If you into affiliate marketing you certainly should know how to write a product review!
Affiliate marketing is one of the coolest ways to make money blogging and product reviews are a major part of it.
There are various benefits to making money via affiliate marketing:
- You don’t have to create a product to sell
- You don’t have to provide support to the product
- You don’t have to work on updating the product
But still you can make a share of the product’s price in the form of affiliate commissions, even if you don’t own the product and haven’t worked for its creation.
I consider this to be super cool which is why I urge every blogger to have affiliate marketing as part of his/her income stream.
Note that, I am not encouraging you to do only affiliate marketing and do not create products of your own. You should be, in the course of time, creating your own products and establishing yourself in the industry.
But affiliate marketing is something you should keep along the side, all the way in your blogging journey. Given its benefits, it is something too good to ignore.
If you are an established blogger, a casual mention of a product in a blog post with an affiliate link will earn you lots of commissions.
But it is not as easy as it sounds.
In order to gain that status you have to build trust among your audience – if you casually mention a product and if you want people to buy it like hot cakes, you should build that level of trust among them.
When you are writing product reviews you should follow certain principles so that the review is both useful to the reader as well as helps in getting you affiliate sales.
Let me share some of the tips to help you write great product reviews.
How to write a product review? Simple! Be genuine
If you are into building a stable online business, trust is something you should aim to build.
And with affiliate marketing where you recommend someone else’s product, if people don’t trust you, they won’t trust your recommendations too. It is as simple as that.
It is normal that you want to write a review where you directly push the sale.
You desperately want to do the sale, right? And that feel of “desperation” is a bad thing.
Coz you will then not hesitate to make false claims or give away false positive information about the product in order to do that sale; and this is a very bad thing.
This is bad in two ways:
- In the name of writing a review and in order to make a sale, you are misleading your readers with incorrect information.
- It won’t take long for people to smell your fake stuff – there are lots of other sources that offer true information and they can easily cross refer. And, when they find out, you are going to ruin your trust factor.
As you can see, giving away false information and writing a review merely to make a sale is bad for both your readers and to your business. So stay away from it.
Do not write a review of a product that you haven’t used
This is one of the most common mistakes made by many bloggers when they write product reviews. They don’t care if they have used the product or not.
If that particular product could earn them a decent commission, they tend to jump in and write a review – they only have the commission in mind!
You cannot tell your readers that product “A” is good at doing “XYZ” unless you have used that “A” and have done “XYZ” with that.
So, do not attempt to write a product review if you haven’t put your hands on it. Without the experience you cannot write a genuine review.
You cannot promise things. You cannot say what will work and what won’t unless you see it for yourself.
Moreover you will be able to better explain features of the product and other stuff if you have experience using it.
Don’t write a “buy it now” kind of review
OK this one is a biggie. We all want the commission from affiliate sales. That’s the whole point of affiliate marketing and I don’t deny that.
But if your review sounds so desperate that you absolutely want the reader to buy that product, they are not going to buy it from you.
From the perspective of the reader, they want a review that tells them the positives and negatives of the product in a genuine manner.
But if your review sounds as if it wants them to buy and buy only, they clearly know that your review will be focused on the sales.
If a review is focused on the sale, surely, the person writing the review will focus only on the positives of the product and there will be no usefulness from the perspective of the person reading the review.
On the other hand, a review that does not focus on the sale will cover all the necessary aspects of the product, thus making it useful to the reader!
Write tutorials/guides
This is another important aspect when you look at it from the reader’s perspective.
A reader is looking to buy a particular product and they are looking for expert opinion.
They are reading/researching the opinion of other persons who have already used the product.
And if you write in-depth tutorial and guides about using the product or write about how the product can be used for a particular purpose, or tips and tricks, this will add spice.
For one, people will come to know that you have very good experience in using the product and that you are an expert! So your opinion will actually count.
Second, people will know for sure that even if they buy the product and get stuck at a particular thing, they can refer to your tutorial or guide.
This will also psychologically encourage them to buy through your affiliate link rather than from any other person.
How to write a product review – Conclusion
If you are into affiliate marketing for making money blogging, writing reviews is one of the best ways to make money.
Rather than randomly mentioning a product in social media (with your affiliate link), write a useful review.
This way you will not only be providing value to your readers but will also put your affiliate link on a page.
In turn, this could get consistent amount of traffic and attraction (unlike a social media update or a random mention).
Well written product reviews usually rank well in search engines and continue to receive consistent traffic.
This means, if you sit down and do the work once, your review can act as a sales person doing the affiliate sales for you 24/7 even when you are sleeping.
This is why writing product reviews is a crucial part of doing affiliate marketing.
There are lots of steps involved in affiliate marketing including choosing the right product, but the review writing bit is the most crucial aspects of all.
With a perfectly written review you can not only count on the sales but you can also build trust for the years to come.
Have you written product reviews?
- What aspects you have missed and what are your plus points?
- Are you proud of your reviews in the sense they are genuinely useful to your readers?
- Will your readers trust you if they read your reviews?
- Above all are you sure now you know how to write a product review?
Think about these things and you can improve a lot on writing reviews.
Susan Velez says
Hi Jane,
Great tips for anyone who wants to get started or improve their affiliate marketing commissions.
I personally think that when you share how you’re using a product or how to set it up is the best way to get people to understand about it. I’ve also found that how to tutorials tend to do very well for conversions.
Whenever I am considering investing in a new product, I always search the Internet for videos or posts on how to use the actual product. I like to make sure that it is actually something that I will benefit from before investing in it.
Thanks for taking the time to share this with us.
Have a great day 🙂
Susan
Anil Agarwal says
Great post Jane,
I consider affiliate marketing one of the very best ways of making money online, and I agree with all the benefits you mentioned.
However, one more benefit I’ll love to add is that most products will continue giving you money for years once you make that first sale. Those are the subscription based products.
Overall, affiliate marketing is dope, and I’ve benefited a lot from it.
Thanks for sharing.