I have recently partnered with Bedsure and in addition to reviewing a lot of their home products which included curtains, sheets, bed sets, and blankets. They also make a wide variety of pet related products as well, one of these are their line of pet beds which are great for dogs and/or cats. So I can personally vouch that my dogs absolutely love this Bedsure Waterproof dog bed that we are listing in this giveaway and every Bedsure bed that was reviewed for our Amazon Store has been well received by all the pets in my dragonblogger reviewer community as well.
So this is your chance to win this Bedsure Waterproof Dog bed pillow, which has a full-coverage inner liner to help protect the filling from accidents. So the inner lining is waterproof the outer soft cover you can just wash if it gets messy. This Large pet bed has a dimensions of 36″x27″x4″ but they make other sizes as well, I would always buy bigger since I find my small dogs even prefer a giant pet bed. You can use this pet bed in crates, kennels or large carriers or you can simply plop it on you bedroom or living room floor which is where mine is for my dogs.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a good reputation, always be your best, always deliver excellence in whatever you do. Never be known as the “person who wouldn’t do that” if you are not the right person, or don’t know how, be part of the solution that helps deliver what the requestor wants.
If you are a company or brand, reputation takes an incredibly long time to build up and can be ruined in seconds, sometimes never recovering other times costing enormous amounts of time and effort to recover.
Example: I frequently run across is brands/stores violating Amazon ToS in regards to influencers, trying to influencer reviewer ratings/demand 5 stars, high ratings, which not only is wrong and undermines the trust and reputation of the influencers you try to partner with, but also harms your brand reputation when it comes to light and can have severe financial repercussions for violating #Amazon ToS.
Amazon has strict seller policies and zero tolerance for review manipulation https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/GYRKB5RU3FS5TURN?language=en_US
If you are an influencer and brands contact you demanding 5 stars or trying to incentivize with refunds/gift cards or other monetization exchange for increasing report them.
I had been using AdSense to earn money from my blog for pretty much 10+ years overall and didn’t really put much effort into looking at other ad platforms I was content and pretty much figure that Google the giant that it is must be better at automating ad placement and revenue generation than most other companies.
Turns out I was very wrong and leaving money on the table, how much? If I had used Ezoic the last few years I would have more than $10,000 extra dollars in my pocket from passive ads, that is literally not an exaggeration of how much money I left on the table by just sticking with Google AdSense for my blog and not testing Ezoic sooner.
Ezoic claims to do an average of 2-3x as much revenue as native AdSense and so far nearly 2 months in they are able to back that up with earnings deposits and analytics to prove it isn’t just hype. Now here is what I have learned, if you run an informational, news or general blog then you are in an ideal position to maximize your earnings with Ezoic, in networking with blogging peers it seems that if you run a very tight niche site, it may not be as beneficial especially if you are in a very tight focused niche but it still may be worth testing.
How does Ezoic Work
Ezoic is a bit more intrusive to setup than just simply enabling some Javascript on your site for Google to insert ads, it actually requires you repoint your site DNS over to Ezoic themselves and use them as a CDN (Don’t worry they use Cloudflare so the same protections you get from Cloudflare extend with Ezoic). They will support all your custom DNS records if you have them and you have to point your NameServers over to Ezoic and do all appropriate routing which is not hard to do if you purchased your domain name from NameCheap or Route53, you just update the configuration to point to Ezoic NameServers.
You can turn on Ezoic for Desktop Browsers, Mobile and Tablets independently
And you get to control the initial placement and optimization of where ads display down to the individual page if you prefer with their Chrome extension.
Ezoic works by taking advantage of placement and learning patterns creating heatmaps and knowing which ads placed where generate the most engagement. This learning pattern means that the Ezoic platform takes a week or two to get off the ground running as it builds a profile and learns those patterns.
