So quick recap! Yesterday’s blog post was a bit of an intro on product reviews for bloggers. I gave a little synopsis on Rob Sutton’s blog post named “How To Get Free Products To Review On Your Blog“. Rob touched on why providing product reviews on your blog is a great way to beef up your SEO efforts, grow your audience and subscribers as well as earn some additional cash. None of which are bad reasons to give it a shot, I’d say! But just how do you go about doing this? Ah. A great question. Let’s explore.
The important thing to remember at the beginning is that you have to put your time in just like every other rookie. How does that work? Rob Sutton says “[r]eview everything you can get your hands on.” And this is pretty much exactly like getting started in any segment. You just have to keep producing, and continue to plug away at it as it’s laying the foundation for things to come. If you write reviews on things you find in your house, in your friends houses, nights out on the town or anything along those lines without inquiring for a kickback, you’ll build credibility with vendors and retailers and will give them a sense of ease when it comes time for you to actually approach them for further products to review. “No one is going to send you their money (in the form of inventory) if they aren’t reasonably sure what they are getting into”, Sutton puts it. It’s so true. Put yourself in the retailers shoes here, and really make a conscious effort of building up a “portfolio” of great – and pro bono – reviews. Keep in mind your time isn’t being lost along the way, you’re still increasing your blog’s value with added SEO-rich content and interesting anecdotes for your readership.
Secondly, build out your contacts and relationship network within your desired niche(s) so that you bring more value to the table when you approach a vendor. This makes absolute sense as your inherent worth will increase immensely if you can produce more qualified buyers as part of your audience and community. Sutton suggests that you look for forums related to the niche you are writing for. There could be forums out there looking to increase their content value with dedicated and targeted bloggers in exchange for the invaluable relationships that could be built. Sutton makes the great point of saying “[s]earch out forum sites in your niche and if they don’t already have a program like this…pitch the idea to them. This will allow you to start a long term relationship with another large website in the industry, but…more importantly…it will gain you a huge amount of credibility that you couldn’t have done that quickly on your own.”
So once you feel you’ve built a solid portfolio of great reviews, and have developed and nurtured a community of targeted purchasers, then comes the dirty work – get in touch with your top retailers. You can’t sit back and expect the retailer to find you. I’m sure it does happen to some, however the proactive approach is absolutely necessary. So, contact them! Email, snail mail, whatever works. Sutton makes the great point of warning you to never, ever, create cookie-cutter letters or anything that looks like it’s in bulk. What happens to those? DELETE. Sutton suggests to do some research, and make your correspondence personal. Include:
- The name(s) of the products and why you want to review them
- An outline what you want to do and how you are going to do it
- Any companies you have worked with in the past (or reviews that you have already done)
- Some simple traffic numbers (subscribers, uniques per month, page views per month)
- A thanks for their time and let them know you look forward to hearing back from them
If you start out sending an email, Sutton also makes the great suggestion of following up with a snail mail version of your letter. This will bypass the spam filters, or delete buttons and will make you look like you’re serious about what you’re asking. Do a little research on specific contacts to reach out to within the company you are looking to provide reviews for. Google someone specific in their marketing department, and I’d suggest giving Jigsaw.com a try. It may be worth it to purchase a specific contact and address your correspondence specifically to them. Sutton suggests throwing a business card or logo in the letter. Not a bad idea. Heck, I’d say pick up the phone if you’ve got the time to do it. Why not?
Finally, a really great and key point that Sutton makes is this: “Ideally, you need to provide enough return out of this partnership that the product manufacturer had a bigger return on their time investment than you did as the blogger”. How do you do this? Deliver on what you say you’ll deliver on and kick in a little extra. Sutton suggests that you not only link back to the merchant’s website through you review, but also on other areas of your blog. In this day and age, it’s important to go above and beyond what is expected of you in a business relationship. This is how you get noticed and this is how you are remembered.
Finally, be patient. As with all things, this will take time. Slowly you will start to see a greater ROI but just remember the other added bonus’ of doing these types of posts.
Speaking of patience, I hope you stick around for our next post on this topic coming your way shortly. I want to give you the opposite perspective on this subject! I’ll touch on some companies that have seen the light and are helping retailers harness the power of consumer reviews, as well as some things that retailers are thinking about when looking to recruit bloggers like you!
Thank you very much for so interesting article. Great job!