Reinventing the Affiliate Product Review Site

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By Jacob Maslow

web site surfingFinding affiliate review sites is not very difficult. You only need to enter the name of a product, whether digital or tangible, and put the word “review” beside it. Google will easily retrieve reviews. In fact, review sites are so numerous that it doesn’t take much effort to find them.

 

Unfortunately, most review sites are stale. A lot of them don’t work. They fail to convert visitors and fail to add value to the manufacturer or retailer sales page that they are leading the visitor to. It is really too bad.

 

The old model for affiliate product review sites uses canned content. It’s a one-way street. You do a search on Google, get a listing of reviews, click on the listing, and you see the content. It’s offered on a take it or leave it basis. It’s a one-way conversation.

 

A much better model would be a more interactive review site. What I mean by this is a review site that essentially writes itself. When people end up at the review site, you motivate visitors to contribute and pool their knowledge. The prompts can be short snippets of text the reader fills in. Whatever the form, the prompts are frictionless and encourages or incentivizes readers to contribute information.

 

This way, the review platform benefits from collective wisdom. This has been implemented before by TripAdvisor and other similar websites. There is a lot of potential to an affiliate product review site configured this way. However, it all boils down to giving visitors the right incentives. People on their own wouldn’t do this, unless they are highly upset and want to post a scam complaint.

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