Review Site User Manual DEVISING A GAME PLAN

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• DEVISING A GAME PLAN
• Choosing Your Niche
• Deciding On Comparison Features
• Coming Up With Content For Reviews
• Selecting A Hero Shot
• Establishing Your Authority
• Mastering Your Metadata
• Adding A Subscriber Opt-In Form

DEVISING A GAME PLAN

Now that you have Review Site installed, you have at your finger tips a very convenient system for preparing a compelling product review site. But to get the most out of this system you still have to do some real work to add unique content. Review Site is designed to make the presentation of that information both easy to format as the site owner, and easy to consume as a site visitor. But it is up to you to ensure the quality of that content. Some tips on how to go about this are discussed below.

Choosing Your Niche

Of critical importance to your long term profitability is the selection of an appropriate product niche. This is discussed in great detail in Affiliate Review Site Monopoly, which you should read carefully if you wish to master the affiliate product review space.

The most important tip I can offer you here is that you need to select product niches that come with large hungry crowds who are constantly on the search for great products in those niches. As an example, consider the niche known as, for want of a better expression, the getting your ex back niche.

Like the need for food, the need for companionship with the opposite sex can lead to a lifelong pursuit for many people. The younger generation, in particular, inexperienced, and full of unrealistic expectations about dating, are prone to destroying their relationships and then thinking twice about their decision. This breakup regret phase generates a large consumer base for marketers of getting your ex back products. The affiliate commission on these products, most of which are ebooks, is not huge, perhaps $20, but the market is there if you can find a way to tap into it, and the steady accumulation of $20 commissions can really add to your bank account.

If you rush into niche selection without performing some initial research you may end up choosing a niche which, in reality, just doesn't support a large consumer base looking for the kind of products that you will be promoting. You will simply end up spinning your wheels. No matter how selective you are in choosing the right products, no matter how helpful the reviews you write, your site will not get traffic, and you will not make sales. You will declare that affiliate marketing just doesn't work, and you will give up. Meanwhile, those of your affiliate competitors who have done a little research and selected the right niches to promote are creating profitable review sites that bring in money almost every day.

If you want to run a successful product review site, take care with your niche selection. If you don't get that right, nothing you do after that will improve your odds for success.

Deciding On Comparison Features

When someone comes to your web site and sees that you offer a product comparison page they will likely use it to decide which of the products promoted on your site are worth spending a little time learning about. They may end up reading just the three reviews that you have written for the three top-rated products on your site. On the other hand they might have time to read only one review. So if there is a clear favorite in your mind, make sure you convey this.

One way to do this is to look critically at the best product of the bunch and figure out what features make it so good. Then you draw up a vertical list on a piece of paper which itemizes these features. You make another column on the page and put the name of the product at the top. Then you put a tick below it, next to each of the features. You repeat this process for every other product that you intend to review on your site.

This is a rough representation of what the visitor will see when they visit your product comparison page. Review Site will automically extract this information and format it appropriately after you have entered the information into the Review table for each of the products you will be reviewing.

For each of the product features that you have identified, you will be adding a separate column to the Review table to characterize that feature. How you go about adding these columns will be discussed fully in the next section: UNDERSTANDING REVIEW RECORDS. But identifying the product features of importance is the first step in that process.

It is also a good idea to separate product features into three basic types which Review Site can then treat specially. These types are the following:

1. The feature which is either present or absent, and can be indicated as such using a tick icon or a cross icon.
2. The feature that is generally present but may vary somewhat in quality or usefulness. This feature can be summarized with a rough rating icon that represent one of three states: great, OK, or weak.
3. All other features, which are summarized with a short string of information.

In the section UNDERSTANDING REVIEW RECORDS you will see that you can designate comparison columns according to one of the above types by assigning a Form Type to the column when it is created. The Form Type will decide how the value in the comparison column is formatted for display.

Coming Up With Content For Reviews

Ideally, you should write your own reviews of the products that appear on your site. This way you can be sure that the content is unique. Uniqueness is important not only to the search engines, but also your visitors, who are looking for critical reviews that they have not read elsewhere.

Of course, it is not always practical to write reviews for all of the products you want to appear on your site. Usually you cannot purchase every product you would like to review, simply because it is beyond your financial means.

So how do you get your reviews?