So using historical analytics, I can show you that in July 2020 my site which was averaging about 37k PageViews the past several months was only making around $40 – $100 in AdSense per 37k – 45k pageviews. The days fluctuated anywhere from .32 to $3 in earnings on a single day.
AdSense Earnings July 2020
In August I had about 42k pageviews and earnings went up a little bit to around $68 in ADSense earnings for the month.
AdSense Earnings August 2020
September turned out to be a little better even, as we had some anomaly days of $8 – $13 earnings on a single day.
AdSense Earnings September 2020
But on October 19th 2020 I decided it was time to take the risk and cut my site over to Ezoic and see if it really could live up to the claim that it would out earn AdSense by 2-2.5x my current AdSense revenue. Note I was bouncing between $40 and $100 for about a year so I had a good amount of solid analytics to compare Ezoic to.
I activate Ezoic on October 19th 2020 and within the first 12 days, it already made more than the entire month of July 2020 which was a good sign.
Ezoic Earnings the first 12 days.
You can see that the first week or so was the learning period and then it started to ramp up. At no point did any day go into the .50 or lower like there was with many AdSense days.
It continued to RAMP up and kept climbing each week in November 2020, by the time I had November 1st through November 30th you could see that 54,913 pageviews which is only 17% more pageviews than in September 2020 ended up with $395.06 ad earnings and an ePMV of $9.78. This is over 300% increase in revenue with only a 17% increase in pageviews.
Ezoic Earnings November 2020
Ezoic first full month after the learning showed a 300% increase in revenue compared to using vanilla AdSense auto-ads.
Realizing there is some overlap here as the month of December isn’t finished, I can report that with Ezoic my site for the first time hit over $400 in AdSense in a 30 day span with less than 55k PageViews. That is the remarkable part, we are talking about a $10.72 ePMV in 12 years of running AdSense, when my site was getting 200k Pageviews per month back in 2012 I was only averaging about $300 in AdSense.
Ezoic Earnings Last 30 Days (11/21 – 12/12)
This is also with me using the “balanced” ad plan, and having to disable some ads on my SpintoWin page where the ads were interfering with the Spin Game, which is my highest trafficked page getting almost 10k views by itself per month. That is why there was a dip in the last 12 days of December, as we determined the Ezoic banner was slicing in some of my game and breaking code, so I had to remove 1 banner segment and it caused a slight drop off, but even with this drop the average earnings are 3-4x better than my earnings were on AdSense auto-ads.
You could select Revenue focused and let the program up the ads to try to maximize revenue, but I did not want to test this yet as a risk to my end user experience visiting my site. You can also minimize the ads with User Experience Focused if you find that the ads are too intrusive, which I found them to be no more intrusive than the Google AdSense auto-ads at balanced honestly.
Ezoic What About Site Performance?
Because Ezoic uses Cloudflare and CDN it generally shouldn’t cause any negative site performance compared to your existing site as the content is cached. There could be some slight extra latency as the DNS has to redirect to possibly another site before coming back to your site on new requests, but this generally could be minimized by leveraging proper caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and optimizing your site. Even more you could leverage the Site Speed Accelerator function from Ezoic but this wasn’t tested for this review and will come later.
Ezoic Security and Privacy
Ezoic requires to run over an SSL certificate as most sites do now, and even has integrations for showing a privacy policy as well as hosting a consent management option for you for opting in if you aren’t using a WordPress plugin or other method to have people opt in to cookies and ads for GDPR and CCPA compliance as well.
Ezoic AD Location Design and Testing
With layout testing, split testing, AMP testing and so much more at your fingertips you really have so much more power and control over how you want your ad placements to look, render and split test away to optimize what fits best for you and your site.
Again the Ezoic Ad Test Extension for Chrome is a MUST and recommended plugin to let you not only test, configure but choose if you want to disable ad blocks on specific pages and posts for your site.
