Guest post by Jason Acidre
Anyone can write a product review, but making it profitable and worth reading is a completely different challenge. If you ever go to make a review blog or need to review a product as an affiliate making sure you know how to write a profitable product review will come in very handy.
If you plan on reviewing a product or service you’re promoting making sure you do it properly means the difference between just a few sales and a tsunami of sales. For most affiliate marketers writing a profitable product review is extremely important for creating content that actually converts their traffic into sales, so how do you do it? If you’ve ever written a product review and been disappointed with the results you were probably missing out on some key attributes in your writing. Let’s take a look at how to write a profitable product review.
From the beginning it’s important you tell the reader what you’re reviewing. Even if you plan on posting the review on a website that’s branded and covered in images of the product it’s important that you clearly and concisely spell out what you’re going to cover. Putting in the exact product name and what you intend to review to preface the rest of the review is important to keep the content focused and targeted. It will also help you to frame your writing and help keep you on track when you set yourself a specific objective at the beginning of your review.
Next you’ll want to decide what your objective is. Are you writing the review to attract visitors through organic traffic and have them click your ads or are you trying to passively promote a product as an affiliate? Knowing what you want to achieve with your writing will make structuring and writing it a lot easier (and make it more profitable!) Try to give a good preview of what your review contains in the first or second paragraph. For example try to work in sentences where you talk about how pleased you were with the product but how it was lacking in some crucial areas. This will help let the reader know you’re not overly biased in one way or another.
When writing your review it’s important that you write strictly about the product or service you’re reviewing. Don’t go all over the place with your writing and talk about past experiences you had with other products or how it relates to something irrelevant. Keep the review tightly focused and very concise. The more you get distracted with your own writing the more distracted the reader will be which will result in them hitting the back button or not converting into a sale when they’re finished.
Doing your best to make sure your review stands out and has some value or quality about it that sets it apart is important. You can do this a few ways but one of the best is to just make sure it’s a very high quality review that covers all the bases. Things as simple as proper punctuation and spelling go a long way and believe it or not a lot of people skip out on this or get too lax. If you have a unique writing style you should also try to weave it in (to a certain extent) and make it unique and something people will remember. For example if you have a humorous or “smart” way of writing you should try to use that in your review since it’ll make the reader relate to you and remember your review that much more.
When you go to review a tool or service that might be a bit on the advanced side it’s a good idea to lead the reader into it. Not everyone is going to be as well versed in a product or service so balancing your writing to include both basic and advanced information about the product and service is important. For example if you’re reviewing a SEO service you might want to explain what SEO is, how it works, why it’s important and why you’d want SEO service in the first place. This goes a long way for helping to increase conversions since if the reader doesn’t fully understand what you’re talking about they’ll go find a different review.
Listing pros and cons is a great hallmark of any profitable review. To make sure the reader doesn’t’ think you’re biased one way or another it’s a good idea to make sure you list pros and cons of the product or service you’re reviewing. This is a great way to list the benefits and downsides of a particular product and as a reviewer you shouldn’t worry about doing this since the pros often far outweigh the cons. In fact, listing the pros and cons probably do more to reinforce the reader’s idea that the item being reviewed is a great deal.
One thing you’ll likely never read in a “how to write a profitable product review” guide is this: pick something that people actually want to read a review about. Believe it or not there are some very popular products and services out there that no one cares to read a review about because they know through word of mouth it’s a great product. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write a review about it at all since you can get some passive traffic and readers but if you plan on using the review to pre-sell a visitor you’ll certainly need to go for products that have good search volume.
Finally, once you’ve written a compelling and informative review it’s a good idea to have a very solid call to action—especially if you’re promoting the product as an affiliate. Telling the reader to click a button or click a link at the end of the review (or intermittently throughout the review) is a good way to send that pre-sold traffic through your affiliate link and earn a commission. Without a call to action you might as well not write the review at all since transferring that hungry traffic to the sales page is often the main motive behind writing one. Learning how to write a profitable product review is an important part of affiliate marketing or marketing your own products so the more you practice it the better you’ll get at pre-selling and driving traffic from your content.
About Author:
Jason Acidre is a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. They provide affiliate marketing education and advanced affiliate marketing tools for beginning and advance affiliates.
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Hey Jason,
Good advice given here, you know I thinkits the first post I have ever read that covers this all important subject, I think it`s crucial to learn this skill!
For example, as you will know Ezine Articles is the most visited article directory on the net, and their ruling on direct linking to an affiliate sales page from the bio is a big no no, which means you cannot tap into that targeted traffic to your $$$$!
You have to send them to a review page, and then as you say convert them into $$$$ via the vendors sales page, but with your advice on creating review sites you have now eliminated that problem!
Cheers….Ed.
Thanks for the advice man, much appreciated.