Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Wasting Data on a Review

Canon EOS 60D full review
I read many ReviewMe reviews on other sites that I visit and I often wonder if the website ordering the review is really just wasting money.

As with any business expense, you really need to decide on its purpose.  Forking over $400 for a review can be a huge waste of money if you don’t know why you are doing it.

Do you really want a review from the site?  Or are you really paying $400 for the PR5 backlink and the traffic generated by the review?  Will you take the reviewer’s suggestions to heart?  What if you get a negative review?

Before you order a review, I suggest that you decide why you are doing it and formulate a game plan.  Here are some suggestions:

You are ordering the review because you really want to know what the reviewer thinks about your website.  Generated traffic from the review is a secondary benefit.

Read past reviews from the reviewer and determine if the reviewer produces a genuine thorough review.  Does the reviewer make suggestions on how to improve your site?  Is the reviewer qualified to make these suggestions?  You don’t want someone telling you to change the colors on your website if their own site looks horrible.

Does the reviewer’s readers provide a lot of comments to the review?  Many times, the reviewer’s commentors provide great additional feedback giving you many additional mini reviews.

Does the reviewer make both positive and negative reviews?  You don’t want to order from someone who is positive on everything.  You probably won’t get the feedback that you’re really looking for.

You are ordering the review mainly to generate traffic and capture new readers.  The content of the review is secondary.


You’d obviously still want to order a review from a high ranking high traffic site.  You should still choose a high quality reviewer.  However your reviewer’s audience type is much more important here.
You should determine if your reviewer’s audience would benefit from visiting your site.  Remember, you may have only one chance to get their eyes onto your site.  You have to plan for that.

For example, if your site is about fast food review and you order a review from  ILoveHotdogsBlog.com, you should schedule a post about hotdogs on the same day that the review is posted on the reviewer’s site.  Additionally, you should have some previous posts about hotdogs on your site for the reviewer to review.  If your site does not have any hotdog posts before ordering the review, what is the reviewer going to be reviewing?  You may have many posts about burgers and pizza, but your reviewer is probably an expert on hotdogs, not burgers. Kinda sounds like spending money on data recovery when you don't know what a computer is.

What’s the reviewer’s blog traffic and how much do you expect to convert? 

Let’s say you order a $400 review with the hopes of getting 1000 new visitors.  If you know from your site statistics that you have approximately 40% return visitors daily then you can assume that you will get 400 new loyal readers from the review.  Therefore, you are paying $1 per new reader.  You should have some idea of this number before you go and blindly order reviews.

If your reviewer’s site has daily traffic of 2,000 visitors, it would be nice to know how many of its visitors will check out your site due to the review.  I would suggest contacting the webmasters of the site’s past reviews to see if they are willing to share that information.  After all, if only a quarter of its readers come to your site, your review probably will not reach your goals.

One ReviewMe for $400 or Two $200 reviews or four $100 reviews?

Is it better to order one review from a big site or multiple reviews from smaller sites?  This really depends on your site’s niche.  If you decide to order reviews from multiple site you would need to determine if these sites have a different set of readers.

In going back to the example about a fast food review, it would make sense to order multiple reviews from a hotdog site, a pizza site and a burger site.  You wouldn’t want to order two reviews from competing hotdog sites because there’s a good chance that they have many readers in common. 

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