope these changes will make it easier to drive visitors to your articles and reviews, but natural traffic to well written pieces should increase over the long term. The bad news is that this will take some time, and in the interim we are seeing a dip that is going to affect both pageviews and SharedReviews advertising revenue forcing a temporary dip in the cash rewards total for this month at the minimum. This month we are allocating $1000 to the community, which has been updated in your profiles. Unfortunately we weren’t able to let you know about this change until now since we didn’t know how this would affect cash flow for the company, but we do expect cash rewards to go over and above what we’ve been sharing up until now in no time.

We will be releasing more new feature and category changes in the coming months, so stay tuned and let us know if you see anything that needs to be fixed, or a feature / function you’d like to see added.

Happy Holidays SharedReviewers!

I wanted to send out a special thank you and best wishes from all of us here at SharedReviews. We hope you have a wonderful Christmas this holiday season, and you remember to pay attention to what you think of all of those special new things you receive this year!

As always, thank you so much for Sharing,

Best,

Peter (and the rest of the SR gang)

You’ll notice some changes with the addition of a new member navigation menu in the right side column of member pages. Also displayed are important data elements you’ll need to know as you traverse the SR community. We’ve included new info for the upcoming Content Bounty Beta, which is a paid for article writing service you can apply for. We’ve had many hundreds of applications, and we’ve had a very busy Alpha trial with early member authors that has been going extremely well. We expect to launch the Beta the 15th of January, so with the new year comes an amazing new earning opportunity for our community.

Things have been so busy here at the SR factory that we’ve been lax in announcing the all new referral program that started December 1st! Every referral you bring to the community will earn you 10% of what they earn for 12 full months from the date they sign up. This also applies to any referrals you’ve already brought into the community, where the 12 month period starts December 1st for them. Please access the new Referral Management Pages which includes a re-vamped email invitation tool for more info.

We announced some category changes that were meant to be implemented by the 1st of this month, this has been delayed until the 1st of January. This will allow us to continue to focus on providing the world value with all of your product experiences during this busy shopping season, and open up new writing verticals for the New Year. On the docket before the end of the month will be an all new SR Instant Messaging tool. This tool will give you instant updates on your friend’s activities, messages, and other important system notices. We’ll send out another notice as soon as we have a specific date.

December Cycle Info:

Here is the breakdown of how each category’s share of this month’s $2,000 December Cash Rewards will be split:

1st: 40%, 2nd:25%, 3rd: 20%, 4th: 10%, 5th 5%

1) Vote allowances are going to remain with the same. Here is the current structure:

ShareScore: Amount of votes per category
0-24: 1
25-74: 2
75-94: 3
95-100: 4

ShareScore: Total amount of votes available to you
0-24: 100
25-74: 200
75-94: 400
95-100: 800

2) Vote bonuses for publishing new reviews and referring new members to the site remain at 15 additional votes for a newly published review, and 20 additional votes for a new referral.

3) This Month’s Contests will remain the same:

1) Most Votes Cast:
1. $25
2. $20
3. $15
4. $10
5. $5

2) Most Published Reviews:
1. $25
2. $20
3. $15
4. $10
5. $5

3) Most Votes Received:
1. $25
2. $20
3. $15
4. $10
5. $5

Our next payment run for any outstanding earnings as of October 31st will be sent after this weekend. We plan on sending out the November earnings reports and announcing the contest winners by the 15th of December.

The power of testimonials has been a well known force in the advertising world, but now the Buchanan Group, who also run the newslike styled “Brand Power” ads, has started a new series of TV ads under the name of “Zoot Review“. The new campaign uses the power of endorsements in order to underline the advantages of the products. While peer to peer reviews are probably still the strongest recommendation a product can have, a celebrity is probably the next closest a TV view can relate to - after all your friends are not going to be on the tube endorsing this or that product.

The ads try to emulate that a person of your personal circle of trust recommends a specific product. The people that are used in the ads are celebrities or doctors. Aside form those key personalities, the site also encourages the users to write their own reviews. But are those reviews really neutral - it’s hard to tell, when the endorsement may be a paid statement.

If you are looking for unbiased product reviews from people like you and me take a look at SharedReviews. Our site also features a profile of the reviewer, so you can see how comparable the reviewer is to you.

Hey SharedReviewers!

Video Uploads now working!

After a very long hiatus, we have re-enabled the ability to upload your own previously recorded videos for your reviews. This includes both new reviews, and uploading as part of an update on old reviews. Although we have always supported capturing video directly through your webcam, this has been a sorely missed feature and we look forward to all of the great videos everyone creates and uploads.

With this announcement, there will be a special contest for the first member who uploads 5 valid videos on 5 new reviews published starting right now! ( The video must be original and created by the author, and must display or highlight the use of the product/service being reviewed). The winner will be awarded a prize of $50! I’m starting this thread in the Community Chit Chat forum for those who complete the task so you can post links to the 5 reviews for consideration. For those who had videos waiting to be uploaded on old reviews, sorry they won’t count for this contest, but make sure you do upload them since they will count for future contests starting in December!

When on the Create Review Page, ensure you use the BROWSE bar directly under the Video Box on the right, versus the one in the image section on the left.It may take some time to upload, then encode the file so please be patient. I have tested files up to 5 megabytes in size and imagine it can handle files even larger before your browser times out (dependent on your internet connection upload speed).

Forum now playing nice with FireFox 3.5+

All members with FF 3.5 will now be happy to know they can reply to any post in the forum. Also, the loss of carriage returns has been fixed for all new posts going forward. If there were any old posts that absolutely bother you without carriage returns, you can go back and click EDIT then SAVE and carriage returns will be added to them.

Please reply to this message, post in the forum: bugs and errors section, or email support@sharedreviews.com if you experience anything strange with these fixes.

As always, thank you for your support and patience!