If you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to learn to write reviews that convert. Some experienced have written hundreds or even thousands of product reviews during their affiliate marketing career. Have they bought and tested all of those products personally. Of course not!
You don’t need to buy all those products and have your home full of stuff that you have reviewed. Today I am going to share you How to Write a Great Product Review Without Buying a Product?
“A widely accepted misconception is that you cannot review something honestly if you don’t own it.” –Nathaniell Brenes (A very successful full-time Internet marketer)
“I am a newbie. I don’t own a product. How to write a review?”
Let’s face the reality. Everybody needs to start somewhere. Even guys who are making +$10,000/month online started as newbies one day. They started learning and nowadays they are experts. First of all, don’t worry that you are a newbie. If you start today and keep on learning, someday you will be an expert. I know this from my own experience.
Now listen carefully, you can use your inexperience as an advantage. You can easily relate to your readers who don’t have any experience either. You can write from their perspective and easily answer their questions.
Another thing that I have noticed that many times you don’t even realize how much you know about a subject because you live with yourself every day. Your skills and knowledge seem like normal to you. After talking with a person who really doesn’t know anything about that subject, makes you realize how much you really know.
I can give you an example of my personal life. I thought that where I am an expert. Definitely in playing chess because I am one of the bests in my country. But what other things. Then I realized that I am an expert of languages because I speak 4-6 languages (depends on how you define fluency).
Before I didn’t realize because it was just a normal thing for me. I was living with that fact every day. But I started thinking, how many of my friends speak 4-6 languages. Only very few. I realized that I have a really good knowledge and many people could benefit hearing it. So I decided to create LanguagesAreEasy.com to help people learn languages faster and while having fun.
=>Learn to Make Money Online by Writing Product Reviews!
Know More Than 90% of People with a Few Searches
Sometimes even knowing a little bit of your subject, makes you better than 90% of the population in the world who have 0 knowledge about that subject. So never underestimate your skills and think how much you already know compared to people who don’t know anything.
Let’s say that you are reviewing smartphones. Even though I know more about technology than an average person on the planet, my knowledge about smartphones’ differences is very small. Only by reading a short article about a new iPhone, you already know more than me. Then you could tell me the information and it could help me. If you read 5 articles about that iPhone and combine that information into one article, you have already much better knowledge than many other people.
In your review, you can share other people’s experience and tell how they have enjoyed using iPhone. If somebody didn’t like it because of reason X it’s possible that I don’t like if for the same reason. You can also throw questions to your readers so that they can share their own experiences. Then you get engagement to your website which boosts Google rankings and gives you a better knowledge about the product.
Writing a Review as an Expert
It’s naturally much easier to write a review if you already know a lot about your niche or field. For me, it would not be so hard to write reviews about chess books without using hours on them. The writer of the book defines hugely the quality of the book. Then I could share my own opinion’s about book’s subject and give valuable tips that are not even presented in a book.
Being an expert can be a big advantage because it creates authority. For example mentioning, “When being 5 years in the industry I can say that this product seems…” Your 5 years are a huge sign of credibility in reader’s eyes who doesn’t have so much experience.
Show the Facts – Sometimes That’s Enough
Let’s say that you are still writing that smartphone review of an iPhone that you don’t own. One thing you can do is to present the facts. You can collect for example following information about that iPhone and make a comparison with another smartphone like Samsung:
- Display (what is screen’s resolution?)
- Capacity (how many GBs you can save to your phone?)
- Size and Weight
- Camera (how many megapixels it has?)
- Video recording (how good quality videos you can take?)
- Battery (how long does battery last?)
Only by collecting this information and sharing it on your review, you can make a huge favor for your reader. If you collect information from 10 different sources, you can save hundreds of people’s time who visit your website and don’t need to collect all this information themselves.
Studies Show: Reviews Convert
I give you three quick reasons why to write reviews.
1.88% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations. When your friend recommends you a product does it raise the probability that you would buy the same product too? Yes, it does and online reviews seem to have the same effect according to studies. (Source: SearchEngineLand.com)
2.Bad reviews can improve conversions by 67%. When you are writing reviews, don’t write only about positive products. The study showed that people become suspicious if all reviews in a site are positive. But when you are providing both positive and negative reviews it shows that you care about a reader. It also makes good products stand out better when you compare them to their worse counterparts. (Source: eConsultancy.com)
3.According to one study writing reviews will boost your sales by 18%. (Source: eConsultancy.com)
All in all, writing reviews will bring more money to your pocket.
Want to Learn to Make Money by Writing Product Reviews?
