Why 90% of Product Reviews You Read Online Are Worthless

Recently, since the popularity of this site has increased reasonably well, I’ve been exploring new methods for generating cash from SeanBluestone.com. One of the methods I am experimenting with is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is one of the main ways to make income online and is extremely popular because, like AdSense, it’s extremely simple. In contrast to AdSense however, it pays out big. While a click on a valuable AdSense ad from your site will typically net up to a few dollars, an affiliate sale will typically net you $20 to $30 but can easily net a few hundred dollars and with a bit of work even a few thousand. From a single sale.

One key technique used with affiliate marketing is to write reviews for the product you are marketing with your affiliate link in the text. This is a good approach because the sorts of people who read your review are people who are already interested in buying the product. If, for example, I wrote an article entitled ‘Toyota Widget x300 Reviewed’ then you can bet that the vast majority of the organic (search engine) traffic that comes to that page will be people who are interested in buying a Toyota x300 model Widget. Sometimes all it takes is hearing a good review and they’ll commit to buy. Since there’s a handy link to the sales page on your blog they’ll click through and viola, you make an easy commission.

The problem with this is an ethical one. Since you are interested in seeing a sale being made, you are likely biased towards writing in favor of the product, even if it sucks. This is a horribly common place problem which means that the extreme majority of product reviews on the internet are biased.

So you should just disregard any review with an affiliate link in it, right? Well unfortunately it’s not that simple. The best reviews are always from those who have used the product for their own needs and sometimes affiliate marketers of the product are the only people in this category. There are also cases where affiliate links are masked and so a reader doesn’t know they’re giving a commission to the affiliate marketer and hence don’t know whether the review is potentially worthless. And then there are paid reviews.

Paid reviews are reviews, usually blog entries, that are written by the blogger for a commission which don’t contain an affiliate link and sometimes go to great lengths to appear as though they are unbiased and genuine product reviews, even when the webmaster may never have used the product in his or her life. Companies like these because they know that many people don’t trust or don’t use affiliate links any more and if an article is seen on a prominent website which raves and glorifies their product, that’s likely to end in more sales for them.

DooYoo.co.uk is a great example of a site offering paid reviews. They pay anyone and everyone 50p (around 75c) for each review and an additional 1.5p or 2.2c each time another dooyoo member reads your review. The minimum cash payout is £50. Alternatively you can receive Amazon.com vouchers or make a charitable donation.
Being honest however, 50p per review is less than other paid review sites can offer. The difference with dooyoo however is that it’s easy to sign up and get going with. They also have an active moderator base and if your reviews are good you will be noticed and receive bonuses.

Ciao.co.uk^aff is very similar to DooYoo whereby they offer small amounts of cash for member reviews. The amount you earn depends upon how other people in the community rate your review.

Epinions.com is a vastly popular product review site which pays members for their reviews. The unique thing about Epinions is that they’ve worked hard to make sure even negative reviews generate income and use a Yahoo! Answers style community trust model to make sure honest reviewers do well. Unfortunately they use an ambiguous pagerank style formula for working out which reviews generate the most sales for associated companies and as such the only way to work out how much reviews are worth is to sign up and try it out, which I haven’t done and as such can’t comment on.

PayPerPost.com^aff is another paid review site which maintains a relationship with thousands of companies and has a marketplace where these companies offer, what it calls Opportunities, to review Product X from Company Y in return for cash. PayPerPost.com boasts a huge inventory of companies and products and reviews can net upwards of $1,000.

Most physical products like clothes, toys and games don’t suffer from these bias review problems because they can be seen and handled and more and more people will check out YouTube to see the product in action before they buy it.

So how can you determine whether a review is legitimate or not? Here are a few key pointers. Does the review contain an affiliate link? If so then the review may not be legitimate and may be fabricated to encourage sales. Is the review exclusively positive? In most cases a good writer will include some of the negative things about a product in a review as well as the positive whereas a paid review will usually contain insignificant or trivial negative aspects or will be exclusively positive. Are there outrageous claims that don’t have proof or evidence to support them? A scenario which I see all the time is where a product is advertised and the sales page boasts titles and claims like ‘How I make $10,000 per week from this simple method!’ with a plethora of PayPal screenshots which when investigated usually turn out to be copied from the hundreds of other sites sporting the same images. A very good rule of thumb to remember is that if a product sounds too good to be true, it almost always is. If you aren’t put off by claims like this then at least do some research before investing your cash. If the site has forums, ask the members questions. If the site has testimonials, check up on the customers and if possible email them for a response. If the site has none of these or no method for getting in touch with people who have actually used the product then simply don’t buy.

While affiliate links don’t affect the price you pay or your service, and so wont be an issue for the majority of people, it’s important to get reviews and insight into a product before buying. This is especially true for electronic products like eBooks, SEO services and the likes, since the only evidence that many of these products works are customers who have already used them. Internet marketing is rife with biased reviews or worse reviews that are entirely fabricated and so when buying a product or service you should always be sure that the claims on the sales page can be backed up with hard evidence.

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