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How To Build A Review Based Website
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For the purposes of this article I am going to assume that I do not need to convince you that
adding a polished customer review section to your website significantly increases its value.
Whether you are an affiliate marketer, or a regular webmaster, the credibility which this new addition
to your site affords you, and the usefulness it offers your visitors, should be immediately obvious.
The question you want answered is this: How can I add professional-quality review pages to my website quickly, and do it without breaking the bank? This is exactly the question I will answer, and in the process offer a couple of ideas about how to maximize the potential of your customer review-based website offering. Select The Right Customer Reviewing Solution If you have performed a search on the web for customer review software you have probably tried the obvious keyword phrases, like review script, or product review software and seen the offerings that come up. There are a handful to choose from. Some are cheaper than the solution I am going to discuss, but be very careful about allowing thrift to dominate your final selection of a reviewing platform. Nowhere is the maxum more true that you get what you pay for, than when it comes to purchasing customer review software. It is a lot like buying real estate; you can pay bottom dollar and be stuck with something that will never really satisfy you, or you can pay a little more and reap the rewards of bonus features that pay for themselves again and again for years to come. The first thing you will want of your reviewing application is that it should be incredibly customizable. You want to be able to integrate the review pages into your site seamlessly, and not have them appear as a grafted-on section. All colors, font faces, and general style-related issues need to be fully controllable from a simple administrative interface. So check that your solution offers this. Next, unless ALL public pages produced by the customer review application are built from completely editable templates, steer clear--you will end up with a cookie cutter site that shouts "Can you tell? I was build by a cheap off-the-shelf solution!" The second thing you will find indispensable in your reviewing software is a means to add arbitrary types of data to your review pages. If your site is concerned with audio files you will want to be able to offer MP3 files for download, or if you are more concerned with presenting images there needs to be a way to incorporate those. Maybe you need to display the movie running time, distributor name, and director of each movie reviewed on your site. Well, you will need to add a new table column for each of those pieces of data. Your review application should be able to handle that, and get the data onto the page for people to see it. You will not be concerned with just collecting reviews, but also detailing clearly the reviewable items. So make sure this is not going to be a problem. I could suggest you download each customer review application you come across and test each one. Instead, I will simply cut to the chase and tell you which one I recommend and use myself. I am going to be entirely biased in my selection, because I also happen to be the creator of it. On the other hand, it really is heads and shoulders above the other customer review software alternatives, so I have absolutely no reservation suggesting it to you. If you want a solution that allows you to build a customer review-based site as full-featured and friendly-looking as ClickBank Hotshots then use Red Queen, on which ClickBank Hotshots is based. I am an affiliate marketer, so you can be sure that Red Queen contains everything I need to make a website successful, both from the customer prespective AND that of the search engines. SEO and traffic-building considerations are built right in. Organize Your Customer Review Pages One thing you can anticipate of a customer review application is that it will help organize your reviewable items into a category structure of some kind. The browsable categories found on Amazon.com are the kind of thing you can expect. But sometimes you can do better than this. For example, suppose that the theme of your site is independent films. You set up a category structure to contain the various films. But wouldn't it also be great to set up, in addition to the film pages, a separate category structure that catered specifically to the film producers? That way you could allow the production company to be reviewed independently of any given film they produced. Red Queen calls this part of your site yellow pages--as they are most often used to characterize companies. So, if the items you want to have reviewed on your site can be considered as coming from a supplier of some type, you can see that it might very well make sense to explore the possibility of allowing these suppliers to be reviewed as well. Of course, this is not always going to be the case. For example, if you intended to create a site that allowed your visitors to review theme parks across the country, the concept of a theme park supplier can probably be considered irrelevant. But do think carefully about the nature of your reviewable items or services before you start constructing your category schemes. If you are able to split up the organization of things into items and suppliers, it may increase the usability and value of your final offering. Geo Spatial Reviewing Considerations? Speaking of reviewable theme parks, and for that matter any reviewable entity that has a physical location associated with it, check whether your proposed customer review application can offer visitors a search form that returns every offering located within, say, 10 miles of a stated U.S. zipcode, or U.K. postcode. If your visitor is on your site to research the best restaurants in his or her town, then being able to type a zipcode into a form and have recommended dining establishments in their neighborhood pop up will be a very welcome feature. Naturally, that is just the kind of thing you can do with Red Queen that you probably will not find in similar applications. Choose Your Review-Sorting Options With Care When you configure your reviewing application be sure to arrange things so that you get the maximum amount of information you can from the reviewer. If you are collecting review on toys, ask your reviewer to rate those qualities about the toy that your visitors will likely find the most relevant to their immediate needs. For example, someone reading toy reviews will probably want to know (1) how much fun his or her kids are likely to derive from the toy, (2) whether the thing is robust, or likely to fall apart after six months, and (3) whether the asking price for the toy represents good value for money. This information might also prove useful to you. If you are an affiliate marketer, you will think twice about promoting those products that consistently rate poorly. Do not get carried away with this, however. I recommend looking for three important rating attributes, and think that five would perhaps be violating the often quoted recommendation to keep it simple. But it depends entirely on your audience. If you cater to a detail-obsessive audience of hi-fi lovers, maybe having your reviewers offer ratings on 8 separate qualities of an amplifier makes sense. Again, put some thought into this during the configuration period. Naturally enough, if you offer multiple rating attributes, your visitors are going to expect to be able to sort your reviewable items by those attributes. Every parent will want to know which toys offer the most fun, and will try to avoid the least durable ones. So check that your application supports sorting by the rating value of an arbitrary attribute. Make Your Review Site Addictive Hopefully by now you appreciate that building review sites is not that difficult. But building such a site is only half the battle. If you already have a well-trafficked site the other half of the battle is sewn up too. If not, you need to consider how to get people to your review site and, once they get there, how to get them to submit customer reviews. One thing you can do is publish lists of reviewable items as RSS feeds. You should be able to do that with your chosen review application. These feeds advertise your offering. You should also be able to publish RSS feeds of the reviews of individual reviewers once the reviews start coming in. This way, when someone discovers a reviewer they hold in high regard, they can subscribe to the reviewer's feed, and receive notification each time the reviewer submits a new review. Another thing you can do is offer a list of ranked reviewers. This offers reviewers incentive to submit quality reviews, and your visitors a way to find the best of them. If you can convince your reviewers that submitting to your site is fun, you will not have much trouble finding people who want to read those reviews. The search engines are pummeled by people looking for just such information, and once they find your site they will appreciate it and keep coming back. Final Thought: The Era Of Review Sites Is Still In Its Infancy Review sites offer something that people come online to search for: information about the quality of products or services that they are either considering buying or making use of in some way. Surprisingly, the quality of review sites themselves on the web is not all that good yet. For some reason webmasters and affiliate marketers have either overlooked this form of presenting information, or they have implemented it with tools that can only be described as wanting. Consider this. What do you find when you go to a search engine and type in "reviews of XYZ" where XYZ is something that interests you? Most of the time you will NOT find reviews of XYZ. You are more likely to find site after site of product listings that mention XYZ, but there will be no sign of actual customer reviews. More often than not, if you find a "review" it is some affiliate promoting the product whose testimony you have no idea whether or not you can trust. This all needs to change. The consumer wants to see real people offering their unbiased opinions on all kinds of niche products and services. We are a long way from seeing this today, which means a huge opportunity exists for webmasters and affiliate marketers to exploit. Perhaps even by you. Resource: Red Queen, for building quality customer review sites |
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