One thing you can do is pay an expert in the niche to provide you with unique reviews. This may cost you several hundred dollars, or more. But it may be worth the expense, particularly if their insight is very good. Or if you know for a fact that they have published reviews already on the products that you will be promoting, you might be able to convince them to provide you with rewritten versions in exchange for backlinks to their site. The danger in doing this, of course, is that you may lose prospects through those backlinks.

Another idea is to simply outsource your reviews using a service like Elance.com to find writers. The problem with this is that you are unlikely to receive expert level criticism unless the writer truly understands the niche. Ask to see samples of their writing in the exact niche, before you commission them to write your reviews. Not only will they need to write the reviews, but they should be able to come up with an accurate rating for the product to match their verdict.

Selecting A Hero Shot

Until I watched the video sessions of Jeremy Palmer's The Black Ink Project 1.0 I had not come across the term "hero shot". It is a reference to the central image used by affiliates on their landing pages. The purpose of the hero shot is to summarize the nature of the product that is being promoted.

In Review Site the hero shot is the main image that appears on the left side of the index page, the topmost page shown when visitors enter your Review Site. You should use your hero shot to summarize the nature of your niche and the products that you will be reviewing. It is the very first thing that a visitor will look at when they enter your site, so you should choose this image carefully.

To specify a new hero shot (the default one is just a placeholder - you can see the iStockPhoto watermark on it), go to the Configure > Skin Images page and scroll to the bottom of the page where the image_index_hero_shot configuration variable is defined. You can use the Browse button to select a new image from your PC and upload it to your site.

Where do you find your hero shot? Well, that's entirely up to you. You could visit one of the stock image sites like iStockPhoto to find your image. Or if you cannot come up with something suitably generic, take the product images associated with your best rated product and crop it tightly to create a suitable "windowed image" that fits into the hero shot area. Basically you just need any image that sums up what the visitor is there to learn about.

You will notice that the default hero shot is wider than it is tall. This is the preferred orientation for your image shot, so that it uses space efficiently in the upper left portion of the page. I suggest trying to stick fairly close to the dimensions of the default hero shot, which is 320 pixels wide, by 200 pixels high.

The advantage of using an image close to this size is that the tops of the three promotional columns at the bottom of the page remain just above the fold and will be seen by the viewer. In particular, the star rating of the top-rated product will be seen. If you use a hero shot that pushes the top-rated star rating off the bottom of the page you can expect your conversions to go down.

If you DO change the dimensions of the hero shot away from the 320 x 200 pixel format you will see that the page requires some reformatting. This is not automatic, since CSS style sheets with pixel-precision specification jave been used to perform the layout. If you change the image size significantly you will need to edit your CSS style file to accommodate your changes. This is a little tricky. So pay close attention to the following details on making the required changes.

Your CSS style file lives at the following location:

/rs/reviewsite/my/skins/default/css/plain/style.css

You will need to edit this file by hand. The following 5 CSS classes will need to be modified:

upper
upper_left_fade
upper_left_border
upper_right_border
upper_hero_shot_container

Margin and height attributes will need to be changed in these classes. The default values are based on the dimensions of the default 320 x 200 pixel hero shot. So to make adjustments when a new image is used (of dimensions W x H pixels), we need to calculate the differences between new and old hero image dimensions, and use these to correct the attribute values. Let's define the extra_width and extra_height of the new image as follows:

extra_width  = new width  - default width  = ( W - 320 )px
extra_height = new_height - default height = ( H - 200 )px

Now the formulae for the new attribute values. I will use a dot notation to denote the class and attribute, like class.attribute, in what follows, so that you can identify the relevant quantity to alter:

upper.height              = 258px + extra_height
upper_left_fade.height    = 270px + extra_height
upper_left_border.height  = 270px + extra_height
upper_right_border.height = 270px + extra_height
upper_hero_shot_container.margin-left = ( 50px - extra_width / 2 )

Note that if the extra_width and extra_height are each set to zero in the above formulae, the attribute values evaluate to the values found in the CSS style file before alteration.

So, if we were to use a hero shot with the new dimensions of 240 x 260 pixels, we would need to make the following attribute adjustments in the CSS style.css file:

upper.height              = 258px + 60px = 318px
upper_left_fade.height    = 270px + 60px = 330px
upper_left_border.height  = 270px + 60px = 330px
upper_right_border.height = 270px + 60px = 330px
upper_hero_shot_container.margin-left = ( 50px - (-80px) / 2 ) = 90px

Obviously with that last calculation, you round to the nearest pixel for your final result. When you make these changes to the CSS style file (just change the relevant numbers and nothing else) you'll see that the new image is centered and other parts of the index page are stretched to accommodate the new image dimensions.

