Reviews can make the difference to a product’s sales.

A bad review in a newspaper can close a play.

A lot of cinema goers will check a site like Rotten Tomatoes to find out what the critics and the public think of a film before deciding which movie to watch.

Car dealers offer test drives – a short term review copy – to help individuals decide whether to buy a car.

Reviews work. Especially honest ones. And they can be a relatively easy way to make affiliate sales.

Most things we buy online, we check the reviews.

But we’re becoming more immune to sites where the only reviews are glowing with 5 stars.

A friend of mine even goes to far as to ignore products on Amazon with only a handful of reviews if they are all 5 stars. He’ll drill down to ones where the reviews include at least one negative review on the basis that you can’t please all the people all the time.

It’s easy to start your product review site:

• Pick a niche – preferably one that you’re interested in as you’re going to be creating a lot of content in the niche
• Choose a domain name
• Install WordPress on your website and tweak it with various plugins
• Choose a theme – there are free review themes or depending on your chosen style you could use almost any WordPress theme
• Create some content – obviously that should focus on reviews. Start with products you’ve purchased yourself
• Get more products to review. Not every product owner will send you a free copy but enough will. And it’s a good filter as the less worthwhile products probably won’t offer a review copy as they know they won’t stand up to scrutiny. If you’re based in the USA then you can even get physical products for review via sites such as Tomoson. There are probably similar sites for other countries – you’d need to do a search (it’s not an area I’ve researched)
• Create the review: my preferred mix would be a video as well as written content, that way you cater for the different ways people like to consume information. You can embed the YouTube video on your review site which will help it’s internal score on YouTube. And you can get external links by contributing articles to sites like EzineArticles – that site has a separate section purely for review style articles.
• Consider adding a podcast to your review as well – not everyone watches videos or reads blog posts and once you’re established you’ll start to get listeners to each new audio you put up
• Optionally, create a Facebook page that includes snippets from your reviews and links to the videos.
• Do other promotion such as contributing to forums in your niche – be careful not to come across as being too self promotional, just be yourself and let your signature link do the selling

There’s a fine line to walk when you create a review site.

Your reviews need to be real world – we’re getting more and more suspicious and if every review reads like a promotional piece that could have been written by the product’s advertising agency, that won’t work very well.

The best reviews will find one or two small faults in a product – nothing too damning but enough to show you’ve been through the product and aren’t just regurgitating the sales page.

Ideally you should take the time out to create a bonus item that addresses the fault or problem you’ve identified.

Then offer that free to anyone who buys via your link.

If the product is sold via a marketplace such as Warrior Plus it’s often possible to include the download link within their system but, if not, you can just ask people to email you a copy of their receipt in exchange for the download link.

The more honest your reviews, the more people will resonate with them and the more products you’re likely to sell.

If your chosen niche lends itself to it, consider offering an email subscription so that people can get notified of each new review.

Mike from Maine does this very effectively with his review website and other sites work along similar lines. You can do that even if you don’t keep up the relentless review and iterview pace that Mike sets.

Another thing to remember when you’re setting up a website – whether it’s product reviews or anything else – is that it takes time for it to get noticed.

You can promote it using the standard techniques such as videos, articles, forums, Facebook, Twitter, guest blog posts,  etc.

But it still takes time to grow.

You need to commit to this, even if it seems you’re only initially doing the reviews for yourself and maybe your cat.

Create a regular schedule – I suggest starting with around an hour a day as most people find that manageable – and keep to it as best you can.

And feel free to report back your progress below or ask about anything you need clarification on.