6 Best Practices with Product Review Sites
So – I’m gonna step back in time just a bit and get back to some of the very basic things that have been working for me on product review sites over the past few months. If you recall from a few days ago, I still lack focus… and due to that haphazard way of building product review sites in volume, I have definitely seen a few things working better than others.
I confess, in the last 90-120 days – I have added more than 30 review sites. The following items are the things I’ve learned from doing them inconsistently across several sites!
Best Practices for Product Review Sites
1 – If You Start It – Finish It!
Without a doubt, the best bit of advice I can offer anyone, and proven to be true 100% of the time! The single most popular way to guarantee you won’t earn a nickel with a product review website, is by NOT finishing it!
2 – Use Your Homepage as a ShowCase for Your Site!
You need to assume that everyone coming to your website rode the short bus throughout middle school! Use your homepage to explain what your site is about, what the visitors can expect to find and how to find it, along with a way to communicate with you!
Who, What, Where, When, and Why! Answer them all on your home page!
3 – Link to Relevant Resources from Every Relevant Page!
One of the hardest things we all struggle to overcome, but carries the highest rewards! If you have a product review about the Black and Decker G-Wiz-Bang Toaster Over, link to several other places about the G-Wiz-Bang Toaster Over! B&D, the B&D product page, a few other top reviews for the same item, etc.
Listen – I know it doesn’t make sense, but having these outbound links makes YOUR PAGE, much more relevant to visitors and search engines! Being relevant to visitors means more traffic. If these were true ecommerce sites it wouldn’t matter as much as it does… but since they are non-destination sites (People don’t actually complete transactions here), you really need to do everything to make the pages relevant!
“Placement” of those links does not need to be in your visitors face… as long as they are there! I use the very bottom of the articles.
4 – If You Use Repurposed or RSS Content – Rewrite It The Best You Can!
One of the many things I love about ReviewAzon, is when I add a specific product listing and review, the text description of that content is put into a field that I can edit, and make my own, forever!
I target 8 word strings… and no 8 words in a row can remain the same! That means, I never go longer than 8 words without changing something! Whether I change “hot” to “warm” or “Large” to “Big”… no 8 words in a row remain the same!
5 – Stitch The Auto Content Together with Buying Guides!
By FAR – one of the things I am seeing the BEST return from… is stitching the fed content together within buying guides, toplists, etc.
I will Import 50 product articles and reviews to the site, rewrite them to make them unique, then add just 5-10 100% unique buying guide type articles that pull all the reviews together.
If it was a site about baseball bats for instance – 50 products imported. Then guides like,
- Top 5 Aluminium Bats in 2010 (linking to 5 bats from the reviews section)
- Top Rated Composite Bats (Linking to…)
- A Look at 10 of the Louisville Sluggers for 2010 (Linking to…)
etc…
The buying guides are by far the most popular content on the site!
6 – Use the Auto-Generated Reviews Sparingly!
ReviewAzon will automatically pull as many reviews as you tell it to! I decided to limit mine to just ONE REVIEW, the latest that was submitted! Instead of showing 5 reviews that the visitor can read on my site… I show just 1 review, and a link that says “Read All of the Reviews on Amazon”
Whats Working for Your Product Review Sites?
Share… cmon, don’t be an info hog – share!
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Product Review Site Blueprint Builder – Next Week is For You!
- Finding the Right Brands for A Product Review Site
- Amazon Making Change That Will Affect Review Sites
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Great tips Mark.
I am hearing lots more people saying about adding outbound links to relevant information on the products/niche so that “the big G” sees that you are linking to other authority sites and therefore may give you a little more trust.
Even better if you can link to somewhere that has trackbacks available, so you can get a backlink too!
So, do you nofollow those links?
@Tao – I let the juice flow Tao…
Most of the time – its a manufacturer page to a specific item, a wikipedia page to specific “type” of product, or even several reviews of the exact products!
The way I look at it… being more popular and attracting 10x the traffic, makes it a little easier to swallow losing a small percentage to other places. Ex: Losing 100 out of 1000 visitors, is better than only getting 100 total.
Mark
Mark
@Tao – I also wanted to add… Its reallt not something new. Just one of those things you have an internal argument with on every article post! LOL
You should hear me arguing with me!