Did you notice that this was a lot of effort just to use a new image size for the hero shot? This is a consequence of using div elements to perform page layout. They are not stretchy like tables. But div elements seem to be the favored method these days, so that's why they have been used in Review Site. Believe me, if I had based the templates on tables, all I'd hear from clients is "Why tables? I thought those were outdated?". It seems to be a fundamental constraint of web design these days: to make it look good you have to make it inflexible.

Establishing Your Authority

Unlike a review site on which visitors can submit their own reviews and back up the claims you are making about the products you will be reviewing, with Review Site YOU are the authority figure. So you need to make that clear from the beginning.

One way to do this is to use the ABOUT US page to clearly spell out who you are and why people should listen to you. I suggest you try to keep this honest. So many supposed marketing gurus will tell you to make up a persona and then add a fake story that helps you win over your readers. I don't believe in this type of deception, so I am certainly not going to tell you to do that.

If I am writing such an ABOUT US page, I will try to stick to the facts and explain how I decided to learn everything I could about the niche and then summarize my findings by using this web site to do it.

If you really are an authority in the niche, spell it out. Say why that is, and for how long you have been interested in the niche. Any personal stories help flesh you out as a real person.

If you can, include a photo of yourself and a signature. These also help improve your credibility.

Mastering Your Metadata

For purposes of search engine optimization, which is always extremely important to your site, no matter what its purpose, every page of Review Site presents content for the <meta> tags that go into the page header. You can find the language for all of the metadata variables on the Configure > Language page.

Don't rush through this, and certainly don't overlook it. You need to think about what content will appear on each of your pages and then create a succinct summary of that content which can appear in the description variable of the metadata tags.

At the same time, take a look at the language variables that control what will appear in the page <title> tags. Spent some time getting this right. Research which keywords are going to appear in this spots and have the most payoff. Every niche will have its own sweet spot of magic keywords to employ. It is up to you to do the research to find them.

Adding A Subscriber Opt-In Form

If you are interested in creating a list of subscribers for your niche, you can add a sign-up form to your index page using the options found on the Configure > Email / Subscribe page.

Presently there are two services that can be integrated with ease. These are Aweber and GetResponse, both of which are well-known and recommended by all the top internet marketers.

You have two options when specifying the configuration variables for these subscription services. You have the option of specifying a custom URL for the confirmation page that is presented after someone successfully signs up. If you do specify a custom URL, then you are responsible for handing that page in its entirety. It exists outside of the scope of Review Site. The other option is to NOT specify a confirmation page URL. In that case Review Site will put up a message about the successful sign up AND, if you like, it will present downloadable files that you can offer as an incentive to sign up.

The way the download option works is very simple. There is a subdirectory in your /rs/reviewsite/my directory which is named (unless you have changed the name):

/gifts

If you want to offer downloadable files as gifts, just add the files to the gifts directory. From that point on, links to those files will be presented on the index page immediately following a successful sign-up. You can add .pdf files or .zip files, or in fact any file type you like. Alternatively, if you do not wish to offer downloadable files, just don't add any to that directory.

If you do decide to offer gifts as a signup bonus, make sure you alter the relevant language which appears above the sign-up form so that it is clear what the visitor will be getting if they do sign up. This is usually referred to as your "call to action". You can find the call to action language variable on the Configure > Language page. It is listed as the following variable:

index . subscribe_enticer_text

Also, you may wish to modify the confirmation message too, which is specified by the value of this language variable on the same page:

index . subscribe_confirmation

ALTERNATIVE SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES

Although the Aweber and GetResponse options are the only ones offered, if you have an alternate subscription service you would like to use it, it is possible to subvert one of the existing sign-up options by getting your hands dirty and editing the relevant template that places the sign-up form on the index page.

The tag in index.tpl that pulls in the Aweber signup form is this one:

	[% include file=aweber_form.tpl %]

	[% include file=getresponse_form.tpl %]

You will also need to specify a value for the relevant subcription sign-up URL. That is, you will need to specify one of these two:

email_aweber_subscribe_url
email_getresponse_subscribe_url

Otherwise the signup form will simply not appear. Of course, it may just be easier to sign up with one of the two supported subscription services than to go through these contortions.

Next Section: UNDERSTANDING REVIEW RECORDS

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