So far, I am only about 60 days into using Ezoic which completely replaced my Google AdSense auto-ads on my blog and I am very impressed with the conversions so far. Had I done this back in 2018, I might have earned as much as an extra $10,000 in ad revenue from my 1 blog.
Sign up for Ezoic and test it with your site today, but one thing to note is that your site must generate 10,000 or more pageviews per month to be eligible to sign up for Ezoic. So that is the only caveat to determine if you are eligible to sign up and should investigate if you can make more money than AdSense on your site by switching to Ezoic or not.
I can tell you that if I had more blogs with 10k impressions per month or news sites, unless they were specific niche affiliate sites targeting product sales, Ezoic so far appears to be an excellent option for news and review sites where you generally publish information and are not specifically targeting niche affiliate product sales.
If you are already an Amazon Prime member you may not be aware that you already now have access to Twitch Prime since Twitch is owned by Amazon. Twitch Prime offers an array of other benefits for Amazon Prime members who happen to be gamers or simply want to support their favorite gamers on Twitch without coming out of pocket to subscribe to them. With Twitch Prime you get access to free games, unlocks and skins for various games and more. With your Twitch Prime linked to your Amazon prime you can now also give 1 free monthly sub to another Twitch Streamer which is basically like donating $4.99 to a Twitch streamer of your choice without paying anything, you are just using your free Twitch Prime sub that comes with Amazon Prime.
How to take advantage of Twitch Prime
You have to have as Twitch account at least created, even if you never plan on streaming yourself. So the first thing you do is create an account on Twitch.
You will see a button to Activate Prime Gaming near the top right side of the screen. Then you will be asked to confirm your country and be taken to the screen which authorizes your Twitch account or asks you to sign in if you are not yet signed into Twitch.
After you authorized it you should get a confirmation from Amazon that you have leveled up with information on what you can now do with your Twitch Prime.
Now if you want to claim your free games and game content you can click on See Loot, if you want to use your Twitch Prime sub now to support your favorite streamers one month a time, you can click on the Subscribe Free button and just find your favorite streamers channel. Example if you go to https://www.twitch.tv/dragonbloggers and click on the subscribe button at the top you will now see a way to use your Twitch Prime sub for free as an alternative to the $4.99 subscription.
You also get the Twitch Prime crown badge next to your profile on Twitch. One reason why you should use your Twitch Prime sub for a streamer is that a streamer gets to keep 100% of the Twitch Prime sub revenue, the full $4.99 instead of only 50% if you pay for a subscription. This means to the streamer the Twitch Prime sub actually provides them more value as a sub when it comes to revenue. This is why Twitch Prime subs are highly regarded and truly appreciated if you have one to spare and use to support your favorite streamers.
So if you have a Twitch Prime sub, feel free to drop it on dragonbloggers and you will get a free random PC Steam game key as a thank you for lending us your Twitch Prime Sub. In addition many of our giveaways offer a bonus +100 entries to Twitch Subscribers of our channel which can give you an odds boost of winning one of our giveaways.
So there are a number of different ways bloggers try to monetize their thoughts and passion for putting words into a blog post and some are passive income earning programs like banners, ads while others may be hosting affiliate links tied to certain keywords or product links to help spur some affiliate sales for those curious and clicking on the link to publish something.
Another method of potentially monetizing your blog is allowing guest or sponsored content into your blog knowing that you are accepting guest content in exchange for payment. This does require you have a site-wide disclosure to be legit and compliant with FTC as well as you may have other rules to follow to be compliant with Google ToS but is a method that should be considered if you have a blog that has aged but isn’t getting a lot of views, as many guest post programs will not have as much of a requirement on number of pageviews as other factors.
