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How to Create a Product Review Blog

July 20, 2007 | By Gobala KrishnancloseAuthor: Gobala Krishnan Name: Gobala Krishnan
Site: http://www.gobalakrishnan.com
About: Gobala Krishnan dedicates his life to making sure the average guy masters Wordpress and blogging faster than ever before.See Authors Posts (212) |

Instead of writing aimlessly and competing with more established bloggers, would it make more sense for you to create a product review blog instead?

There are a few advantages to owning a product review blog:

1. It’s much more to-the-point and anyone can review a product
2. You can ranked easier in search engines for the name / brand of a product
3. Your provide value to a customer by researching a product / program
4. You can make money as an affiliate from ready-to-buy readers
5. Your visitors can add their own comments and reviews, increasing the value of your content

So what does it take to create a product review blog, specifically with Wordpress? Let’s take a look at some of the components involved.

1- Get a Market & Set-up Your Wordpress Blog

Do your research and determine what market you want to focus on. Ideally, the market should have a lot of affiliate programs to support your money-making intentions. Keep the market wide enough to allow inclusion of related products, to maximize your income potential. If your market is too small, you’ll eventually run out of products or programs to review, and that’s not good.

When you have your market, buy a domain name that has the important keywords in it, plus the word “Review”. For example, if you focus on the dating niche and want to review dating sites, get a domain like DatingSitesReview-com or Dating-Sites-Review-com. Having the word “review” in it may help you a lot as far as search engine traffic is concerned. A lot of people are looking for review sites, and having your keywords in the URL is still one of the most important part of SEO.

Of course, you may choose to go for a sleeker name, which is fine too. When you’re done with getting a domain name and affordable web hosting, set-up your Wordpress blog. The easiest way to do this is to use Cpanel, and you can get your blog set-up in a few clicks.

2- Install Your Review Site Plugin and Theme

Wordpress by default is a plain blogging platform, but with just the right plugins you can literally transform it into anything your want. And yes, you can turn it into a plugin site as well. Thanks to Dan Grossman’s amazing review site plugin, this became a hell of a lot easier for non-techs like me. All you need to do is upload the plugin, activate it, and add the respective code into parts of your blog where you want it to appear:

1. In your comments.php file to display input ratings, where the reader can select from a rating scale that you specify.
2. In your index.php, category.php, archives.php and other files where you want the overall ratings (average) to be displayed.
3. Anywhere else you see fit

Now the one thing you need to remember when using that plugin is that your entire commenting feature will be turned into a review function instead. In other words, even on normal posts where you don’t review a product, the readers still see the ratings input. The last thing you want is for someone to submit reviews on your photos or your rants

This is the reason I created my “Super Review” Wordpress theme. Unlike the default settings, by using this theme you can assign a specific category for reviews.

Any post that you assign to this category alone will have the reviewing function as you see in the image here; all other posts assigned to other categories will not.

So if you post blog about what you did yesterday on particular dating site (going with the example above)

Each individual review will have the reviewer’s ratings displayed right below the comment, which adds to the value as readers can comparing ratings.

The average ratings will then appear on each post that you have assigned to that particular category; all other posts will not display any ratings.

You can download the free version of the Super Review Wordpress Theme here, or choose from a variety of “instant” versions I have here. All instant versions are the same as the free version, but with professionally designed graphics. (note: only available on the upgrade pages as a one-time offer)

I’m not boasting but anyone using the Super Review themes have only good things to say about it, and as of the time writing I have not found anything like it anywhere else.

3- Write Your Product Reviews

Ok, we’ve come to the part everyone hates - writing.

Cheer up - unlike other forms of writing, writing a review is very straightforward and requires less writing or English skills. All you need to do is to:

1. Name the product in your blog title and post
2. Give a brief overview of what the product does
3. State the advantages / limitations of the product (you may want to play down the disadvantages if you’re promoting it, but do reveal the disadvantages)
4. Give the URL (can be your affiliate link) where it’s available
5. Invite readers to submit their own reviews

Item number 5 is most important - if you can get readers to submit their own reviews the value of your review increases exponentially. Allow both positive and negative comments, as people generally can make up their own mind to purchase a product even if there are negative comments.

