You have finally started your own blog and you are now looking for a proper layout for your product reviews. To tell you the truth, there is no right or wrong way of writing a product review, as long as it has a nice flow. Every blogger has his or her own way and style of writing. However, seeing as you may be new to this, you have to start somewhere to be able to create your own. You’ve reached the right place to learn how to write a product review.
(Just a note that this article is geared towards affiliate marketers)
What product do I choose to write about?
“Reyhana, there are a lot of products to write about. Which one do I choose?”
Well, that’s not as important as you may think, as long as you stick to your niche. Because whether you write a positive or a negative review, you can still make money (and I will discuss that further down). What’s important here is to choose products with which you have had experience using or products that are similar to those you have used before.
Choosing such a product will make it easier on you because if you are knowledgeable about it, you may not need to do much research and that will speed up your work. If you do need to research it, you will be able to quickly recognize features that are good or bad and point them out to your readers.
One thing that I can’t stress enough is to start very narrow. So for example, if you want your website to be geared towards camping gear, then only write reviews on camping gear. As you become an authority in this niche and you feel like you have saturated all the avenues in relation to camping gear, which should take several months, even years, then you can move on to more general gear, like survival kits, hiking gear and anything else related to the outdoors.
I have chosen my product. Now what?
At first, you will be able to write about the many products that you have used without having to look up any detail. But to be perfectly honest, very few bloggers have actually used EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT that they have ever reviewed. Of course, it is better to have used a product to be able to write the most accurate review but it is not mandatory.
How can I write reviews on those then? It is through research!
Researching the specifics of a particular product, its features, its uses, its benefits and looking up reviews (from other people that HAVE used it) are the ways that a blogger can learn about a product, without ever having used it. Then, they can use their own knowledge of similar products and apply it to the review.
The internet is where all this information will come from. It can come from vendors on Amazon or eBay, who list all the properties of the product. It can come from the manufacturer’s website. It can even come from other reviews on the internet.
“Reyhana, aren’t you promoting plagiarism that way? Bad Reyhana!”
Not at all, silly! If you copy the exact review of another blogger, word for word, and claim it as your own, then yes, it is plagiarism. I am not telling you to do that. What I am telling you, is to read several reviews from different bloggers AND THEN, based on your findings from those reviews combined with the specifications of the product from different vendors AND reviews from actual people who have used the product, you can now write a very good review. Let me stress; IN YOUR OWN WORDS!
Keyword Research
The next very important step is to look for a keyword that will make it easy for your review to be found on the search engines. And by that, I mean to be on the 1st page of Google, Yahoo and Bing. How many of us actually scroll past the first page looking for information? Very,very few of us. We always tend to look through the first page, even only the first few results, to find what we are looking for and that holds true for most of the people searching Google, or any other search engine.
To land on the 1st page of Google, it is not only a matter of finding the right keywords, but you also have to establish a good relationship with Google and the search engines by consistently publishing quality content and engagement with your readers. Without getting too far into SEO, let me only tell you that it can take from several months to a year (depending on how much you work on your blog) for your posts to start appearing on the 1st page.
Let me introduce you…
… to the actual keyword research tool that I personally use to find keywords for my blog. It is called JAAXY. If you want to read my entire Jaaxy review, CLICK HERE to be taken to the post. But if you wanted to try it out right away, type a keyword below and that will get you a sample result.
EXAMPLE
Let’s take “camping gear” as can example. To start, we will plug it into Jaaxy so the tool can give us the statistics.
As you can see, the monthly search is very high, but so is the competition for this particular keyword. We can conclude that there is no point to trying to rank under this keyword. Let’s try a longer, more specific keyword, “camping gear for kids”.
Now you can see that the search volume is way lower, as is the competition. It does not look like much compared to the volume of searches for “camping gear”. But the reason you want to try to rank under the longer keyword is because you have a much better chance of landing on the 1st page of google. You can actually increase your chances of landing sales for that particular niche rather than NEVER being on the first page of Google AND never getting any traffic and sales.
The Intro
Yeah, I did take some time to get to this point but the first few steps were incredibly important. Now that we have figured out our keyword, we want to make sure that it appears in our title, as well as our first paragraph in order to maximize the efficiency of the keyword. You can use the same keyword several times within the body of your review as well but I would not recommend using it too many times because Google will think that you are trying to deceive the system to rank under it. Really, the opposite will happen. Therefore, use it only when you need to.
The introduction should state general facts about the product, brand name, model number and what you will be covering within your review.
The Body Paragraphs
From this point on, write naturally, without overdoing it, else your readers will get bored very quickly. When I write a product review, I always like to talk about its features, its uses and its benefits, in that order. It always seems to make sense to list all the facts first before you move on to telling them how those features can help. If you are writing a negative review, I would still state them in that order and then add the negative stuff, so your readers know exactly what features you are talking about that you don’t like.
Then, I personally like to include actual screenshots of other people’s reviews on the product. Your readers will always want to see what people who have actually used it, are saying about it. Those can easily be found on Amazon, eBay and anywhere else on the internet where the product is actually sold.
Afterwards, you can talk about pricing and whether you think it is fair for the product. Some people like to actually place their affiliate links here that will lead to the actual buying page, where their readers can find the price. Others like to keep them separate and actually create another heading for places their readers could buy the product.
Negative Reviews
Remember how I told you that you could still make money even if you didn’t recommend the product? Well, everybody is different and not everybody who comes to your website will have the money to invest in the BETTER products that you personally recommend. Many will settle for an inferior product because they are in dire need and may not be in a financial situation to get the more expensive ones. So, what you can do is include an affiliate link for those people to get through to that marketplace / vendor where they can buy it.
What you can also do, for the readers who don’t want to buy the inferior product, is redirect them to another post on your own website that describes a product that you actually recommend. That way, you are not losing on the sale either way and you provide a good opportunity for your readers to find a product that will better suit their needs.
Anything I missed?
Of course, product reviews can be done several different ways, but this is the skeleton of a review in general. And I just added a touch of how I like to do things. Did I miss anything that you would like to add though? How do you usually write your own reviews? Leave them all in the comment section below and thanks for sharing.
Cheers to your success,
Reyhana
I have been trying to figure out how to write a review correctly. Your steps are very helpful to me in figuring out how to do this. Following your ideas, I may have a skeleton to work with. Thank you for the jazzy product that helps me to figure out how to my article or the words to be used in it for Google classification. I love the picture
Sylvia, I am glad that my review was helpful to you. And yes, Jaaxy is one of the best tools that you can use for SEO, compared to other ones on the market at the moment. I wish you much success in your online endeavours.