Flyout is a platform that you can list your blog on and set your price, you will be assigned content to review and publish on your blog in exchange for your set price that you list. I have seen some decent quality articles and content match is hit and miss even when you put specific categories as the only type you accept. You have an option to review and manually post all content or allow content to auto-post, if you run a blog in some content topics you could end up making pretty decent earnings in sponsored posts leveraging flyout and with the auto-publishing feature it automates the process if you are less picky about reviewing content before it publishes. As with most systems, it does require the links in your post to be dofollow by default and doesn’t support nofollow links for the content so this is always a risk in my opinion, but if you want to monetize your blog with sponsored content you will need to accept that many want the SEO value of having their link counted and recognized by Google indexing.
SeedingUp used to be known as Teliad and is a program where you can sign up as a publisher and sell links on your site or sell entire blog post reviews. The site will let you list your homepage or each individual page you want to put into the system to sell links on. Teliad will calculate the annual value of your page that you list and will allow you to choose the low/medium or high end of that price. Once your price is set you can request Teliad to adjust it by contacting their support directly if you feel it is not accurate. You are paid out in monthly installments for sponsored reviews, and even if you sell 1 blog post for $120, you are paid in 12 $10 installments every month as they do this to ensure an advertisers post stays up for at least 12 months. Other than that the program still has potential to make bloggers money. Just remember that you have to list every page in your site separately that you want to potentially sell links on, this is a manual process and involves using your sitemap to get all site URL’s however. You can also offer Infographic spots and other text link opportunities, you can choose to only accept NoFollow sponsored opps for those who wish to remain fully Google ToS compliant.
SeedingUp will generally net you more offers for blogs with a higher PageRank like several other services.
LinkWorth is a service that offers bloggers the ability to sell reviews, links, ads, banners, muras or other types of advertiser requests. So far I have done a few LinkPost and LinkAds and the payouts are pretty good if you have a blog with a decent Google Pagerank. They have a recurring billing and payment system so an advertiser can purchase a LinkAd and keep renewing it monthly while the publisher’s account balance keeps earning and collecting. LinkWorth pays out when balance reaches $25 and I earned enough in the few months I was with them to recommend them. I personally know a few bloggers who make hundreds per month with LinkWorth too, but here your blog needs to be a PR5 or higher to really earn more.
ReviewMe was a popular service that connects advertisers with bloggers. It isn’t easy to get your blog approved in the system sometimes (you have to contact support if your blog is first rejected). This site also has you list your blog and set some categories, they set a default price if someone hires you directly, but you can manually adjust this. Advertisers will then come to you with offers and you will get better offers depending on your PageRank, Alexa Rank and estimated RSS subscribers. Again here, PageRank seems to be the winner in the # of opps you get. I personally know a few bloggers who make over $200 per month with ReviewMe, but since I only have a PageRank 2 blog approved in the system, I get about $40 in offers, but only usually do $20 per month at this time. ReviewMe is highly valuable if you have a blog with a good PageRank though and don’t count the service out.
Lately I have been experimenting with a lot of Twitch streaming and particularly using Streamlabs OBS and twitch with leveraging multiple scenes, overlays, sources and more. I created a few video tutorial showcasing some of what I setup and do in the hopes it helps others as a lot of people still come to me with advice on how to fix framerate drops and ask me for my SLOBS settings.
This was my video for setting up scenes and sources including touching on themes and widgets like choosing an Alert box.
This video directly covers some of the items to check when you have stream latency, lag, framerate drops or other Streamlabs OBS streaming issues to Twitch and hopefully you get some relief with implementing some of these tips.
Any questions about SLOBS let me know and I will do my best to find the answer, currently I can’t seem to get separate alert boxes to work with different scenes even when the alert box is set to a browser source instead of alert box.
It has been a while since I updated my personal blog, so I thought I would end the year with some updates on some of my smaller projects. Mostly I found the new WordPress 5.x to be troublesome with the Avada theme and more specifically the Fusion Builder plugin that comes with and is required by the Avada WordPress theme.
This has caused me to switch to finding a different theme on my smaller sites so I can exclusively use the new editor and get my sites more lean and easier to manage. I decided after reading in a blogging Facebook group to try the Frontier free WordPress theme which has an excellent set of customization options that are very easy to use even if the theme is a little generic. The theme wound up working well for some of my smaller sites in keeping them very lean and fast loading.
