How to Start a Review Blog

Business Overview:

If you’d like to earn income while you sleep and help people find great products, you should learn how to start a review blog. A review blog is a website with reviews of specific products. The products you review on your blog could be physical products or digital products (such as eBooks). You make money with this business by being paid a commission every time someone purchases a product via a link that you provide in your review article. You can also make money by building a list of subscribers to your website and sending out review emails to them. Again, if they buy a product through a link in your email you receive a commission. Essentially with this business idea you act as an affiliate marketer, and you promote merchants’ products in exchange for a commission for sales made. In doing so, you help people by providing valuable information on products which helps them decide whether or not to buy. It’s a great online business idea for several reasons. First, it can be highly lucrative. Recent statistics show that the affiliate marketing industry generates $6 billion USD worldwide. Second, starting a review blog is easy, and you can set everything up for very low start-up costs. All you need to spend to set up a review blog is around $10 USD a month for website hosting, and another $10 USD annually for a domain name. If you are not very technical it may take you some time to learn how to set up your website or you can easily pay someone else to do that for you for a relatively low fee. If you’d like, you can even sign up for a free WordPress or Blogger blog without needing to have your own hosting or domain. With the costs of starting this business being so incredibly low, the only major investment you really need to make is your time. You will want to continually expand your review blog by adding more reviews of products. It would be wise to focus on a specific niche, such as children’s products, jewelry, pet products, or technical software. As the popularity of your site grows, you will likely have advertisers contacting you wanting to advertise on your website. One of the great things about this business is that you can travel and live anywhere in the world while running it. With enough motivation and, such freedom is definitely within the grasp of anyone who decides to start a review blog.

A Day in the Life of a Review Blog Business Owner:

This article brought to you by Business Ideas! If you enjoyed this article, make sure to subscribe to the Business Ideas Newsletter to get ideas sent straight to your email inbox.A typical day will involve you reviewing a product thoroughly before you begin to write about it. If it’s a physical product, you will need to obtain it and either examine or use it, depending on what type of product it is. You may also want to do some online research to discover who is behind the company and if there’s an interesting tale to be told along with your review. People will want to hear not only your opinion of the product, but why you are giving it the review you are. Good writing skills are a must for this business idea. If you’re not a strong writer, you can certainly hire a writer (or a team of writers if you want to go large) to review products and write for you. Then you’ll want to post your article to your blog, making sure that your article is set up so that it will receive relevant traffic from the search engines. You may spend time on the phone or email working out deals with advertisers who want space on your blog. Review sites aren’t limited to search engines as a means of generating traffic. On a typical day you may also create videos and upload them to a site like YouTube, where you can provide a link to your review site to drive more traffic to your blog. Bear in mind, however, that you don’t even have to go through the process of product selection, article writing, and traffic generation yourself. You can outsource this work by hiring someone else to do it for you if you’d prefer. In this case, a typical day would simply consist of overseeing the smooth running of your review blog business, and checking your account to find out how many commissions you’ve earned that day.

About Your Customers:

With a review blog business you won’t have customers per se because you will earn your money by generating sales for a merchant. So in this sense you won’t have customers, but you will have online leads that you aim to convert into customers for your merchant. Broadly speaking, the sales that you generate for your merchant(s) will come from people who are thinking of buying a specific product. They will be looking for more information on the product to help them decide whether or not to buy, and that’s exactly the information your blog will provide.

What You Need to Start:

• An account as an affiliate for a merchant (in order to promote products on your blog and earn commissions)
• A blog
• The ability to write informative review articles on specific products—or the willingness to hire a writer
• Hosting and a domain name for your blog (or you can create a free account with WordPress or Blogger)
• Business license
• Computer with high-speed Internet connection
• Financial tracking software

The Good:

• There are virtually no start-up costs if you can get merchants to provide you with free samples to review.
• You’ll be part of a $6 billion USD industry—so the profit generating potential is enormous.
• You can outsource a lot of the work if you choose.
• You can operate this business from any location in the world.
• You will be providing a genuine service to others by letting them know the pros and cons of the products you review.

The Bad:

• You’ll need to be motivated and willing to work hard, at least in the beginning, as it can take time for you to build up your blog and generate good levels of traffic and profits.
• Learning how to set up blogs correctly can be technically challenging (though you can outsource this work if you choose).

Resources:

• Performance Marketing Association
• Wikipedia on Reviews

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