If you’ve played the affiliation game long enough, you’ve probably tried your luck with a product review site of some sort. It’s the definitive choice for affiliate beginners, yet it still offers untold riches for those who’ve seen everything in the business and know how to capitalize accordingly.

Product review sites are popular because they’re viable for even the laziest of web entrepreneurs, and they don’t take an Indian summer to setup. They also cut out a lot of the middle researching groundwork. If you’re going to build a site dedicated to one product, you better know that product inside out with a comprehensive understanding of your market. Anything less is like walking in to the abyss of chance affiliate marketing. You might get lucky and crack a few sales, but you’re more likely to walk away with a sore head and no return on your investment. Pounds for pennies, if you will.

Hell, you’ll probably stumble back to Digital Point pleading for tips on your first sale and posting a big fat screen grab when you finally cash in on your hours of hard work. I wouldn’t dare knock it. We’ve all started somewhere and just like many - it took me a fair amount of experimentation and late nights glued to the blue to stumble upon a formula that worked.

When I speak to people looking to make a sustained second income on the Internet, I usually advise them to get started on a product review site.

These are absolutely perfect for learning the ropes and understanding the basic principles of what sells and what draws traffic to a site. Better yet, you can set up your site on Wordpress or Blogger and be up and running in minutes.

I’ve explored many avenues for presenting my affiliate offers. From the bespoke website with 100% unique structure and content, to hosted Wordpress blogs and Squidoo hub pages. The truth is, it really doesn’t matter. I use Wordpress to publish my content. It’s quick, it’s optimized for the search engines and it’s easily manageable.

If you’re looking to break in to the product review segment of affiliate marketing, you might take interest in this tip. If you’re already successful, well, it might get you thinking about how you can implement the technique elsewhere.

My advice is to go viral.

Viral is such a buzz word in 2008. I fucking hate it but it’s true. People don’t trust the traditional review site anymore, and why should they?

Some of these product review sites out there are about as discrete with their intentions as Arrington is with his Twitter. If I were a consumer, and I stumbled across a review site showering praise on a heap of products that I hadn’t heard of before, telling me to buy them with special discounts, I’d immediately suspect the legitimacy.

Of course, when you’re in the affiliate marketing business, you grow terribly skeptical of all reviews - both from trusted sources and whatever dot com. It’s important to separate the consumer mindset from the salesman mindset.

Recently, I’ve adopted a tactic which has served me so much better than the biased review approach, I’ve been teasing the urge to bin my old projects in disgust. It’s simple and it’s subtle.

You write without trying to sell, and let your “customer reviews” do the talking.

What do I mean by customer reviews? No, not those god awful testimonials that you read for shits and giggles. I mean busting open the commenting functionality on Wordpress and spamming the hell out of your own blog (no, it’s not practiced here!).

Web 2.0 has reached the melting point where consumers are increasingly relying on the reviews of fellow customers and word of mouth. Established review columns are no longer as appealing. Why take one opinion when you can take fifty?

When you post your product review, stick to the facts. Get rid of the sales talk and promotional garbage about how the consumer simply has to have the greatest invention of the twenty first century. It won’t wash with the savvier audience of 2008. You should STOP reviewing the product and START describing it.

Keep all bias out of the equation and reel off a list of facts about what’s included with the purchase. We’re talking company information, a list of the features, the history of the product, when it was released and what the manufacturer is hoping to achieve with it. Forget those stupid product rating icons. 10/10 and 5 stars are lovely if your brand is worth a sniff of a shit.

The key is to remain completely neutral and come across as an independent party with no affiliate connection. We’ll still hype the product to the moon, but we’ll do it in our comments section.

It’s easy to spam your own blog. That’s a fact, folks.

Those of you with split personalities are gonna love this because you’ve now got the chance to create some make-belief blog commenters and explore as many different shoes as you can feel comfortable in. Take ten minutes to jot down the key selling points of the product. What would the consumer be concerned about?

Got it? Now start commenting on your review under the guise of different names and aliases. Don’t go overboard with the positive praise. A lot of the time, the consumer is simply looking for assurance that the product is legit and not a scam. Especially with the sales pages that they can expect to find on Clickbank (”take my money, just take it”).

Mix up the comments with a few neutral reviews, and maybe the odd pissed off rant which will surely be overlooked if you sugar coat it in enough positive viral buzz.

Now what you have is one informative and non-biased review, and a whole host of positive feedback snippets from your “customer readers”. Just think Amazon, with a hidden agenda! After all, what would you rather trust? A review that praises a product you’ve never heard of to the moon? Or an overview of features and glowing praise from satisfied customers? Better yet, we can use our blog comments to further optimize for keywords (it’s great for the long-tail) without having to ruin the tone of the original article.

Product review sites will always be a popular entry point for affiliate newcomers. But it doesn’t matter how much experience you have. Some simple consumer logic will go a long way to making your site pay.

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