Providing your opinion can be lucrative, if done well. Image: Flickr / videocrab / CC-BY
Getting your product or service reviewed can help you improve your ranking and reputation online. Becoming a reviewer, however, can be a great way to build your ranking and reputation — if you do reviews the right way.
Know your audience
Review websites may be mostly based on your opinions about your topics, but you will still be writing for a very specific audience. Just like with any other website, you should know exactly who your audience is and write very carefully for those readers. If your audience is mostly moms, then talk about how the products or services you are reviewing will appeal to families and kids. If your audience is mostly single 20-somethings, then write about that demographic. It’s the same old story; write for your audience.
Do not just copy-paste
There are many formats for a review post, which you can follow (or not) according to your own desires. Many review blogs include some kind of “about the company” portion of most posts. One of the biggest mistakes you can make, however, is to copy-paste the “about the company” section from the company’s website. Not only does this lead to possible problems such as forgetting to change pronouns from “we” to “they,” which reads oddly, but it can hurt your site’s ranking. Duplicate content can hurt your website and make your links less valuable, and copy-pasting large blocks of content can be read as duplicate content.
Be completely honest
Review bloggers are often in a very difficult position. Review websites market opinions about products but also try to market themselves to businesses who want their products reviewed. Constantly reviewing products badly means that product or service providers may not provide their product for a review. Constantly providing saccharine-sweet reviews, on the other hand, could make you seem like a mouthpiece for the companies.
The secret to balancing these two competing forces is to always be completely honest. Let your readers know if you have received a free product or other consideration for your review. You should also be honest about the product or service you are reviewing. Honesty, however, does not mean being negative. Frame things that you don’t like as something that the company can improve, rather than something that you hated.
Be a true partner
Just posting a post of your review is a good place to start. Businesses, however, will be much more willing to work with you if you are willing to leverage your social media presence and followers to help that business. That may mean helping run a giveaway, drive users to their social networking profiles, or helping create an opportunity to do market research.
Two examples
These are two review websites that both reviewed the same set of products.
Good example: Money Saving Mindy This reviewer not only provided a detailed and well-thought out review, but posted on Facebook and Twitter and helped run a giveaway that polled users about their favorite flavors. She did make necessary changes to the “about us” information, but this review would have been even better if she’d included less of the copied information.
Needs improvement: Lovez2Read The “about the company” section of this review was obviously copy-pasted from the Savor Sweets website, with a few pronouns not changed, which makes for awkward reading. The actual review of the products amounts for about one and one-half paragraphs of the post. The review is not bad, but there are definitely some obvious things to improve.