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ABOUT REVIEW SITEIt's All About Marketing A NicheWhether you call it a review engine, a review script, or review software, Review Site is the premier application for managing a small scale tightly niched affiliate review site. So the important point to note here is that Review Site was designed specifically for the affiliate marketing of a very tight niche. That is to say, it was NOT designed to do all things, and you are definitely looking at the wrong application if you were hoping to build a large scale review site. If that's your intention, then go check out Review Foundry. However that's an advanced, steep learning-curve application which I spent years developing, and which should only interest serious affiliate marketers who are looking to establish an authority site. In contrast, Review Site is a VERY SIMPLE program which makes the task of setting up a small-scale niched affiliate review site VERY EASY. The idea is that when you set up a Review Site web site, your target audience is people who are on the verge of buying something. They want advice about the handful of quality products in the niche that interests them, and you are going to provide that information in the form of reviews, and product comparisons. You won't be offering reviews of 40 products, or probably even 20 products. You'll pick just the handful that are serious contenders for your prospect's attention, and no more. Your prospect will be able to read every page on your website in less than 30 minutes and make a decision about what product they should go with. To understand how Review Site came about, I need to tell you about Jeremy Palmer's Black Ink Project. You have probably heard Jeremy's story. Today he is a widely respected and very successful affiliate marketer. But only a few years ago he was making just $36,000 per year as a web designer. Today he makes an annual income in excess of a million dollars a year by harnessing his skills as a web designer, adopting a solid work ethic, and exploiting an unnatural aptitude for affiliate marketing. In mid 2008 Jeremy launched his Black Ink Project, in which he created more than a dozen videos that detailed the art of the professional affiliate marketer. His goal was to cover everything necessary to go from struggling affiliate marketer to profitable affiliate marketer. The sessions received a great deal of critical acclaim. They also lead to an encore: Black Ink 2. In the second project Jeremy detailed his construction of a small-scale affiliate review site. The niche he chose was online meeting software, and you can see the final web site he created at OnlineMeetingReviews.com Actually, Jeremy did not build his review site himself. He understood that to compete in the affiliate space of the online meeting software market he needed to produce an exceptionally well-designed site. As he had done in the past, he outsourced the project in two stages. In the first stage he placed a project on 99Designs.com to have the design portion of his site done for him. Check out the results of the competition to see the winning design. The second part of the outsourcing involved taking the PSD files for the winning design and finding a web development company that could turn the design into function web pages. This required programming in PHP and integration with a MySQL database. This outsourcing was done via Elance.com The final budget for the creation of Jeremy's web site ran to about US $1000. But it seemed to me that, at least for beginning affiliates, the idea of spending that much money on a quality affiliate review site was a little frightening. Especially when you take into account the risks involved with outsourcing. After all, you never really know how good the final web site is going to turn out. If it is your first time outsourcing, and you can't afford to misspend your limited budget, the process can be daunting. As it happened, I had been writing an ebook on the subject of affiliate review site marketing when Jeremy's Black Ink Project was launched. The end result was that his course inspired me to create a fully functional, generic affiliate review site as a companion to my ebook. Review Site was built upon the principles epoused in Black Ink 2. Once I had finished coding Review Site I realized that the end result was a fully formed product in itself, and that it was just a little too good to simply be given away as a bonus for purchasing the ebook. Even so, I have decided to honor that original intent of mine, and give away one license of Review Site with every copy of my ebook Affiliate Review Site Monopoly, which I believe is the definitive reference on the subject of affiliate review site marketing. If you have looked at the demo version of Review Site, or installed it yourself and looked over the public end of the application, you will see that it consists of basically three components:
Why PHP and MySQL For The Front End?The public portion of Review Site is written in PHP, simply because webmasters seem to have fallen in love with the language. Me personally, I don't like it so much. In my opinion it is far too complex a language for web development. But try telling that to the uneducated masses. They want what they want, so PHP it is. Because I have gone with PHP for the front end (which is the part that webmasters are likely to want to fiddle with), and because I believe in writing applications based on a templating system, the front end of Review Site is built upon the Smarty templating system. Again, this is not a great templating system in my humble opinion, but it's probably the best one written in PHP. So that's why it has been employed. If you plan on customizing the front end to any extent, you'll have to get familiar with Smarty. Of course, there is lots of online Smarty documentation to help you learn the system, so you should not find it a monumental task. On the other hand, Review Site was designed so that you really don't need to mess around with the templates if you aren't comfortable with that. You can simply add your content to the database records and it will all make its way onto the public pages. You'll find instructions on how to go about this elsewhere in the manual. The choice of MySQL as the database for the application is a no-brainer. MySQL is the most widely used database for web applications and has great support in the PHP language. Why Perl For The Back End?Something that will probably strike you as odd, is that the front end and back end (administrative portion) of Review Site are not written in the same language. The administrative pages are actually written in Perl. Originally I had decided to write the front end in PHP and then have you make database modifications using a client like phpMyAdmin. However, I eventually decided that I might as well provide you with the interface that I use to make my database modifications. I find it much easier to use than clients like phpMyAdmin. It comes from the back end of Review Foundry, which is entirely Perl based. I have stripped this back end down to just a few operations. The most important ones allow you to:
Using just these operations you can extend the functionality of Review Site if you want to, or simply add records to the existing tables. Explicit instructions for adding new columns are covered elsewhere in this manual. If you do decide to use this back end to modify the structure of your Review Site tables, then you should stick with the back end and not make modifications via any other database client. The reason for this is that an internal representation of the table structure is kept up to date with all of the table structure modications that you make through the back end. If you were to add a new column using a DIFFERENT client, then Review Site would have no record of that operation and you will not see the new column appear in the Review Site backend. So, keep that in mind - it's important. Oh. And if you do screw up the table definition files by using a different client to make your table modifications, don't bother telling me about it. I don't want to know. You can correct the problem by deleting your new columns in the other client, and then adding them back in via the Review Site backend so that they are properly recorded. The table definition files live in /cgi-bin/rs/reviewsite/my/defs and are NOT to be edited by hand, because it is too easy to break them. They are managed internally and rewritten with every table structure-changing operation that you carry out. DocumentationDocumentation for Review Site, of which this is one of the pages, is an ongoing project. You should find that there is sufficient information here to get you started. Suggestions for improvement to the manual are always welcomed. As more users gain experience with Review Site, and issues are resolved for its application in different areas, information gained from that experience will make its way into these pages. Next Section: INSTALLATION & REQUIREMENTS « Table of Contents | Obtain Review Site » Copyright © 2008 Random Mouse Software. All Rights Reserved. |