The good thing about arguing with myself is that I always win! :D
I know that outbound authority links work…..yet I still don’t always remember to put them in. Something to think about.
You and I suffer the same isssue….I usually have 5 or 6 sites being built at one time or in some state of build. Moving forward I really want to build 1 site, finish it completely, and then move to the next one.
Bing! lightbulb moment!
I was thinking more about the outgoing links last night and thought back to when blogging and making sites was just a fun pastime for me (before all this SEO crap started invading my brain).
Linking out to other sites with relevant information was common practice. If I was talking about a the iPod, I would link to the Apple site – which makes total sense.
I suppose it goes back to what we always hear on the BANS forum – what would your site look like with no ads or affiliate links on? What value would that site add to the visitor if they came there? If I was writing about the new iPod, then I WOULD link to Apple and other relevant information sources so that my readers would get something from my site.
I think I shall try this on a site at some point. I will add a “related sites, information and resources” section to each post and add some links in there…
@Bill – I’m with you Bill… at least I ALWAYS win those arguments!
I was actually talking with Kim over the past couple weeks about my lack of structure, aka, jumping around from site to site all the time.
If i ever find a cure – I will let you know!
@Tao – I have tried using plugins to handle the auto discover of related stuff for more than 3 years now, but all the plugins I have ever used ONLY find blogs.
Pages that seem to get the most traffic, almost ALWAYS have related links woven into the content.
M
Hi Mark
I’ve been using outbound links and they do seem to help to rank quicker/higher. I just take a couple of phrases out of my article and pop them in Google, take a site from the top three and link to it. As long as the phrase is relevant to my page and is not the phrase I’m targeting I think it makes your site look like a true resource.
As for arguing with your self, I have been known to resort to violence, punch my head till I see sense. LOL.
I’ve finally found a current use for DMOZ. In addition to linking out to one or more relevant Wikipedia articles, I pull around ten url’s off DMOZ. Usually, I place them in the sidebar under “Other Widget Guides”, or some such. Also, I try to place a couple of outbound links in the main content, often to a Wiki article.
I use target=”_blank” on the outbound links.
Yeah, faking that you’re an authority site is a good way to suck up to the Google Gods.
Interesting. I built 5 sites around the time the N1Way was released, then stopped, rode the pine with what I had – why not it was working.
Problem is, I never went back and gave those 5 sites some love. Just over the past 2 weeks, I’ve been built 5 more after having a haitus of not doing anything for 4 months – and I live off this stuff.
Now I’m going back to give those 5 previous product sites some love and making a plan to go back to every site I build to give them some love. Now that I’m using WP and not BANs, I now have a blog on each site and can add some content.
I’ve started with at least 50 pages total on each site (products, guides). I’m using the Revolution WP Church themes, awesome stuff.
But I like the link juice thing, I’ll try it, DOH – I did and didn’t realize it, last week I found a table on a non profit site, that talked about safety, but it related to one of my niches, I emailed the webmaster and asked if I could use it, I just got a reply back, they said yes, but I just needed to provide information on where it came from with a link back – they are a dot org site. – Very cool.
Can’t be stingy, pay it forward.
@Sean – LOL – You are nicer than Me Sean – I would have simply used the table, linked to the source, and waited on THEM to ask me to remove it! :-)
All-In-All.. N1Way has worked GREAT on sites that I followed the guide with! My problem is finishing what I start… and there was really only a few sites that I followed every step of N1Way to the end.
Even those… I still add content to regularly. (a few times a month)
Mark
Thanks for the reminder to link to other sites, I’ve gotten greedy and out of the habit of doing so.
I have been using the Reviewazon plugin recently and also take the time to rewrite the product description and add a paragraph or 2 above & below it. I also read reviews from other sites and kind of summarize in my own words, the good and bad of what other people have said. I like the idea of only using one Amazon review and then adding the link below it to guide visitors to view more on Amazon.
@potentmix – DMOZ rocks! Right… Submit and wait for 6 years! I think I have had “”Maybe** 20 out of 200 sites submitted to DMOZ, approved.
Does it help though? Yep.
Mark
Hey Mark thanks for the great tips..
I am new to all this and just last night I was linking out to relevant manufactures sites wondering if I was doing the right thing. Now you have made me feel more at ease with what I was doing. It really helps when you guys with a heap more experience spell it out.