I continue to tweak things here and there in various programs, I am currently going to be ending my contract with BBTV which is a YouTube Partner program and go without any partnership in February 2019 to see if my earnings will be affected. BBTV aka. Viso was taking 20% of my YouTube AdSense earnings which ended up costing more than $600 in 2018 for what I don’t feel was that much worth of benefit.
TubeBuddy is a fantastic plugin and service to hook up to your YouTube Channel and was more valuable than any of the tools that BBTV Viso was providing with a lot of overlap.
Meanwhile, my blogging goals continue to be diversify into more niche sites to try and capitalize on the lower traffic but higher conversion niches where I can, but I find that I have less time and motivation to blog this year compared to previous years after doing it for 10 years now, and I want to spend my free time usually gaming rather than writing lately.
Hopefully I will get inspired again to continue blogging more in 2019.
For those of you who know me, you know I started this blog in 2008 originally as a means to bring entertainment and my love of tech, gadgets and video games to an audience but also as a way to make a part time income online to supplement my full time job. I didn’t have visions of grandeur thinking I could become wealthy enough to quit my day job with blogging, but over the past 10 years I was able to carve out a relatively stable method of making $10,000 to $15,000 per year by running a part time blog about 20-25 hours per week. The best part about this is that I was able to do this at nights/weekends and queue work in advance so I had content being delivered everyday even though I only actually worked 2-3 days per week creating the content. I have a whole make money online page that detailed many of the programs I have used since I started blogging, but this article will talk about the ways I have earned in 2018 and I foresee earning income online in 2019 that other people may wish to pursue and summarize them.
Become a Blogger or Run Social Media Channels (Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook Fanpages…etc)
This isn’t as easy as it sounds, while anyone can become a blogger leveraging Medium, WordPress, Tumblr, and other blogging platform there is no easy way to make money being a blogger at first if you don’t have a following and a readership. Social media and Video platforms now dominate compared to traditional blogs and even if you do become a blogger or expand your blogging into where you are monetizing then I would highly suggest you augment it with social media and video channels. Note you can simply spawn off Facebook fanpages and Twitter pages devoted to affiliate earning as well, you don’t even need to run a blog. I have several Facebook fanpages that have nothing to do with this site and earn purely by referring out specific products in the related niche for example.
Ways to Monetize
*Ads – These could include any type of banner ads like Google Adsense, Selling ads with BuySellAds (requires your site have a lot of views per month already) or sell your banner ad space yourself. This is passive income and you get earnings per number of impressions or views of the ads with increased income if there is any CTR (Click Through) from the banners. This is among the most passive and works well for a small passive income if you already have a fair amount of readership per your blog, it is not uncommon to get around $100 per month for a blog with 25,000 – 40,000 views per month in just passive banner income if you have decent banner placement and multiple methods. If you are running a YouTube Channel and meet the requirements around views and channel subs you can also monetize your YouTube channel and earn revenue from video ads that play on your videos. If your Facebook fanpage meets certain criteria as well you can get Facebook ad monetization on your fanpages and Facebook videos you upload to Facebook as well and earn that way.
*Affiliate Sales – This could be Amazon Affiliate, Gearbest Affiliate, MagicLinks (If they accept you), CJ, ShareASale or any other partner or affiliate program where you get a percentage of the sale of the item you refer. This is done by a tracking link being provided so if someone clicks on the link from your blog/site you make money off of the sale, you don’t earn from clicks only if it leads to a sale. Amazon and some programs leave a cookie for 24 hours in the users browser so that if they purchase any product after clicking your link (even if not the product you were directly showcasing) you get a percentage of the sales commission. This is a good income earner for my site and YouTube channels as we link to Amazon affiliate linked products we review in or descriptions and on social media. You also can run blog posts, and leverage Amazon banner ads which lead to sales commission as well but they won’t give you CPM impression earnings like AdSense will. Depending on your niche, specialty and how you are targeting there is good money to be made being an Amazon affiliate, you can see a copy of their current 2018 fee structure below to see what kind of % commission you get from types of products. I won’t like in recent years the cut in commission for electronics, tech and gadgets has dramatically lowered our Amazon affiliate income being in the tech blogging niche.
