When you go online to buy a product, what’s one of the first things you do? In most cases, savvy shoppers search for reviews and see what others think before clicking the “buy” button. As a blogger, writing product reviews can be a very profitable niche – or a good traffic generator at the very least. However, writing effective product reviews isn’t as easy as it seems.
Four Tips for Superior Product Review Posts
Reviews make for great blog posts. They’re useable, sticky, and shareable. As a result, they garner a significant amount of traffic and can quickly enhance your SEO rankings. But if you’re going to take the time to write a review post, make sure you’re heeding the following pointers.
1. Disclose Conflicts Ahead of Time
If you’re reviewing a product of your own – or you’re somehow connected through an affiliate program – then you need to disclose all conflicts ahead of time. Not only is this required in most situations, but it also prevents issues down the road. There’s nothing customers hate more than learning that a supposedly organic review was actually biased. However, if they know from the start that you’re connected, they’ll take what you say with a grain of salt.
2. Provide Background Information
There’s a huge difference between basic reviews and in-depth reviews. The former are extremely shallow and don’t really convey all the details and information that customers are looking for. In many cases, basic reviews are indicative of a reviewer that hasn’t actually tried the product firsthand, and has instead gathered information from other sources and created a new format.
To give you an idea of the difference between basic and in-depth reviews, let’s take a look at two examples. The first is a basic review of a hair removal laser device, and the latter is a more in-depth review of five different hair removal laser devices.
How much value is there really in the first one? All the article does is tout some benefits and pull some quotes. Now, cross-reference that review against the one from Groom and Style, and notice how much more detail it provides. This is an example of a good product review post – detailed is good, while shallow is bad.
3. Touch on Pros and Cons
Every product review post should touch on both the pros and cons of a product. There are no perfect products on the market and you can’t afford to leave out negative details. Even if it’s your own product you’re writing about, cons help you look more transparent. That, in and of itself, will help you more than the negative details will hurt you.
4. Develop a Consistent Scoring System
If you’ll be publishing multiple product review posts on your blog, then it’s a smart idea to come up with some sort of scoring system that allows you to rank different products over time. This system could be a letter system (A-F), number system (1-10 or 1-100), or even a word-based system (Bad, Good, Better, and Best).
A consistent scoring system gives your audience a way to gauge exactly how you feel about a specific product. It also gives you the opportunity to rank different products in an unbiased way.
Putting it All Together
A good product review post is something that anyone can write, yet few bloggers do well. This represents an opportunity for you to enhance your blog and carve out a niche. But if you’re going to invest in product review posts, make sure you’re doing them right.