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How to Weave a Story into Your Product Reviews

Saturday, July 10th, 2010 at 12:10 am

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Continuing on from our last blog post, today we are going to go through how to include a story in your product reviews. The reason we add a story is that it makes the story more interesting and entices the reader to continue reading. Let’s put it this way, which version do you find more interesting?

This one:

“Today I am going to review the iPod Touch. This has just been released by Apple and is the equivalent of the iPhone without the phone. This makes it perfect for those who don’t need another phone or want to sign up to a phone plan. The features of this great little device are extensive and I will be going through each of them today.”

Or this one:

” When Wanda and I were in the US attending a conference, we happened upon the Apple Store in New York. If you’ve ever been there you’ll know what an experience that is, but we happened to be there the day after the iPhone was released to the world, actually we were on a hop on hop off tourist bus and when the guide pointed out the iPod store – we hopped off. Well, what can I say, we were hooked, but unfortunately we couldn’t buy one because they wouldn’t have worked back home in Australia. It was only later when the iPod Touch was released that we ended up buying one of those instead and we are so glad we did.”

The first one is okay but I much prefer the second one. I know I would keep reading to see what happens next.

Weaving a story into a product review lightens up the post and makes it more readable. It also lets the reader know that you are a real person and most people love reviews written by real people.

But what do you do if you don’t have a story?

First of all, you don’t need to have a story for every single product review you write. We have hundreds of reviews online and believe me, they don’t all have a story. But when we do have the opportunity we use a story. And that means when we have a real life story to use.

So we don’t recommend you making one up. You want your readers to trust you. If they see a whole lot of different stories on different reviews on your website they are going to start to get a little suspicious and the trust factor will disappear in a flash.

The story about me and Wanda in New York was 100% accurate. We did get off the bus to check out the Apple store as we really wanted to see the iPhone and we did end up buying an iPod Touch when they were eventually released in Australia.

But let’s assume that didn’t happen and I don’t own an iPod Touch. What I would do is try and create a story out of my personal feelings for the product or those of family and friends.

For instance:

my opinion of the iPod Touch before I purchased it was that it looked like a lot of fun and I really had to have one
a work mate at my last full time job loves gadgets and discussed this product with me a few times
I know my niece would love one of these if she saw it in action

So that’s just three simple (truthful) statements that relate to me and family and friends. Now I take those statements and see if I can create a story from one or all of them. Just remember that a story doesn’t mean making something up – it simply means making the product review more personal.

So my opening paragraph for my review might sound like this:

“My nieces birthday is coming up and I have been thinking about what to get her. I am a real fan of gadgets and I know she is too so I thought that perhaps an iPod Touch might be a good choice. I personally want one of these myself so may just end up buying two but either way I think it might be a great gift. So because I never buy anything without doing the research, I’ve spent a considerably amount of time checking them out to see if they are actually worth the money. Here’s what I found out…”

You can see how I took something as simple as one statement about a family member and created a story from it. It’s only a couple of sentences of personal stuff but it gets the reader in and interested in what I have to day.

Here’s another version:

“In my last job, I had a work mate who loved gadgets. Since I am the gadget queen we would speak extensively about the latest devices and gizmos. One gadget that came up often in our discussions was the iPod Touch. This is one amazing little device. Some call it the iPhone without a phone and that is essentially what it is. It can pretty much do everything the iPhone can do except make a phone call or take photos. This means the iPod Touch is cheaper and you don’t have to sign up to any lengthy phone plans. I like that!”

For the rest of your review you can just get on and talk about the product and its benefits and if you like throw in a few personal touches as you go. For instance:

“I really like this feature”
“I really like how the iPod Touch has a wifi function so you can connect to the internet and email when you are out and about.”
“This isn’t a feature I would use but I know others would find it super convenient”
“When my friend spoke about this, he mentioned that…”

Making your reviews more personal really does improve conversion rates so take a little extra time if you can to come up with something to suit your product review.

How Many Product Reviews Do You Need to Write to Start Making Money Online ?

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 5:35 am

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On one of our blog posts recently a reader left a question wanting to know how many product reviews we had to write before we started to see any measurable success. I started to write a response to him but it became so long that I knew that I had to write a blog post about it. It’s a question that just can’t be answered in a few words and the reason for that is that the number of product reviews made no difference to our level of success at all.

