Part of my website/blog involves reviews of retailers (particularly internet retailers) and products.  In general they will be of interest to moms, but many of the reviews will span to a larger audience.

For instance, I have done a review of a cell phone retailer called LetsTalk.com.  It is fairly detailed and can be found here:
http://accidentalmommies.com/2008/04/20 … -a-review/

I am aware of review type sites such as Epinions.com and other shopping portals that have consumer reviews, but they do not easily allow me credit for my review as far as being able to market my website through it.  Generally, it is convoluted where someone could click on my name and see my "profile" that would contain a not necessarily obvious link to my site.

Does anyone have any suggestions for marketing / submitting reviews of this type?

Thanks in advance!

G'day Mom.

Not too sure what you're looking for. Maybe this will help:

I gave Blogsvertise a go. Didn't work out real well for me. Might have another go at it.

There are other similar programmes.

Blogsvertise pay only about US$4, US$6, sometimes up to US$10. If you have the traffic and ranking you can do a bit better.

I really think that if you go to the trouble of reviewing a website, product or company, the time invested to do it properly has got to be worth fifty bucks. A case in point is the better site reviews on SR would have to be worth fifty bucks.

I think that what you need to do in order to get traffic from other sites is produce something that is good enough so that others will use your RSS feed and that will lead their traffic to you.

Be sure to have only the teaser in the feed or the traffic won't need to come to you.

Check out the posts on SR from Mark CCDC. Maybe there is room for some sort of deal.

Regards,
Laurie.

Laurie,

Thanks for the tips.  I'll definately give Blogvertise a go.

There are products that I will review, regardless of whether or not anyone is paying me for the review in order to help my readers.  I guess what I am looking for is a way or place to submit my already written review somewhere in order to gain additional readers to the blog.  Not necessarily to get paid for my review, simply to advertise the review.

I have had a few hits to my cell phone retailer review simply from Google searches.

Thanks!

Hey Mom!

Glad you've had some visitors on the review.

Yes, there may well be sites that would help with traffic to your reviews, but I can't help you with that.

Search engine traffic seems to be your best shot. Following that, a loyal readership.

I have no idea where you are at with SEO (search engine optimization). To get the SE traffic that you are looking for, your site will need to be optimized to achieve high SERPs (search engine results pages) ranking. That is, be on the first page of Google for any given search term.

Regards,
Laurie.

Thanks for all the advice Laurie, I appreciate it!

I haven't done any SEO type stuff...not really sure where to start.  I haven't done any research in that area.

OK Mom. Obviously you and your co-mom are filled with vitality, enthusiasm and creativity. Good on ya! That's great!

And far from being a young mum, I'm a grandfather. So you're site doesn't grab me as it would my daughter or daughters in law, who are young mums.

If you are to get good SE traffic to your site, there's a heap of learning and work ahead.

Here are a couple of things that you are apparently blissfully oblivious to but which require attention:

1)  You have 79 pages indexed in Google. Great! The big half all have the same title and description giving you the same lines in the SERPs.

I suppose it's because of the header in your blog. I guess it's related to the theme.

It could be that they all have the same title and description but Google has taken pity on you with some, picking up on the content from down the page a bit.

2)  You don't appear tp have a .htaccess file." What's that?" she says in disbeliefe.

3)  Your robots.txt file says only:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

4)  There are a heap of on site and off site factors that you'll need to come to terms with in order for your blog to triumph as the content demands it does.

Now please note that I haven't set out to put you down, here. Simply giving a sketchy view of what's ahead. It's not so long ago that I didn't know what a .htaccess file was, either. In fact, I still don't know what it is. I just know how to make it and where to put it.

SR is full of resources on SEO. Check out the current and archived posts and articles. If you wish to pursue the study of SEO, give us a hoy and we'll set you some homework. That means point you in the direction of some self study.

So in part, what I'm saying is that there's a lot more to it than a heap of riveting content.

I suppose there are millions of blogs out there. Certainly hundreds and hundreds of thousands.

I see so many hopefuls with their blogs. Many of the authors get into schemes that attempt to get traffic. In the most part, the traffic they get is from other hopefuls with the same intent. Not targeted traffic. There are exceptions, of course. Be one of the exceptions!

Regards,
Laurie.

If your writing reviews on your own site there are 2 ways to monetize that:

1) if you are recommending the product, and they have an affiliate program you can link to it using your affiliate link

2) advertise relevant products/services on the review page

Laurie,

Thanks so much for all the info...

I think

Seriously, it looks like I still have some work ahead of me but I'm up for the challenge.

Thanks again for all the advice!

Nic wrote:

If your writing reviews on your own site there are 2 ways to monetize that:

1) if you are recommending the product, and they have an affiliate program you can link to it using your affiliate link

2) advertise relevant products/services on the review page

I actually am doing the affiliate thing for everything that I can.

#2 is a good idea that I'll have to look into.  I've been afraid to put too many ads, but maybe it's not about quantity but about relevence?

Thanks Nic

You got that right!
it's all about relevancy.

I see you're using your affiliate links well. this is good, the way you've done some of them (the text links) there's a chance the affiliate link will be indexed and appear in search results. This could get you money without people even visiting your site. Nice!

What you need is a way to increase conversions (someone landing on your site then leaving it through an affiliate link).

Personally (this is my opinion based on the page you linked to), I would add some images to that article.

