When people hear the word "reviewer," the first thing they think of is "free stuff." While you can sometimes get free stuff, that isn't always the case. And a lot of times, that free stuff isn't stuff you actually want. Still want to be a reviewer? Read on!

Whether you have a blog or a vlog, the road to reviewing is the same. Since companies want their product to be seen by the largest amount of people possible, they tend to want to work with established reviewers. But how does someone become established? 

The first step is to figure out what you want to review. Would you like to review baby products or would you prefer to  talk about dog toys? Perhaps your love of movies pushes you into becoming a movie reviewer. It's OK if you don't have a specific niche. Just keep in mind that a more general website might not have as large an audience as one dedicated to a specific topic. 

Once you have your niche in mind, just start reviewing things. Talk about things you already own or things you recently purchased. Talk about that item your best friend uses every day. This is where a majority of reviewers begin. If it's stuff you already own or you are already going to buy, you might as well take advantage of the situation and talk about it! 

Here is where the difficult part begins. You need to get your reviews seen by people. While cross-posting (posting your content on different platforms) sounds like a great idea, you want people to visit your site. Instead of posting your entire review on Tumblr, post the first paragraph and a link to the rest of the review. This won't work for reviews on Amazon, where you will need to post a full review, but you can put a link to your blog at the bottom. And make sure you are posting links to all of this on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites. 

Becoming an established reviewer doesn't happen overnight. If you need to find some additional items for review, you can try websites like Tomoson, BzzAgent, or Influenster. There are quite a few websites out there looking to connect companies with bloggers. Do some research to find the ones that fit your style. 

When you have a decent following, you can create a media kit for your site. A media kit is a one- or two-page document that tells a company who you are and who your audience is. (My media kit can be found on my contact page.) Once your media kit is ready, you can send it out to companies to see if they will partner with you.  Don't be discouraged if you don't hear back from them. Companies have a lot of people contacting them. They can't reply to everyone. 

And there you have it. You are a reviewer. I know, it seems much more difficult but it's not. Just make sure that you are in it because you love it and not for the free stuff. Your reviews will definitely suffer if you are reviewing things you don't care about.