That may be surprising to some but really we could have kept on writing hundreds of reviews without making any substantial difference to our income. And in fact, we did just that sometime back when we added 8 posts a day to our blog. It was a great tactic and brought in traffic and it did increase sales but the amount of effort we had to expend to get that increase just wasn’t worth it in the end. If we had kept at it, we would probably be stressed and strung out by now and still not making the same amount of money we are today.

You really don’t need to create hundreds of reviews to make a good income online – you don’t even need 20 or 10 or even 5. You actually only need one review to make a full-time income. We have a few reviews that are doing just that. However, we’re not advocating that you should only write one review – diversity is the key as you never know what could happen in this business. That page could suddenly disappear from Google for instance.

The problem most people have with affiliate marketing is that they think they need to write hundreds of product reviews or build a multitude of websites in order to be successful. It really isn’t necessary and in fact it can be detrimental. The more you have to work on, the more you spread yourself thin. What this means is that nothing gets the attention it deserves and nothing really works.

We did exactly the same thing when we were working on all our 20 websites at the one time. We never got anywhere and we only started seeing success when we focused on just one website. And then when we focused in even more by working on only a few pages we did even better.

It all comes down to quality vs quantity. Once you grasp this concept, it’s then and only then that you will start to see real success online.

So this is what we suggest for anyone trying to make money online with Amazon products although this will work with any products really.

1. Choose 5 products from Amazon to promote

Choose products that are getting good reviews and those with a price tag over $150. We recommend choosing 5 products because you never know if one product is going to do better than another.

2. Write a good quality review for each of those products

Your reviews need to be unique and provide a lot of detail. Our best reviews are over 1000 words and we find they convert so much better. Just think about what you would want to see in a review if you were looking to buy a particular product. Don’t spend too much time on writing the review – just do your best and get it up there. You can tweak it later once you start getting traffic. Just keep in mind that it is the quality of the review that converts.

3. Get as much traffic to those reviews as possible

This is the most important step and is often missed by most. If someone says to me that they aren’t making money online, this is usually the reason. The industry average for affiliate sales is thought to be around 1 in 100 clicks through to the merchant. In other words you have to send 100 people through to Amazon in order to achieve 1 sale. Now I know from experience that we get a better conversion rate than that with the way we write up our reviews and Amazon itself converts better than 1 in 100 but this gives you a general idea.

So if you only receive 100 visitors to your product review page per week and out of those 100 visitors only 10 click through to Amazon then you are only going to achieve about 1 sale every 10 weeks. Doesn’t sound so good does it? This is why getting traffic to your site is absolutely critical.

We recommend spending 80% of your time working on getting traffic.

4. Create content that links back to those product reviews

While you are working on generating traffic, spend some time writing up some articles for your blog. These articles won’t be product reviews but instead short information type articles. They only need to be around 400 words each but in some way related to the product you are promoting. So for instance, say you have written a product review for a gold diamond ring. You then write a 400 word article on how to clean a diamond ring. You upload that article to your site and add a link in that article back to your gold diamond ring product review. This helps to boost that product review and also helps to boost your site.

If you can do one of these articles per week for each product review (ie. 5 articles in total per week if you have written 5 product reviews) then that is excellent. But if you are strapped for time then even one or two articles per month per product review is still good. If you’d rather not write the articles yourself and have a bit of cash to spare then you should be able to get a well written 400 word article written up by writers in Elance for around $5 each.

So what is the answer to making a decent living from Affiliate Marketing?…in our opinion it is definitely quality content and high traffic volumes.

How to Turn a WordPress Blog into an Article Directory in Under 30min

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 11:06 pm

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Lately we’ve been working on new ways to generate traffic to our blogs and are starting to try online services that can generate backlinks through placing articles on other sites. You’ve probably seen some of these sites or even tried them – sites like 1WayLinks, Unique Article Wizard, Free Traffic System and so on. We will do a blog post on the various backlinking services available at a later date..