Amazon Table 1 – Fixed Standard Program Fee Rates for Specific Product Categories
Furniture, Home, Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Pets Products, Pantry
8.00%
Apparel, Amazon Cloud Cam Devices, Amazon Element Smart TV (with Fire TV), Amazon Fire TV Devices, Amazon Echo Devices, Ring Devices, Watches, Jewelry, Luggage, Shoes, Handbags & Accessories
7.00%
Headphones, Beauty, Musical Instruments, Business & Industrial Supplies
6.00%
Outdoors, Tools
5.50%
Digital Music, Grocery, Physical Music, Handmade, Digital Videos
5.00%
Physical Books, Health & Personal Care, Sports, Kitchen, Automotive, Baby Products
4.50%
Amazon Fire Tablet Devices, Dash Buttons, Amazon Kindle Devices
4.00%
Amazon Fresh, Toys
3.00%
PC, PC Components, DVD & Blu-Ray
2.50%
Televisions, Digital Video Games
2.00%
Physical Video Games & Video Game Consoles
1.00%
Gift Cards; Wireless Service Plans; Alcoholic Beverages; Digital Kindle Products purchased as a subscription; Food prepared and delivered from a restaurant; Amazon Appstore, Prime Now, Amazon Pay Places, or Prime Wardrobe Purchases
0.00%
All Other Categories
4.00%
Note, you can clearly see the where the higher earnings potential is so remember if you haven’t started a blog yet, better to choose and keep it to a targeted niche.
*Brand/Client Sponsorship – This generally is only an available option after your channels have reached a certain level of reputation, notice and views that brands are willing to work with you. I would say if you can show a clear 10,000+ visits per day, or hundreds of engagement for Instagram posts, Facebook posts, thousands of views for a YouTube video then I would start reaching out to brands in your related niche directly and start looking for partnership. This can come in the form of simply receiving products/content in exchange for reviews or becoming an affiliate of specialized stores and brands directly. An example of a brand sponsorship is we became a Netgear Brand Ambassador a few years back and continue to work closely with Netgear on proving reviews and tips on Netgear routers and devices.
Video Game Streamer
This is very specific for those who are looking to become the next Ninja or other major online streamer and dream of being able to make money online by just playing video games on Twitch, YouTube and whatnot. There are some very important things to note here and that is that most people watch streamers not for the games, but for the streamer themselves. Your personality, play style and engagement of the audience is a big factor, along with some luck and some marketing and putting yourself out there. You need to have a very clean and consistent stream schedule that is clearly published so people know when to tune in, streaming isn’t like uploading videos to YouTube you are an interactive online presence and you must be available and consistent in your schedule and engagement with the audience. Once your each a certain criteria you can monetize your Twitch stream with ads, but you can also unlock people to subscribe and earn money every month by having subscribers who contribute to your success as a streamer.
Some people focus on a very specific game, others vary the game and make the stream about themselves. Always make sure you have the best equipment such as microphone, headsets, and a way to keep your streamers engaged while streaming. I consider this a very difficult niche to break into and make money online, but I see people do it and have a few friends on GamingTribe who stream and monetize their Twitch channels so it is very viable.
