How to Write Product Reviews That Bring Traffic and Commissions

Reviewing products is one of the best ways to build a website that pays consistent affiliate marketing commissions. People who read reviews, after all, are much more likely to be interested in buying than someone who is just doing some casual Internet surfing.

However, it's getting harder every day to write a review that gets noticed. Why? Simple. Because everybody and their mother knows that websites well-stocked with reviews are making money. Therefore, everybody and their mother is building websites well-stocked with reviews.

How can you make your reviews stand out from the crowd?

Use Personality and Personal Experience

Sometimes in life, it's better to blend in. Writing an Internet product review is not one of those times. On the contrary, using personality is an awesome technique for creating reviews that bring in both traffic and affiliate marketing commissions. Best of all, anyone can do it.

Specifically with respect to reviewing products, it's often worthwhile to include your personal experience in the review. Have you used the product you're reviewing? What were your thoughts and feelings before, during, and after you used the product?

People respond to that stuff and so does Google.

Of course, overuse of the proverbial "me, myself, and I" can become a problem, and a severe one at that. But in that case, you's not the problem. Your overuse of you is.

Use Facts and Figures

Secondly, it's always advisable to use facts and figures when writing a review. This may seem at first glance to contradict the personal experience theory, but the two are actually complementary. If you can write a review that has both personality and hard data, you have a much better chance of getting your review noticed than a reviewer who only has one or the other.

To verify this fact, look at a review-based site like TechCrunch.com. Ranked as the #2 most popular blog on the Internet by Technorati, TechCrunch editors are not short on personality or personal experience, but they spit out copious facts and figures, too.

Engadget and Ars Technica are two other websites that gain high respect from both readers and search engines because their reviews are not all sizzle no steak.

Use Video and YouTube

The last but not least best idea for writing reviews that get noticed is to not write reviews, but record them. According to a February 2009 study by Forrester Research, videos are 53 times more likely than text pages to turn up on the first page of Google's search results.

Take note, though, that video reviews especially benefit from a few somewhat esoteric tricks of the search engine optimization trade. You must use accurate, descriptive meta tags for your video files, for example, if you want the search engines to find your videos easily. Including other text such as captions or subtitles may provide additional search engine optimization value.

It's also a good idea to post a video review or two (or three or four) on YouTube, as opposed to only running your video reviews on your own site.