How Affiliate Marketers Can Avoid This All-Too-Common Mistake When Writing a Product Review

If you're familiar with affiliate marketing, you've probably noticed that product reviews are a longstanding staple for this kind of website.

Whether it's an in-depth review of a single product, or a top ten list of the best on the market, a fair but positive review is a great way to motivate your readers to make a purchase.

There are quite a few benefits to incorporating product reviews into your content strategy, even if you're more of a hobby blogger whose content isn't always particularly product-focused.

But there's one huge mistake that tons of affiliate niche site owners make when they write reviews.

NicheHacks discusses this big misstep in detail below, along with the benefits of reviewing products in the first place.

What Are The Benefits Of Writing A Product Review?

A lot has been written on the benefits of having your products reviewed.

From the fact that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Through to the way that they can give you up to an 18% rise in sales.

But not a lot has been said on the benefits of writing a product review.

Let’s take a look at why you should be writing product reviews then:

Money: I’ll cover this a little more in depth next. But, you can make affiliate sales quite swiftly from product reviews.
SEO: You can target more long-tail keywords and drive more specific search traffic from people looking for the product. (If you're a beginner at SEO, check out this guide)
Authority: By reviewing products, and having people engage with them, you can create more authority in your niche. Because you must know what you’re talking about if you have a platform to speak from.
Free stuff: A lot of people will give you free access to their tools and products too. Meaning that, even if you don’t get paid, you have a new toy to play with.

Which, no matter where you are in you niche site journey, you can always benefit from.

The 5 Star Mistake Most Niche Marketers Make

When you sit down to write your review you feel drawn to give the product a five star rating. Why?

Because you want to make money and you feel that anything less than five stars is going to turn customers away. It’s a natural and understandable thought process.

But this is also dangerous territory.

If you rate everything five stars – especially products you haven’t used – your site is going to look a lot less trustworthy.

Not every product in your niche can be that good, can it?

And as eConsultancy found, bad reviews can increase your conversions by up to 67%. Which makes perfect sense when you think about it.

The problems of one product can be the feature or benefit someone else is looking for.

For example Benny Lewis is a language learning blogger who often reviews products and tools.

In this review he gave Rosetta Stone, one of the best known products in this niche, a two star review.

Because for his method of language learning it’s completely incompatible.

He wants to get out on the streets, talk to people and learn the language in that style.

But someone who feels more comfortable sat at home and wants to a simple program to learn a language through their computer could read that review and go, “Man, that’s exactly the product I’m looking for!”.

In fact if you take a minute to go through your latest purchases on Amazon you’ll find products that you’ve bought despite the fact they had one and two star reviews.

One of my favourite books, A Walk In The Woods, is a masterpiece in travel writing for me. But there are those people out there who hate it.

But the reasons they hate it are probably the reasons I love it.

So don’t worry about writing three or four star reviews of products. When your reviews are:

– Honest
– Easy to read
– Informative
– Relatable

People will convert to the products no matter whether they’re five star, one star or anywhere in between.