(Unless all the comments are negative, of course)

Now, you can also get Private Label (PLR) product reviews from Anik Singal’s site. I’m a member every month, and you’ll get a variety of reviews on may different hot niche markets every month.

Here’s an unedited sample from the dating niche, again to keep up with the earlier example:

Product: How to Become an Alpha Male
Company: Alpha Male System.com
Company URL: alphamalesystem.com/?hop=0

Affiliate Network: Clickbank

Sign-up URL: www.clickbank.com or alphamalesystem.com/affiliates.html

Price: $39.95

Consumer: Men

The purpose of the How to Become an Alpha Male e-book is to inform and instruct men in how to get women to like them.

Pros: The How to Become an Alpha Male e-book was written by John Alexander. Mr. Alexander says that his book will teach you how to become an Alpha Male that women will fall all over no matter how you look or what your past experience with women has been.

According to the How to Become an Alpha Male e-book advertisements, you will learn how to make five adjustments to your body language and have women falling all over you. The author provides precise advice about when you should call a woman after she has given you her phone number and exactly what you should say word-for-word.

The How to Become an Alpha Male e-book leads men through the process of picking up women, knowing what to say to women, and how to take relationships as far as the men want to take them.

Cons: There really aren’t any brand new breakthroughs in the male/female relationship arena offer in the How to Become an Alpha Male e-book, but some men will find the book helpful in getting women to notice them.

Guarantee: There is a 60-day guarantee of satisfaction offered. If you are unhappy with the How to Become an Alpha Male e-book, you may return it for a full refund, no questions asked.

Value for money: The How to Become an Alpha Male e-book is a good value that many men will find helpful.

Where to buy: AFFILIATE LINK

As you can see the reviews are good, and the best part is that they tell you where to sign-up for the affiliate program (Clickbank, PayDotCom, CJ or on individual sites). It may take you a few days to create a review like this yourself, not to mention the amount of time you’ll spend buying and testing the products.

That’s why I’m a very happy person paying $47 / month for PLR Product Reviews - it just makes sense.

Although since this is PLR you need to change the words or restructure the sentence to escape Google’s duplicate content penalty, but that’s nothing compared to the actual research and writing process if you do it the hard way.

There’s one drawback - in some niches the affiliate programs are only available via Commission Junction, and historically it can be hard to join some affiliate programs in CJ especially for marketers outside the US.

But that really brings me to the next point..

4- Make a Much Money as Possible

The objective of your product review blog is to make you as much money as possible. So if you cannot sign-up for one or two affiliate programs don’t cry about it. Here’s other ways you can make money from a product review blog:

1. Adsense, the old favorite - If on a particular post you’re not using your affiliate link, by all means use the Adsense Deluxe plugin and put in some Adsense. But don’t put Adsense and affiliate links on the same review, as you’ll just be cutting your own profits. So treat each review as a separate money-making page and see how you can maximize it.
2. Auction Ads - If your blog’s content relates to a lot of products being sold on Ebay, you can also use Auction ads. Instead of paying per click, you get paid per Ebay transaction complete via your Ads. May not work so well if no big-ticket items are being sold on Ebay in your niche market
3. Review Me - Why not get paid to add more reviews to your site? Depending on the ranking of your blog, you may get reviews between $5.00 to $100 or more. By using the plugins and tools I mentioned earlier, your users will be able to counter review you, adding to all the fun..

Well, that’s all I can think of for this post on how to create a product review blog using Wordpress. Let me leave you with some ideas, and you can add more to the comments section below.

Product review blog ideas:

• Web hosting review blog
• Clickbank products review blog
• Articles review blog
• Night clubs review blog
• Web design review blog
• Online games review blog
• Mobile phones review blog
• Computer / laptops review blog
• Hot or Not type of review blog
• Music CDs / iTunes review blog
• Health products / programs review blog
• Book review blog (if you can beat Amazon)
• Paid surveys / home based work review blog
• Scam or Not type of review blog
• Footwear / shoes review blog

Generally, any market where NEW products are introduced constantly are ideal for review blog. You can get more niche ideas as a member or PLR Product Reviews - some of the ideas above are taken from the site.

Note: You can get customized themes for most of the ideas above here.

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