As part of these services you can submit what is called a donor blog to the system. What this means is that you create a blog (or use one you already have), submit it to the backlinking site and once it has been approved, content is automatically submitted to your blog on a regular basis. In some cases you can receive up to 10 articles a day on your blog. The articles are just drip fed to your blog and you often don’t need to do anything but watch the content go up.

This was the case with us and we now, after a couple of months, already have a blog with close to 400 articles on all sorts of subjects ranging from dog training right through to insurance, ps3 gaming, crafts, hobbies and more…with more coming in on a regular basis. So what do you do with a blog like this with such a diverse range of topics? We could just as easily leave it as is since it’s not like we need to do anything to maintain it.

But then we had a thought that maybe we could turn it into an article directory. Nice idea in theory but in practice it really looked like a lot of hard work. I could just imagine the time it would take to find an article directory script and set it all up and then somehow transfer 400 articles over. It just seemed like too much to do on top of our already full schedule.

But then a thought came to me…I wonder if there is a WordPress plugin that can turn a WordPress blog into an article directory. It only took me a few minutes of searching and I came up with a couple of possibilities…and both of them free! And in fact, I never got around to trying the second one because the first one did the job beautifully….and by the time I was done, I had turned that blog into a professional looking article directory in well under 30 minutes.

So if you have a blog with lots of diverse topics then this might work for you too.

Steps to Creating Your Own Article Directory

Step 1: Download the following files – these are all free by the way:

1. Article Directory Plugin – More info for this plugin can be found here
2. Article Directory Theme – More info for this theme can be found here
3. Role Manager Plugin – More info for this plugin can be found here
4. Post Corrector WordPress Plugin – this one is optional – it allows you to add categories quickly and easily and this is the sample file of categories which you can use with this plugin. More info for this plugin can be found here

Step 2: Upload the Article Directory Plugin and Activate It

The plugin is easy to upload and activate and it includes various options which you can change in the WordPress dashboard such as excluding certain categories from displaying and whether or not to show empty categories.

Step 3: Upload the Article Directory Theme and Activate It

Note that you don’t have to use this theme. You can use your own but I can’t provide instructions on what to do if you use your own. I just know that when using their theme it all works perfectly and the theme is quite clean and ready to use. If you need more info on using the Article Directory plugin with your own theme then check out the creators website – Articlesss.com

Step 4: Add Categories

If you already have an existing blog then you won’t need to add any categories as you will have most likely added categories in the past. But if your blog is new then you can either manually add categories or use the Post Corrector WordPress plugin from Step 1 above. This will allow you to quickly add categories and subcategories especially if you use it in conjunction with the sample file of categories. This will create categories similar to EzineArticles.com.

Step 5: Upload the Role Manager Plugin and Activate It

To be quite honest we never got around to uploading this one. The articles we receive come straight from 1WayLinks and are automatically added to the one user account in WordPress. I think however that if you are wanting to get serious with your Article Directory then you really need to use this type of plugin so that you can better manage users wanting to submit articles to your directory.

Step 6: Your Done!

Your Article Directory should be up and running at this point. Your only job now is to adjust the sidebar widgets, header and footer to make it suit your blog.

Amazon WordPress Plugins – Our Review of WP Zon Builder

Monday, May 31st, 2010 at 4:57 am

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Just recently we were lucky enough to be given a copy of an Amazon WordPress plugin to review. To be honest, we had never heard of this plugin so when the owner asked us to review it, we really weren’t expecting too much. After all, we have used the ReviewAzon plugin for quite some time on a few of our blogs and are very happy with it. We didn’t think anything could match it….that is until we actually tried WP Zon Builder.

This is one feature packed plugin and at this point we think it just nudges out ReviewAzon as our top Amazon plugin….not by much mind you, but just enough that we can say that we prefer WP Zon Builder over ReviewAzon. And I actually don’t like saying that because ReviewAzon is such a great plugin and you won’t regret buying it but for us the WP Zon Builder has a few extra features that have won us over.

As anyone who has read this blog knows, we make a nice income from promoting Amazon products and we are always on the lookout for anything to make our lives easier. And although we don’t really use these types of plugins in a big way, we still like them because they allow us to add reviews that automatically include all of that extra data from Amazon like images, prices, specifications, weights, measurements and so on. This means we don’t have to manually add this data ourselves.

