Have you ever browsed websites with product reviews wondering how they receive the samples and all the free items they write about? Establishing a product review website is not difficult, in fact everyone can do it. Getting companies to ship samples and free products is fairly easy too, however no company will ship you something if you have nothing to offer them in return. It is called advertising, and their intention is to gain customers and publicity through your website or review blog.
Here are a few helpful suggestions on how to start a product review website;
Setting up a product review website;
This is the most obvious, you will need to create a website for product reviews. The product reviews can be a part of a larger website, such as a blog, however creating a separate website for product reviews can give them higher visibility and traffic. Try not to use a free hosting or blog service, purchasing your own domain and hosting is always more professional. Hosting and domain name fees are not expensive in today’s market, especially considering that you can buy both hosting and domain for an average of $40 a year. The initial money invested in creating the website and purchasing the setup can be made back within two months of establishing a popular product review website.
Establishing the product review website;
The word repeated in this article is done for a reason, no company will ship products to a new website that has no online establishment or popularity. To establish a website you simply have to write reviews. No free items to review? Start from the every day items in your home, this can be anything from shampoo, toilet cleaner, beauty items to tampons. Write your own feelings about items you’ve used on every day basis, and especially the favorite products you have continuously purchased.
By writing reviews diligently about the every day products you use, you not only establish the product review website but you also build up search engine traffic. Every product review can be written with search engine keywords that will bring in visitors. These visitors mean traffic numbers, which in turn means the advertisers will be interested in using those visitors to advertise their products on your website.
Keep track of statistics
Traffic means statistics, and statistics means using the web hosting provided tools to keep track of who is visiting and where they are coming from. All Cpanel hosting plans come with either Awstats or Webalizer stats, sometimes both. Learn to use these tools and how to read the amount of visitors per day and per month that your product review website is getting. Concentrate on the number of unique visitors, this means one IP per visitors that is coming to the website. The returning number of visits is obviously how many times those unique visitors came back. By having returning traffic it means you are establishing yourself as an accurate source of information, and consumers enjoy reading about the product reviews.
Also, use the Awstats or Webalizer stats to learn about the keywords on your website and what is getting the most traffic. The keywords are whatever the visitors are typing into search engines to find the product reviews. This can help you filter out the most popular items or companies whose products you can write about. It can also be used to help you become a better writer through learning the search engine game.
As you may have noticed through browsing other product review sites, most of them have some sort of affiliates or advertising on their sites. This does not have to be excessive, but you too can add advertising on the product review website. Generally, website advertising is done through Google Adsense or you can even have an ad for companies to contact you in regards to placing advertising. The money you make off of traffic and visitors can help you cover web hosting and domain name costs.
Getting Samples and Products for Review
Finally, we are at the point you most wanted to learn about. How do you get free samples and products to review?
This can be done by either having companies directly contact you, or by signing up for websites that are specifically designed for paid blogging and product advertising. Some of those websites are payperpost.com, payu2blog.com, izea.com and socialpark.com. However, all of these websites require you to fill out an application to have the product review website approved. This is where all previous points are very important, as each of these mentioned sites will only accept an established product review site. Usually, they require a website to exist for at least two months. So get to work on establishing the website and work hard on providing quality review postings before attempting to join.