Patreon
If you are an artist or content creator, then Patreon is a very viable way to have fans donate and subscribe to your work and earn money from being able to continue to create content. This could be creating illustrations, comic books, video games, or just about anything that provides value to people who want it and want more. Examples include Trese Brothers on Patreon who make the game Star Traders: Frontiers which is on Steam, they provide artwork, content and even allow Patreon subscribers at certain levels access to early alpha and vote on what they implement in their games. Another example is MorePurpleMoreBetter on Patreon who makes custom Dungeons and Dragons 5e Character sheets that have incredible quality and functionality and currently has around $5,000+ per month pledged from subscribers to continue his efforts to improve and make better MPMB’s Character Record Sheets. There are people who use Patreon to fund their passion for CGI animation, creating board games and card games, producing podcasts and so much more.
In Summary
These are only a handful of ways I can come up with, there are thousands of more ways to make money online including becoming a freelancer with ODesk or Freelancer.com if you have programming skills, to so many other ways. Finally there is always creating your own eBook or books and self publishing on Amazon KDP or selling your own products/services as a way to earn income online as an entrepreneur. Really the sky is the limit with the Internet, it does start with the foundation of a solid idea, a passion, a lot of research, marketing, promotion and building a fanbase and like it or not, there is a great deal of luck involved too, some people will just say “follow this plan” or “that plan” to get rich online, but most people achieve a certain level of success simply being at the right place at the right time and there is no way to replicate with a step by step process simply put.
Feel free to share your thoughts and any ideas, questions and I am more than happy to help you out if I can.
So recently to save time and not always have to go into the yard to grill something I decided to pick up the Range Mate Pro Deluxe Microwave Grill which supposedly lets you actually grill foods in the microwave. It was far too hot in the summer to turn on the oven as I don’t have an air conditioner here in Southern California so we also wanted something that will keep the pizza crust crispy when cooking microwave pizza or reheating takeout pizza.
What you get is a 5 in one cooking product that compliments and expands what you can cook in your microwave, this is really great for single people who want to cook more natural foods rather than frozen meals and yet still have the same simplicity without dealing with pans and a charcoal or gass grill. The 5 in one set really only contains 4 pieces including the grill pan, a steamer tray, a baking tray and the lid. The cooking instruction book which has 35 different meal instructions on what you can and how to cook the products in the Range Mate Pro grill is a helpful template on how to get started. You will notice there is also a lot of blank and template lines for you to enter your own foods and timings, because this product does have a lot of “try it” and see how long it takes.
One thing to note is that some items you cook you have to preheat the Range Mate Pro grill before you place the items on the grill and actually cook them, this is to heat up the grill itself so that it cooks from surface temperature not just the microwave food and is necessary to create grill marks in foods and cook the surface.
Most items you preheat the grill for 2 minutes at full power with the lid on, then take the lid off and put your food in the grill and microwave. It is best to microwave at 50 percent power for everything unless it says otherwise and then keep adding time as needed. Cooking some left over pizza for example took some extra time, and a normal full frozen 3 minute individual pizza took 7 minutes with the Range Mate Grill but it had a perfect crispy crust instead of a soft chewy crust had I just tossed it on the plate and microwaved it without the grill.
You can steam vegetables by using one of the inserts, putting water below and then having the steam completely cook the vegetables like broccoli (my favorite), spinach, mushrooms, or simply you can grill portobello mushrooms as well. Some foods you can just cook one sided, others you have to flip and may want to grill the other side as well, like when I cooked a bison steak in this thing. Overall I did find it was a bit harder to get internal temperature accurate and right, having rare or medium rare was difficult to assess and it was easy to cook it too little or overcook it to nearly well done by adding just 2 more minutes. But once the experimentation was done, repeating written down notes for the same thickness level of steak yielded the same results so really it is just trial and error until you find the right timing and settings and then just remembering for next time.
Product was a little pricey but if you don’t have to buy a grill and replacement charcoal or gas, you probably would save money over the longer term if you used this Rangemate 5 in 1 Microwave Grill instead. It can do nice chicken and cheese quesadilla’s as you can get the tortilla to be grilled as if it were pan fried as well.