Writing reviews can be a very profitable business. It goes like this:
1.People search for reviews on search engines
2.They end up to your website
3.They read a review and click a link
4.They buy a product and you earn a commission up to 75%
People are making millions of money every year by doing this and affiliate marketing business is growing every year worldwide. Want to have your share of the cake?
Wealthy Affiliate is an online business training that teaches you how to become a successful affiliate marketer. There are more than 800,000 members in the community and many of them have created full-time income by writing reviews. Become a member for free and start making money with your reviews.
PS.The best reviews are still usually made of products that you own and have used yourself. So when you are making money with your reviews, you can invest a small part of it into new products that you buy, test and write a review. When you keep on writing new reviews your income will grow like a snowball.
What kind of reviews do you like?
What are your tips for writing reviews without buying a product?
I have done some SEO writting and I can relate with a majority of the pointers that you have outlined. Where you do not have sufficient knowledge research always is essential. This can be done with ease in the modern world where the internet should be everyone’s best friend.
That’s exactly right 🙂
By the way, on which site have you done SEO writing?
This was a great way to write a review of a product. But for me it is much better to review a product and sharing to others the experience and the features of that product. Because using it personally before reviewing it will give you a lot of things to put on your review.
That is completely true. I always prefer writing reviews of the products that I have tried myself. However, sometimes I do not need to try the product before seeing what it is like, especially in the Internet marketing space. Reading 5-10 reviews can easily show the true skin of the specific kinds of products.
And if you are the one who experience that product or that site you can share more things to others because you are the one who really experienced it. Unlike if you just read some other reviews about it, there is a tendency that you will just copy the idea or just change the terms of that review which is unfair to the author.
This was a good and solid article. I have not thought too much about the opportunity to be able to write reviews without actually owning the product. But now I might think about it.
Hi Tikitalk 😉
I didn’t think about it either in the past. Then I realized that even though you don’t own a product you can provide value by sharing what other people have liked about the product. In addition, you can tell what is the product all about so people don’t need to search the information themselves.
If you have expertise on the field you can many times give a good opinion about a product even without buying it.
Thanks for your great review of Wealthy Affiliate. You really outline everything from what they teach. The education platform looks really good. Easy to follow as there is alot of support within Wealthy Affiliate which really stuck out to me. Can you tell me why you rank it #1 and what other programs have you had a look at?
-Kerryanne
Hi Kerryanne,
I am glad that you also liked my review of Wealthy Affiliate. I made it as honest as possible. I have been using their product for 17 months so I have a good knowledge about it.
I rank WA #1 because of many reasons:
* Their step-by-step training is wonderful and gives you important skills to get started with your online business
* Personal help of successful online entrepreneurs. You get personal feedback and tips from guys who are making +$10,000/month.
*Domain hosting and high-quality websites. WA provides hosting for up to 25 websites when you are their member. If you would buy it from other providers it costs hundreds of euros every year.
* Keyword tool. Tells you which words you need to use in order to get ranked in Google
These are the main reasons and there are much more. We have reviewed +30 products in YourOnlineRevenue.com. You can find our reviews here.
Wish you all the best!
-Roope
Your article is very useful to me. I have read many articles preaching that you need to use a product before you can write a review about it. Now you have enlightened me on the subject and am feeling better off to move into the business.
Thanks a lot and all the best.
Hi Vallery,
yeah those people are right somehow because when you have tried a product yourself you have personal experience of it. However, everyone’s experience is different so even though you would try a certain product for 100 times you may have totally different version than me, for example.
Let’s say that you make a review about a product that you haven’t used yourself. But your friend has and you found that some another person has too. Then you listen to their experiences and write a review. I am sure that this information can be beneficial for me if I am thinking about buying that product.
Sometimes so-called “experts” want to make rules that people must follow. But in reality, there are many ways to make things right. You can write an excellent product review with many different ways. Keep on doing, keep on learning and you will make good progress.
Hi RKiuttu
I really needed this article right now as I am learning how to do reviews myself. I really didnt realize how important they are. Thanks for showing me a vital piece of information! So, if you dont buy these products before reviewing, do you have to state where you get your information about them? Seems like that would make you more believable in your readers eyes or not? I have reached a point in my website that I need to turn to reviews so will be putting your article to good use! Thanks!
Hi Robin,
I am glad that this article was helpful for you. My goal is always to provide valuable information for my readers.
It depends if you need to say where you got the information. Sometimes it can be worth mentioning but sometimes not. Almost all of the knowledge that is in our head has come from some source. We have heard it from a friend, read from a book/Internet or seen on TV. We can never remember where all that information come from.
If you think that mentioning the source in your article then I would add it. Like it did with those three studies that I mentioned in this article. If I would have just thrown those numbers there people would have probably asked where did I get that information. But now I have it already there so people can see it.