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The benefits of doing product reviews and how to find them

Today’s consumers like to hear comments and read reviews given by people who have already purchased a certain product they are interesting in buying, instead of believing in all the advertising that marketers want to throw into their heads. Many times a simple video on Youtube reviewing the item you want to buy can change your opinion and make you either not want to buy it, or make you want to buy it more.

This simply opens an unsurpassed opportunity you can offer on your blog!

In this article will talk about:

  • Benefits to your blog by writing product reviews.
  • How to find companies that will offer products to review.
  • How to create a product review.
  • How to convert reviews to get more traffic to your blog.
  • How to monetize your reviews.

Benefits of writing product reviews for your blog

First of all and very important – Never make a review of a product that you don’t know.

On several occasions I have wasted my time reading reviews made by people who all they wanted was to put an affiliate link without giving a real value to the reader. This is a fatal error because I assure you that I will never visit their blogs again and probably neither will you.

Now that we know what not to do, I would like to tell you that a good product review will benefit you in many ways if you give an excellent experience to your readers. Google will not hesitate to put you in the top positions and your readers will recommend your blog to their friends.

No matter what your niche is, if you offer value to your readers with your reviews you will earn loyalty, subscribers and returning visitors, especially if you become an expert in the field. Take the opportunity to interact with more readers every day and put your name out there.

How to find products to review

Every blog will have a product to talk about, no matter if you have a travel blog, cooking blog, internet marketing blog, movie review blog, just name it and you can think of many products to review.

Until today I have only found two ways to get products to review:

A) Buy them: Take some of your money to buy the product and write about it. The good thing about this is that if you use your own money it means you really need it, therefore you will learn quickly and be able to give an excellent review.

B) Sponsors: This is one of the things I like to do. Ask for the opportunity to obtain products at no cost, review them and then write about them.

These are the ways you can get products for your blogs:

1. We look for companies that sells items that can be very useful to our readers.

Once you find a product that you would would like to review, contact the company that sells it and we offer them a proposal. We offer to review and publish an article about their item on our blog in exchange for the product for free. It’s very important to meet these basic guidelines before you send them an email:

  • Be 100% transparent with your blog stats (We use See the Stats).
  • Be confident when writing the email and transmit your professionalism.
  • Do not commit to give a good rating, remember your readers are your priority. All reviews will be 100% honest and unbiased.
  • Be legit and honest.

This is an example of an email sent to a company that sells GoPro accessories.

emailoutsample

Two days later we had this answer in our inbox.

emailinsample1

 

A week later we received their products and started testing them soon afterwards. We made sure to use the product when we needed them as not to create a false situation and we didn’t write the review until we were 100% sure about the quality of the product.

Do not worry if some companies do not respond. It’s very normal and most of them say no but just keep doing your job.

2. Companies look for us to review their products

Once you have several reviews in your blogs and you are providing value to your readers, you will see that in the internet everything spreads very fast.

As soon as you get more exposure, you will start receiving offers from different brands asking you to review their products. This is one of the emails that we received in our inbox from a company asking us to review their products.

invitationtotry their products1

Did you know that 72% of people who buy online search for reviews in blogs first before making their purchase? So always be honest and never promise to give a good review. Your readers will figure it out and you will lose their trust. At the end you will make more money if you keep your reputation.

How to make a product review

The most important thing when evaluating a product is to be honest and be thorough. Never say something generic like the product material is poor quality or the software is not the most appropriate. Go further and explains what that really means and how that affected you.

You can add photos and/or videos or something creative and unique for your blog. Try to be interactive and if you think you don’t look nice on camera or worry about how your voice sounds, you’re not the first. But the job has to be done and people really appreciate video reviews.

Here is an example of a video we’ve done. Thanks to this video we have sold more than 500 products Aqua-Quest products online.

 

Now if you want to take your review to the next level, you can integrate some important aspects of SEO like adding “Google Rich Snippets to WordPress.” This helps to drive more traffic and increase conversions. I personally use this plugin Author HReview.

