i'm liking both the review site traffic i get from some review sites and also the traffic i send to sponsors with my mini review site.
so for the folks here who don't own a review site or at least a page with mini reviews of your favorite sponsors - why don't you? is it your writing skills? no time? didn't think of it? not sure what to write?
You know, i think for a lot of webmasters the time involvement of writing the reviews is probably the main factor as to why they dont own a review site as yet that being said, time is a constraint that stops webmasters doing a lot of the stuff they want to on an almost daily basis.
In fact, i was talking to someone a couple of days ago who was asking how i found the time to do all the stuff i do and, in all honesty all i could tell them was that by using scripts and managing the time i do have better was really the only reason.
Will be interesting to see some of the other replies to your question though, review sites offer some of the best traffic a paysite owner could hope for and im sure we're going to see more and more webmasters launching review sites over the coming months because of this fact.
Regards,
Lee
Ok. The time issue on this is EASY! Contact the sponsor, say you wanna review the site. Get a PW. Find a porn junkie friend. Give him 10 passwords at a time. And tell him in exchange you want reviews. It works.
COMING SOON - TwinkReview.com
abostonboy
Thanks for the idea and input.. Actually I have been submitting my new gay paysite (globaltwinks.com) to review sites the past few days and I had no idea there where that many! This means that there is money to be made in reviews so I am going to put up my own review site.
Feel free to submit your sites already!
http://www.gaysitesreviews.com
Same thing in mainstream, review sites (not very unbiased ones most of teh time) has been making tons of sales to mainstream marketers of e-books and other clickbank products, or so I hear.
i know of unbiased str8 review sites and LOTS of highly biased gay review sites. the truth is most sites don't just try to concentrate on both the positive and the negative in their reviews - they lie or really color the truth so it's shocking to enter the sites and see what they really have after reading the reviews.
Originally Posted by Marq
Ok. Here comes a long post.
A couple years ago I spent a whole week working on a business plan for a review site. To make a long story short the whole deal fell through for several reasons.
I agree with BassChick that a Mini Review site is a good idea. I am not sure where she is getting the traffic that they sends to it, but a mini review site is a great way to filter traffic from free sites, galleries, etc. And maybe even pick up a bookmarker here and there.
Concerning traffic from review sites. Yes the traffic YOU get probably converts very well. By the time it gets to your paysite it is highly filtered and targeted and even pre quailified, as in the surfer probably knows he's gonna have to pay. But, while your conversion may be good, you don't know how many hits it took to the review site to get you that sale. Is the review site using junk traffic and for every 1,000 visitors they get a sale or are they buying quality traffic and converting at say 1:100?
When doing a review site, you need to think about a few things:
1. Design/Programming. A good review site really needs to be scripted. It needs to be dynamic. Ultimately the front page needs to have like the five most visited sites, the 5 newest reviews, links to random galleries etc. And when the surfer actually starts surfing the categories you really want the surfer to be able to view the sites you review by rating, most popular visited, maybe price, etc. If it is static and lets say you review a 5 star site that you make $40 a sale on and it converts like crazy it does no good for you if its the last site in the category. Anyone who thinks they can design a review site in Dreamweaver w/o some php and mysql is crazy. A blog could work, but even then blogs are way too much date oriented that some sites that you want to be the first they see may get buried.
2. Traffic/SE Rank. Where is your traffic coming from? If you have tons of traffic that you can dump on it then good for you. But if all the traffic is coming from your own domains your SE Rank may never get that high. The reasons some link lists have such a good search enginge rank is of the links coming into them from 100's of domains. Unless you offer a partnership program like some review sites do, you will have a hard time with this. And setting up a partnership program where you may skim 10% off the top and allow webmasters to make money sending traffic to your site just adds to the programming.
3. Traffic again. The most successful review sites spend big bucks on traffic. They pay high click rates on the SE's and run ads like Paysite Reviews bla bla bla. I am sure their conversions are awesome. But here is a problem. MOST of them mainly push pay per signup. They may pay upwards of $20 just to get a sale and will not risk sending to a % program.
4. Time. Good lord. This is more work than a paysite. Besides the review, you need links to sample galleries. And what if the site deosn't offer hosted galleries? It's not like two years ago when I did my business plan for this when you could just ask a webmaster for a photoset. Now you need the 2257 and all that cool stuff. Seriously write one review. See how long it takes. Then multiply that by 500.
5. You almost need to be bias. This is hard to explain and was what actually made the deal I was working on before fall through. The company I was working with ran some paysites (per signup) and traded traffic with many other persignup programs. So how in hell can you bash sites and give them a bad rating when you are partners with them? I mean even if you don't run paysites and are in this situation, it's risky at best. For example I do a lot with Topbucks. I would rate their reality sites a 5. The Asian site a 1. I go and spend big bucks on google with a review site and drive some nice search engine traffic to a review bashing their asian site. Do you think I might be damaging my relationship with Topbucks a little. I am only using them as an example. There are many other companies that have bot great and bad sites. I am not in this business to burn bridges.
On another note, if you are going to be objective, are you going to signup to a % program with a company that may have two sites and give one a 3 and the other a 1? I mean is it really worth the time "just to be objective"? The hour you spending writing the reviews vs the amount of money you will make, falls under the "you spend 20% of your time making 80% of your money" rule.
6. The amount of time you spend setting it up alone will take away from projects that you are doing now that are creating instant income. And IF you decide to buy traffic, then you have to look at what your true cost per customer is. And realize and treat the site like its own business. Be prepared to spend time and money with not a lot to show at first.
So, do I think they are a bad idea? Hell, NO! You just have to find the right model and balance and it could work. It's not as easy as it seems.
Will I ever have a review site? Sortta. See my sig and think outside the box.
I have one but admittedly, I don't run it any longer as someone else who has more expertise in it does it for me. It does pay to have family in the business.
She'll give me reviews for sites in a genre I really like, and then I try like hell to be objective.
I wish I had more time to do porn reviews, but mainstream projects are keeping me too busy for porn these days.
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