How To Make Money Writing Reviews Online

The web, as a major source of information, offers many opportunities for making money online. Writing reviews is one such opportunity and this can be a good way to earn money online. You can do this either as a freelance writer or by having your own blog and promoting products.

Almost all of us search for reviews before we buy something on the internet, I certainly do. If you do too, you have probably already purchased something thanks to the information in a review.

The person who wrote the review probably made a commission on the sale or perhaps the review was written by a freelance writer who was just paid for writing the review and the owner of the site made the sales commission. Either way, you can see there is money to be made by writing reviews.

In this article we will be considering starting your own blog and promoting products via affiliate marketing, this is possible even for a complete beginner.

Advertising or Reviews

Before we get going I think it’s a good idea to look at the difference between an advert and a review. Both give exposure to a product or service and both have the same goal of convincing the reader to take action, but they have a very different approach.

• An advert is conceived by the company who produces the product or a marketing company and concentrates on the features that they want to portray. They will concentrate on the good points and ignore the bad.
• A review, on the other hand, should give an honest opinion about a product and consider the good and bad points.

Why Do We Read Reviews?

Before buying a product or service online most of us look for reviews. This helps us to decide whether a product might be a good fit for us and also warns us if someone has had a bad experience with a product. In general reading reviews can save us a lot of problems later.

In the make money online niche there are so many programs out to scam people that I always encourage people to research online and read reviews to form an opinion about a product. Reading and writing reviews can be a good way to find out the truth or to tell the truth about a product or service.

Reviews on Your Own Blog

Although it’s possible to earn money writing reviews as a freelance writer, in this article we will be considering earning money from your own blog. This is my preferred way of earning money online, but you should be ready to put in some hard work because success won’t come overnight. There are many people who are already doing this and I’m sure you have probably searched for a product online and read reviews before buying.

Imagine, if you follow the easy steps below you could have people coming to read the reviews on your site very soon!

How Much Can You Earn Writing Reviews?

Many people like to have an idea of what it is possible to earn before they start. However, there are too many variables to give you any idea. For example, it will depend on your niche, how much time you can put in and how often you can post new reviews on your site.

Some people are lucky enough to make $1000’s per month quite rapidly while others will struggle to earn $100 per month after a couple of years. There is no normal, all I would say if you don’t give up you will earn money. Are you ready, let’s start!

What Products Will You Be Reviewing?

The first step is to decide what sort of products you will be reviewing (your niche). Ideally, your niche will be related to something you like, a hobby or a passion.

You might be wondering what is a niche? It is a very specific subject or an audience. For example, your niche website could be about health tips, this is too broad to be a niche, you need to narrow it down to something like acne treatment for teenage boys or solutions to bad breath problems.

The reason you want to have a focused niche is because you will have less competition. It’s much better to rank on the 1st page of Google for a keyword that gets 500 searches per month than on the 3rd page for a search term that gets 5000 searches per month. Not many people go past the 1st page of search results and if you’re not found you won’t get any traffic or make any money.

Once you have decided on your niche you need to make sure there are affiliate programs available. For our examples above you could do a Google search for acne + affiliate programs or bad breath + affiliate programs.

Amazon is one of the favorite places where people shop online and they have a huge selection of goods. You will probably find products you can promote from there as well.

Now you have found the products you will be reviewing, you need a website, so people will be able to find your reviews on the internet.

Getting a Website

This might be something that worries you, but setting up a website today isn’t too challenging and there are several platforms that give you a free site – Wix, Weebly or SiteRubix. My recommendation is to try SiteRubix.

SiteRubix is part of the Wealthy Affiliate training platform and online community. You can check out SiteRubix and Wealthy Affiliate here.

The reasons I prefer this platform, aside from being able to create a Wordpress site in just a few clicks are:

• Free to join
• You are given some free lessons to help you get started
• They have a wonderfully supportive community if you have problems or need help
• You are given two free websites
• Everything you need is available in one place – hosting, domain names, lessons in building your online business, help, and support, and tools

This could be a great way to start your review website, no costs involved, you don’t even need your credit card.

Below is a video that shows how easy it is to build a site with SiteRubix.

However, you won’t receive the lessons that are included at Wealthy Affiliate and although most web hosts provide some good support in my experience it’s much slower than the support at Wealthy Affiliate.

Personally, I have found that the training at Wealthy Affiliate really can make a difference, I’m sure I wouldn’t have come so far without the community or the step by step lessons.

Writing Your Reviews

The challenge as a blogger is writing a review that is honest and converts. A good review should answer your reader’s questions.

• What does the product do?
• Who is it for?
• Why is it better than the competition?
• What are the pros and cons?
• How much does it cost and what sort of guarantee do you get?
• Where can you buy the product?
• What are your conclusions?

At the start of your review, you can include a summary.

• Product Name
• Price
• Guarantee
• Where to buy (include your affiliate link)
• Your rating

Your reviews should be very thorough and if you have some experience with the product so much the better. Don’t fall into the trap of writing a positive review for a product that doesn’t deserve it, hoping that you will make some commissions when people follow your recommendation. Your credibility is very important, you must build trust with your readers, therefore, your reviews should portray the truth.

When a visitor reads your review, they want to know if it’s a good idea to purchase the product. If your review doesn’t answer this question, they won’t take any action. Your goal should be to write an honest review that gives your readers insight into the product that they can’t find elsewhere and to do this you can use pictures and videos to improve your review.

There are some people who will read every word of your review and others, perhaps the majority, who will scan over the article looking for the main points. You need to give both sets of readers what they want. The easiest way to do this is to break down your review into short sections with headlines and at the end of your review include a summary.

Getting Visitors to Your Reviews

When people are looking for a review they will go to the search engines and type in the product name + review. For your review to be listed in the search engines you will need to have these words in your article. These words are known as keywords.

As a general rule, it’s good to include the keywords in the title of your page and in the content, as near to the beginning as possible. See this article for more details on search engine optimization. Once your keywords are placed in these strategic positions you write your review naturally.

It’s also a good idea to share your reviews on the social media, you might get some readers from the huge amount of people using these networks.

Your Affiliate Links in Reviews

If you have written a great review your readers should have decided whether to take action and buy the product or not. To enable them to do this you should include your affiliate link at the end of the article in a prominent position. The link should be clearly marked that it is for buying the product.

Summary

I hope you can see from this article that it is possible to make money from writing reviews online. You need to decide what products you will be writing about (your niche) and then you need a website. Once you have these two things you’re ready to start writing.

This is a long-term business you shouldn’t expect to earn money with just one review. After you have written several reviews your rankings in the search engines will improve and you will start getting visitors to your reviews. Keep writing and the money will come, you must be patient and determined.

At the beginning of your online journey, you might become disheartened due to technical problems or need some advice on how to do something. This is why I recommend signing up for Wealthy Affiliate, there is always someone there to help, whatever your problem.

It was the instruction I received from Wealthy Affiliate that got me started with affiliate marketing, you can read my Wealthy Affiliate Review or simply sign up and try out your 2 free websites.

If you have any questions or comments about earning money from reviews let me know in the comments below.