You can use these types of plugins in one of two ways:

1. Adding products using the content from Amazon without making changes – This involves adding Amazon products to your blog without you making any changes to the content that comes over from Amazon. You can literally spend an hour or so using this plugin to add thousands of Amazon products to your blog and take the rest of the year off as the content is drip fed to your site. I’ll show you how this works a little later in this article.

2. Adding products using the content from Amazon BUT you make changes – What this means is that you use this plugin to bring over the content from Amazon but you make changes to that content and replace it with your own product review. This plugin allows you to do that so the content isn’t just a duplication of what is on the Amazon product page.

We use both options but we definitely prefer the second option. If you can add your own review then you will be streets ahead of the rest of others using these types of plugins.

How Does the WP Zon Amazon Plugin Work?

You can add Amazon products in one of two ways with this plugin:

1. The first method involves creating a new post

You pretty much create a new post as you would any other post on your blog and add the product details there. I actually like this method because it gives me a little more control over what is in the post. What I do with this method is simply click on Posts –> Add New and under the text box is a section that I can enter an Amazon ASIN (each product on Amazon has an ASIN number) and then I click Insert. This automatically places a piece of code in my text box which displays an image of the product, a title of the product with a link to Amazon using my affiliate link, the average rating and the total number of reviews. This is what it would look like:

Then once I add my own unique content my post will look like this:

2. The second method involves adding posts en-masse.

With this method you can add hundreds, if not thousands, of posts in less than half an hour. Not my sort of style personally but great for those wanting quick, massive amounts of content added to a site.You can even stagger those posts so that they go up randomly for any period of time you set. You can even back-date them so that they are posted with dates in the past.

You can also use this method, as we do, for finding products based on a specific criteria that you set. This is one of the features we really love about WP Zon Builder. The filtering system is excellent and allows you to narrow down the search based on category, keyword, maximum and minimum price, average rating and the number of customer reviews. You can also sort those results by Featured Items, Bestselling, Relevance, Price, Newest Items and items On Sale.

This is a view of the Find Products page in the WordPress dashboard.

From this page you select your products and add them to a Queue. Once you’ve added 1 or more items you then click on the Post Products link from the dashboard menu and select the dates you want those posts to go up on. You can let them all go up straight away or select from and to dates so that they go up randomly during that period. There’s also a check box that you can select which prevents duplicate products from being posted.

This is what the posts look like if you select this method. If you notice it has brought all of the details over from Amazon. I haven’t changed a thing. However, the beauty of this is that I can change it if I like. I just go in and edit the post and add or change what I like.

Notice also that it has also automatically brought over the consumer reviews from Amazon and added them as comments. I really like that feature. You have the option of turning that off if you like or if you decide to keep the customer reviews you can change the settings so that you can select how many comments are displayed and only show comments that have a minimum rating. You can also sort those reviews by rating, most helpful, and submission date.

There are so many features that this post could go forever so I am just going to summarize the main ones below:

You can automatically use Amazon tags as your post tags or alternatively create post tags from the Amazon product title or use neither if you like and just create your own.
There is an option for creating ‘pretty’ links so that your links to Amazon look like regular links and not long affiliate type links.
The plugin links with the All in One SEO Pack plugin so that it will automatically set your All-In-One SEO Pack post titles, meta keywords, and meta descriptions for any Amazon product posts. Y0u can turn this option on or off.
An update button within each post so that you can update the product details that have come over from Amazon at any time. The creator of this plugin tells me that he will be adding an automatic update feature in a future release of this plugin.
You can make the links to Amazon nofollow if you like.
This plugin will work with any theme. We use the Flexsqueeze theme for most of our sites but this will work on anything according to the creator of this plugin.
This works with any Amazon country affiliate program.
It includes widgets so you can add products to your sidebars.
Click Reporting which provides stats on which products are getting clicks through to Amazon.
You can use more than one Amazon Associate ID and if you need to you can easily change the Associate ID for the entire site.
It integrates with other plugins like phpOStock, phpBay, Auction2Post, and other plugins that display Overstock.com and eBay products. We haven’t tried this function as yet so we can’t advise on how it works.
You can search for and add Youtube video reviews from within the post itself.