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Product reviews can work well for you both content wise and financially wise: You get a new form of content on your site, but you can also link back to product (from within your review) with your unique tracking ID. This means that for every sale that company gets from a visitor buying their product through a link from your review, you receive a percentage of that sale, usually around 5-20%.
Once again, it’s a win-win situation. The key here is to review products that your visitors will find useful and exclude any marketing hype from review.
------------------------------------------ Books ------------------------------------------
Everyone reads in some-way or another: conventional books, email, daily newspaper, eBooks, articles, etc. People feel empowered when they have read something that provides them with useful, free information. A book review can do just that.
There are hundreds of online stores that allow you to link to their books section and receive commission on a per-order basis. The most popular one is Amazon, with over 500,000 members. Their associates program (located at http://associates.amazon.com) lets you enter a books ISBN code and spits out a link and picture right back to that book on their site.
Reviewing a book is easy, but either you or someone you know must have read book beforehand. Don’t fall into trap of simply reading books blurb and then writing a review on it, because you will get caught out and your visitors will loose trust in you.
When reviewing a book, let your visitors know your overall opinion of book, as well as your favourite points and sections in book. Include as many peoples opinion on that particular book as you can, whether they are positive or negative. Your readers will expect you to provide them with honest reviews, and there’s no point lying just so they buy book.
You may also like to include a sample chapter from book in your review. This lets visitors have a read of book without actually purchasing it. If they like sample chapter, then there’s a good chance they will click on your link to buy book in end. I like to review Wrox’s series of programming books, because they let you publish a sample chapter from their book on your site, just like I have at http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/38.
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Don’t get stuck into habit of posting same type of content on your site. As saying goes, variety is spice of life, and this is true in online world also. If you run a content driven site then have a brainstorm listing several companies, products and books related to your sites content that you could review.
For each company, compose an email to send using format that I have outlined in this article. Start by writing to 2-3 companies requesting virtual interviews and see how you go.
For each product, write up a similar email requesting either a beta/full copy of software you want to review. Because you need to actually spend time reviewing and testing product first, you should start with just 1-2 emails and see how you go.
Books, on other hand, are a different story. Goto http://associates.amazon.com and signup for free. Then, pick a couple of books (ones that you have read) and write a 1-2 page review on each one. Post them straight onto your site with link provided by Amazon associates program at end of review.
Until next time, I would recommend you experiment with ideas outlined in this article. If you do everything right, then you can expect your visitor count to increase as a result.
Mitchell Harper is the founder of http://www.devarticles.com, which provides top quality ASP, C++, Java, PHP, Visual Basic and .NET articles for the budding web developer! Looking for some nitfy programming tricks and tutorials that you won't find anywhere else? Then visit us now at http://www.devarticles.com/