In simple words, this plugin will show your review score on the Google results. This improves the user experience by letting them know automatically that this is a review and will bring more visitors and conversions to your article. You will then have more options to impress them and hopefully they will look around your site more.

You can check the review and tutorial about How to make your blog faster and you will see an Author HReview ad in a box at the top-right of the review. You can customize the size, colors and locations.

Sample of a Google result with the plugin installed:

PluginviewHref

If you like the plugin you can get it Here.

Use reviews to drive more traffic to your blog

Once we have published a product review and we know that we are providing value to our readers, it’s time to bring traffic to our blog.

What I personally do is find where my audience “lives” online which would be people interested in this product and therefore want to read reviews on it. To find these readers I look in discussion forums, other blogs and even in Amazon . Once I find my audience, I invite them to visit my blog and read my review.

Do not worry about forums administrators removing your links because if you are adding value and quality to the forum they will not remove them. Always focus on writing for your readers and not for Google!

How to monetize your reviews

We all need to make money to live and pay our bills, so why not make some money with our reviews? Now is the time to join some affiliate sites where you earn sales commissions.

This type of income represents 40% of my monthly income. Thanks to our video testimonials, people buy products through our affiliate links.

An easy example to illustrate this is with the Amazon affiliate program where you can promote millions of products and earn commissions from sales.

There are hundreds of companies that have affiliate programs but the ones I used the most are Share a sale, Amazon and Clickbank. They always pay on time and give me the opportunity to investigate new products and make more reviews and tutorials.

Another way to monetize your reviews is by comparing the quality of two products. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s never accept compensation in exchange for a good review. The best thing you can do is find a better product, contact the seller and compare both items. In this situation you will be winning all the way in terms of gaining your reader’s trust and turning that into conversions and affiliate clicks.

Conclusion

As you have noticed, I have over used the phrase “value” in this article and the reason why I am doing this is to point out the importance of the quality of your articles. I have taken my time to prepare this post for you because my main intention is to earn your trust by giving you the best I can give you. It is also the best way to show respect for the time you spent reading my blog.

Do not hesitate to start making your own reviews! If you are honest and write a good review, you will start earning more readers and commissions.

If you have any questions please leave a comment and if you liked this article and want to follow my blog you can subscribe to my blog.

** If you don’t have your blog now I will teach you how to create yours and you will get a free domain name and one click Installation.

You might also like to read

The truth about monetizing a Travel Blog

Yeison Kim

I am a Costa Rican travel blogger on a journey to create a digital nomad lifestyle through internet marketing and building my online business.

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below

SJ @ Chasing the Donkey - June 8, 2014 Reply

Another great post! I have been thinking about this myself, but I am just too lazy to set up the amazon links ( I have the affiliate account) which is holding me back.

    Yeison Kim - June 8, 2014 Reply

    It might take a little work to do it, but at the end they will be there forever making you money.

Tracie Howe - June 18, 2014 Reply

This is great! Thanks for spelling it out for us newbies. I was wondering though, what sort of stats do you provide when approaching a business? I registered for SeeTheStats as you suggested and there are lots of options, as well as a date range. Any tips for this part?

    Yeison Kim - June 19, 2014 Reply

    Hi Tracie !

    Usually everyone go by months so if you are going to show stats show monthly stats. Then make sure to display page views and visits, If you have any other question please email me yeison@yeisonkim.com Have a great day

How we got more than $30,000 in 12 months with Mytanfeet - MytanFeet - One Couple Traveling Throughout Costa Rica and the World - September 6, 2014 Reply

[…] you’re interested in writing reviews, you can read my tutorial about how to make a product review and it will give you a good guide of how to do the […]

Jane Clements - May 7, 2015 Reply

Thank you for this article Yeison. I have pitched snd succeeded for a couple of product reviews and I have also lost a few too. This will help a lot though. Jane

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