Hi Mark,
Great post and right on the money.
It is very easy to start sites and not finish them, even when you finish them the promotion is on going.
On point 5.
“I will Import 50 product articles and reviews to the site, rewrite them to make them unique, then add just 5-10 100% unique buying guide type articles that pull all the reviews together.”
Where do you import articles from?
@Randy @ Morgan Dollar for Sale – I am VERY big on ReviewAzon right now Randy.
It can automatically pull content from the Amazon network, list the products, and then I can go back and edit the product descriptions before posting them.
Mark
Hi Mark,
Do you actually edit the product descriptions that are provided by Amazon.. Wouldn’t there be a problem with this..? With Amazon!Changing the descriptions of their products.. Or would it be better to just add your input as an addition to their( Amazon) product description.. What are your thoughts on this..
Regards
David
@David – Not sure there any issue at all rewriting the descriptions as far as I know. In effect, you aren’t even using them any longer, but using your own descriptions. The amazon product descriptions are just a starting point… and in most cases, are whats provided by the manufacturer.
They do however forbid you from making ANY changes to the reviews provided through their system.
Also – I HAVE used them intact, and added content above and below like you mention also.
M
@David – Some products on Zon doesn’t even have any description, if any, it’s minimal, which is great opp for you to add or make your own, like Mark said, the manuf. description.
I’ve found some products like that in the Hunting category. I created some articles a few months ago. I came back to the site and redid it with a revolution theme and submitted the articles to some article directories, site has been getting link backs. I’m seeing the love. (And I don’t even hunt, my wife wouldn’t let me hurt bambi if my life depended on it. lol)
Hey Mark,
Some great advice as usual.
Are all of the 30 review sites you’ve built recently, using ReviewAzon? If they are, is there a service like Terapeak(??) that you’re using to review the market at Amazon?
For anyone who doesn’t have ReviewAzon yet it is fantastic – use Mark’s affiliate link at the top of the page to buy it – he deserves the commission for all the help he gives us.
Thanks
Ray
I recently bought the Reviewazon plugin and it is a very nice plugin.
I’m still learning of all its features.
Your 3rd point about linking to relavant sites is very interesting.
You are the third person I know that has mentioned it. It does make sense because in the bigger sites this is natural occurence.
hey mark,
I had just started using this on one of my newest sites (linking to other authority sites) but have yet to see any results from it. It is good, however, to get a little reassurance form someone that has proven credibility (you) with recommending it. Thanks a ton
@Sean –
Sean,
I tried using StudioPress Church_40 but I ran into problems using Reviewazon.. the post excerpts were not showing the images.. just the title with the post excerpt. Did you have these problems?
regards
David
@David – Hey David – you need to change the way the post content is called.
In your “index” style pages like archive.php and index.php, you will find “the_content_limit()” being used to call the content of the plugin.
You need to change it to: “the_content()”
Church (Slightly modded) is the same theme I have running the hightopskateshoes + .com site.
Mark
@Mark Hansen –
Thanks for your help..
Your site hightopskateshoes.com is really a great looking site using the Church theme..
I followed your instructions .. on the archives.php I changed it to “the_content()”.
But on the index.php.. this is what I am seeing..
I am not seeing any “the_content_limit()”
Refreshed site after the one change,( archives.php) but still the images do not show..
regards
David
@Mark Hansen –
Sorry, I left out …this is what I am seeing…
David
@David – Actually, sometimes it’s hard to figure some things out on your own with out a little help. So what I did was purchased the Top Toy Theme from the dude over at Rzon and then modded my own from that. Even added a little interactive header to it for some ecommerce interaction. I like Marks skate site too, I’ve seen some other (epn, rzon) sites using themes like those 2, I have 7 running it, takes a bit more time to put up, but the customizing is worth it. I’ll be starting some PPC on 1 today. I have a coin site running on a lifestyle theme and it’s kickin ass, and it’s a bans-wp hybrid.
@Sean @mark –
Thanks for your advice.. I finally figured it out..and also learned a few things along the way..you actually learn by doing…
Thanks also for your suggestions anyway..
David
Fantastic post Mark!
Point 1 is the one I am most guilty of, it can be so easy to start a site, get distracted and move onto another. It’s a viscous circle:)
Ben
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