Is Review Site Profitable?

The premises that making money in niches is the way to go causes a stir to many 'online marketers' and 'online wealth hunter wannabes'. And, um, I was among that crowd. How did I end up there? Well, lets just say I want to start with something easy and safe so I cut down my option to - you guess it - affiliate marketing.

The idea of affiliate marketing is to make money by earning commission (as if you didn't know about it already) from sales or leads that were generated. And the 'expert' that I'm following at that point of time emphasized on narrowing into a specific group of people i.e. a niche.

My research for dominating niche brought me to this report: Niche Marketing On Crack and I from that day onward, become so focused with niche marketing (but I'm not on crack or anything like that. Just focused).

And that's how I got started (you can read how I review niche marketing on crack here)... Told ya that report got me cranking...

Based on the lesson I got from niche marketing on crack and Andrew Hansen, I bring to life my first review site on a free web platform - Blogger. You can see how it looks like in the Pic. and I was all too proud with the result from my effort.

Heck! At least I take action...

What you see in the pic was the result of countless transformation and as you can see, I settled for a simple web outlook. And that summarizes my philosophy of any making money method from home - plain and simple.

Oh! You've missed my Adsense ads on that site. I took it off after I learned about targeted traffic and 'smart pricing'. But most of the important element is still there.

So that's my first review site (reviewing a local made courses on building websites for beginners, like me).

Now, software makes my life as reviewer much, much better. At least I thought about it that way. What took me like 30 minutes to come up with - building a free blog, optimize it, write content, etc. were cut down to simpler and structured, step-by-step operation...

Actually it's not even an operation because all I need to do was to key in a few words with the guidance of the program (it's a page generator) and at the end, walla! My review page is ready to rock and roll! Simple.

And you can see how the review page generator looks like (pic.)...

I overheard a conversation between 2 copywriters and one copywriter said to his buddy, "You know, the biggest bottle-neck in writing copy is the headline." And that's what this software allows you optimize to boot - the headline (the top part as I called it here).

The top part works as accordance to the 'Bucket Brigade' principles. The purpose is to pull a browser in and to read the first paragraph.

But I'm not trying to sell you the review software generator here. Just wanna show off that I know what I'm doing and talking about (lol!). Take a look of what the top part of a review page created by the software looks like (pic.) --->

(Click here for bigger image of the following the guru review page)

The bottom part looks more stunning, doesn't it? I don't know. I just say that to comfort myself. After all the hard work of thinking up the headline, the content or body copy and the closing (bottom part), I deserve some pats on my back.

I'm not a designer but, you know. My work is not bad. And I remember at one time, I offer a fully designed review page to one of my subscriber - free! The software did most of the designing job so I don't complain much.

Plus my subscriber said that she want to use it as a 'splash page' (Huh!? We'll talk about this nest time). I said, "Whatever..." Just glad to offer my service.

So basically that's how a review page looks like. The bottom part (pic.) and the top part are a chain of story. And I keep churning these day after day, put a link to them on my blog and hope to build a theme sites full of review page because I was lead to believe that was the way to go.

Naive right? Why I say so?

You see, I should've learned from the person who pitch me the membership to this review site.

"What's the lesson?," you asked. Review page must be put on your own website (Hahaha...gotcha!). No. Review page is not what make you the profit. It's the CONVERSION. Can your review page convert? Did you test it?

And to convert a visitor on your review page takes more than words and 'stars'. The lesson from my 'pitcher' is offer more value. What can we give extra that have value attached to it?

That's a BONUS page friends. Bonus converts if it's relevant and value added.

Since review page is used mainly by affiliates, it makes more compelling to have bonus page created to convert visitors to customers. Plus, how obvious it has to be that this particular pitch was sent via e-mail? Meaning...to SUBSCRIBERS, faces on a mailing list.

Is review page profitable? Not on its own. That's my take.