Should You Launch a Review Blog?
Review blogs are some of the most popular types of blogs out there.
Just as the name implies, these blogs offer reviews of various goods or services. There are some very advantageous elements to having one of these blogs. For instance, if you happen to be an avid golfer, launching a review blog of golf courses as a business might just enable you to write off some of your golfing as business expenses on your taxes.
If you’re considering whether you should launch a review blog, here are some of the factors that will come into play.
The Work Involved
If you plan to write a good review blog, you have to do the work involved in investigating products, comparing them to other products and so forth. This is what people come to these blogs for and, if you’re not providing that, your blog is not likely to get very popular.
You’ll have to make the effort to make connections with manufacturers, to set up a blog that looks credible to them so that they will be willing to send your products to review and, for your first few products, you may actually have to pay out-of-pocket to get the products that you want to review.
Ethics
If you’re asking yourself whether it’s ethical to write a good review in exchange for a free product and that seems like a problem for you, you are exactly the kind of person who should be writing a review blog.
If you’re giving away good reviews in exchange for free products or other types of compensation, you’re writing an advertising blog and an unethical one at that. When you talk to manufacturers and ask them for free samples, make sure you point out to them that you write a genuine review blog and that you’re not going to give them good publicity in exchange for any freebies.
This might seem like it would make manufacturers hesitant to participate at all but in fact, if you run a credible review blog, they’ll be glad to have their product mentioned on it.
Format
Format is a big consideration for review blogs. The format you use for your articles needs to be consistent so that people can get good comparisons between different products. When you do a review, be sure to include the product model, model number and so forth in a way that makes it easy for people to see.
You should also tag your articles so that it’s easy for people to search for a given product. Content management systems, such as WordPress, make it very easy to tag your articles and to create an archive that contains your old articles. This means that you don’t have to worry about people getting lost when they’re trying to find a review on a particular product and, of course, it also means the search engines are much more likely to index you for keywords related to the products that you have reviewed, even if you reviewed them long ago.
Products
Where product selection is concerned, starting a review blog is easy. Start out by finding out what the leading products are for any given niche and then start writing reviews about those products. As you write more reviews of well-known products, you’re likely to find other products that are a little bit off the beaten path that you can include on your blog to make it more interesting for readers.
Properly written, ethically solid and well designed, a blog that offers reviews about products can be a very useful resource to people and a potentially lucrative advertising venue for the blog owner.
About author
Anny Solway is a dedicated blogger who loves to share blogging and technology tips.