Think of it like this:

Someone lands on your page, the first thing they see is the top of your page. THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR, and unfortunately, they probably AREN'T looking for a huge page of text to read. So, they skip read if they read at all.

Your text, although very well written (I read most of it) is just one big block.
Use it to funnel eyes down your page towards a nice shiny picture of a product linked through an affiliate network.

I watched a friend of mine once. she doesn't like reading, but loves to spend her hubbys money. She landed on a page and her mouse pointer followed her eyes. She started at the top, bounced from one image to the next, left to right, ignoring all the lovely text. She finally got to an image of something pretty and clicked it.

Within minutes she'd handed her credit card details over and bought the item.

Luckily it was my page she'd been on and I earnt some commission as well as learnt a valuable lesson.

Text for search engines, friends and the 1% of population who like to read.
Images for everyone else with a credit card.

I find that inline styles work well for images in blogs.
alternate between style="float:left" and style="float:right"


Now, getting traffic to these lovely, text rich, affiliate optimised pages!!

Digg.com will get you a few hits.
list your domain in online directories. start with DMoz.org (just for the hell of it) and work your way through a list that someone else will have to give you.
get yourself to other blogs, add comments (relevant comments, not spam) on relevant blogs. Use a username that reflects your site and add your url (where they allow you to, not within your comment).
keep posting on here with your domain linked in your profile. this isn't the best kind of backlink (whats the relevance eh?) but it'll certainly help you get indexed.

You're using wordpress right? there's a better ping plugin than the standard called "Smart update Pinger". Make sure you get that installed, very very good for creating traffic out of nothing.
My record for getting a blog page into googles index with this plugin is.........
No! Im not gonna tell you, but it's FAST, alot faster than anyone could possibly imagine! And the faster you get it into the index the better.

G indexes first, adds you to results, and page ranks later.

lots to think about and even more for you to do.

Hope theres something in there that earns you abit of cash towards bring those little accidents up!

Good Luck

maybe something like this where I reviewed the product and provided a link at the end. Its far more in depth than normal....

The important part about affiliate marketing is to create the desire before pushing them over to the merchant - where they can either make the sale cos they have a good converting site, or waste your efforts because they don't have a site that converts well.

Here is another example

Griffinsbridge,

Thanks so much for the tips.

Do you have any idea if I can use the manufacturer images of the products or do I need to pay for a royalty free photo shop and get images that way?  It really is a fantastic idea that I'd like to implement but don't have much of a budget for a royalty free subscription.

Thanks again, I'm going to look into all the things you mentioned!

Thanks Matte!

G'day Mom.

Do you have any idea if I can use the manufacturer images of the products or do I need to pay for a royalty free photo shop and get images that way?

You should be able to hotlink to the images on the manufacturer's site, but check the fine print before you do.

In order to get targeted traffic and make the most of your affilliate links and product reviews, as well as all your other great content, you should abandon the WP theme that you are using and get another one that uses your article title as the title in the head. This relates to what I mentioned in a previous post and is about the most important thing that you can do about trafic, at this stage, as I see it.

This may come as a kick in the guts to you. Ah, well!

Consider this:

*  You do a review of some exotic, expensive perfume.
*  As Griffinsbridge suggested, you may get the anchor text indexed.
*  Someone does a search on "Super duper, sexy perfume."
*  Your page comes up with "What's That Smell?" in the large print and "Super duper, sexy perfume" in the small print.

What you want is for "Super duper, sexy perfume" to come up in the large print, huh? Not something that implies pooy nappies.

Added to this, the result on your page for "Super duper, sexy perfume" may be downgraded in favor of some other affiliate's page for the same product because:
1)  The search term is lacking in the title.
2)  The same title is found for 69 pages on the net (duplicate content).

Have a look at the links that matte gave you above, in the light of this.

Let's see what others reckon about it.

Regards,
Laurie.

The product images thing.

you need to be very careful with that.
If you're selling an iPhone through (lets say) the O2 network at carphone warehouse (sorry, only know Englands retailers) you would be very unwise to hotlink from the Apple website.

however, hotlinking an image from the carphone warehouse would be acceptable (ish)

I would literally steal the images and place them on your site. Make sure you steal the right images and add something in the review that tells everyone the image is "Courtesy of the carphone whorehouse"
feel free to link that through your aff network.
this way, you're unlikely to get berated for hotlinking and even if they found your stolen image (which is unlikely), they'd get full credit and the chance of a sale, which in my experience, keeps them very quiet indeed.

but as Laurie said check the small print

You could also look into a more dynamic system. In the UK there's a network who provide excellent product ads, so you could (lets say) review an iphone, add "Iphone" to the ad link and it'd come up with 3 or 4 different iphones from different retailers at differeing prices and differing commissions.
The advantage to this is that as differing retailers change their stock, you'll always have available products without having to keep an eye on your affiliate retailers

i won't advertise the network on here, but if you PM me I'd give you the name, Not 100% sure of their Global reach though

griff wrote:

Luckily it was my page she'd been on and I earn some commission as well as learnt a valuable lesson.

could you show us the perfect example of this structure? Link or image in here? Just so i can copy the formula and try it out

Oh and AM (AccidentalMommy is getting long to type out)...my advice would be to make sure that you review, the bad, the terrible and the mediocre as well. You want your reviews to across as just that; reviews and not promotions only.

Nic wrote:

could you show us the perfect example of this structure? Link or image in here? Just so i can copy the formula and try it out

pm sent!
<- right back atcha!