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Article Title: Dramatically Increase The Credibility Of Your Affiliate Website With Customer Reviews
Author: Stephen Carter
Word Count: 904
Keywords: review script, credibility of affiliate websites, customer reviews on affiliate websites
Contact Email Address: articles@randommous
Website: http://www.randommo
Category: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate, Marketing, Internet, Advertising
Description: Learn how to increase the preselling power of your affiliate
website by adding the credibility that comes with customer
reviews.
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Title: Dramatically Increase The Credibility Of Your Affiliate Website With Customer Reviews
Affiliate marketing was a six billion dollar business in 2006,
and shows no sign of tapering off any time soon. But as good as
business has been for the top affiliate marketers, it could be
a lot better for the majority.
A real obstacle to achieving the sales goals of many affiliates
involves their credibility. If I say a product is great, and I
am being paid to convince you to buy it, why should you believe
me?
The fact is, most affiliate sites on the web today are poorly
constructed, and this beggars any authority the owner of the
site hopes to convert into sales. Often these sites are thin
conduits designed to ferry traffic from search engines to the
sites of merchants who have neither the resources nor the time
to figure out how to find the customers they need to ensure
their business success.
Despite this, and because the web is growing more and more
congested, the value of a *quality* affiliate marketer
nonetheless continues to increase. Unfortunately this simple
fact is not at all recognized by the buying public who often
begrudge affiliate marketers and view them as interlopers who
put themselves between the customer and the merchants they are
searching for. In short, the affiliate marketer has long
suffered, and continues to suffer, from an image problem.
This image problem is not confined just to the public. Google,
which derives huge advertising revenues from affiliate
marketers, nevertheless regards affiliate marketing sites with
complete disdain. Of course, affiliate marketers themselves
have contributed to this problem because their websites very
often contain little in the way of new or unique content, which
is what Google values and believes its customers (web
searchers) value.
It is no surprise therefore, to find that some of the top
affiliate marketers differentiate themselves from the rest of
the pack in precisely this area. They offer not only critical
assessment of the products they promote, but also take the time
to blog and build a comraderie with the visitors to their
sites. By offering unique, and regularly updated content, they
appease the Gods of Google, and are rewarded with organic (non
pay-per-click) traffic that very much contributes to the bottom
line. In other words, the top affiliate marketers know how to
project a good image--to their visitors, to Google, and to
other search engines that might bring in prospects.
Blogging is a great way to produce unique content. But it is
time consuming, there is a limit to how much daily content you
can produce as an affiliate, and not everyone finds the task of
writing content easy work.
What if instead you could have the content create itself
automatically? Well, actually you can. If you offer customer
reviews of the products you promote you accomplish this and
more. Not only is the subject matter on target, but the reviews
themselves promote the products for you (supposing you have
carefully chosen only the best products to promote, which is
what any *good* affiliate marketer knows to do). Even better,
you no longer have to worry about that credibility problem. If
ten people come onto your site and say "Buy product XYZ, it
rocks!" that recommendation is a heck of a lot more convincing
than anything that you might say, no matter how truthful your
utterances.
So, all you have to do as an affiliate marketer, to get people
to "click through" to a merchant site in a buying mood is to
promote good products and let people express their opinions
about those products on your site. If the products are great,
the reviews will reflect that. If instead it turns out that the
reviews are consistently bad for one of the products you
promote, then drop it! Replace it with another.
"But collecting reviews is really difficult!" I hear you
object. "I simply do not have time for that. Do I?"
There is nothing inherently difficult about putting customer
reviews on your site today. It does take a little time to set
things up, but low-cost commercial quality reviewing
applications are available to do the bulk of the work (see the
one mentioned in the resource box below if you want to get a
jump start on implementing customer reviews on your website).
Not only does a customer review section on your site
substantially increase your overall credibility, but search
engines will love the content--especially if the review pages
have been optimized for the search engines (as all good
reviewing engines will certainly do).
There is another benefit to collecting customer reviews. Some
review engines allow you to publish the reviews as RSS feeds.
What this means is increased traffic. You can submit your feeds
to the RSS directories. Moreover, if the reviewing application
also allows you to create RSS feeds compatible with Google Base
(as does the application mentioned below) you can upload your
entire review database (or the first N characters of each
review) to Google Base and make your reviews accessible to the
various Google marketing avenues.
Given the clear benefits to implementing customer reviews on
affiliate marketing sites it is surprising that so very few
marketers have actually adopted this strategy to date. But as
the web continues to mature, and affiliate marketing grows more
professional, it is to be expected that this strategy will
become more and more common on the sites of top affiliate
marketers.
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Stephen Carter is the developer of Red Queen,
a powerful web-based customer review engine that allows
webmasters to manage customer reviews on their web site.
http://www.randommo
See also "How To Put Customer Reviews On Your Affiliate Website"
http://www.randommo
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