How To Write A Review Template

In this coming guide, I will show y'allhow to write a product review that does not alienate your readers merely tin still generate good acquirement for your website.

Merely first, let's summarise how searching for feedback almost a product yous are nearly to buy usually goes…

Footstep 1: type "product" + review in Google.

Step 2: your eyes cook at the number of star ratings and review websites appearing on your screen, one-half the titles read "is a scam? Don't buy before you read this!"

Step three: Tentatively click on a result that doesn't seem to exist an obvious click bait and where the domain proper noun looks trustable (i.e not producthonestreivew.com).

Step 4: Land on a page filled with CTA 100% positive reviews and is apparently completely sold out to the product owner (and, if you're lucky, some rehashed product descriptions).

Stride 5: Shut your browser in rage after landing on 3 or 4 such sites not knowing what to do about buying the production or not.

Does this sound familiar?

It does to me, yet I actually accept done that for a while and if you navigate Health Ambition a bit and wait at some of our reviews from a few years ago you will see we were playing that exact game.

But the truth is, fifty-fifty when they rank, these kind of production reviews only don't produce nearly as much acquirement as they used to anymore.

The truth is, nearly people are now adequately well educated most sketchy affiliate sites selling this way and while you can STILL make sales this manner, you won't bank the style y'all used to.

But with every downturn, there is an opportunity.

In that case, being the honest kid in the block and understanding how to write a product review where y'all are not afraid to exist disquisitional almost the product and take the reader's best interest in heed tin have a massive payoff and set you autonomously from all the crappy online reviews.

Nosotros accept been experimenting with that in the past 12 months with great success and generated thousands of dollars in affiliate earnings both on Authority Hacker AND Health Ambition.

We have cleared the board, forgotten everything nosotros knew about writing reviews and looked around to try and learn from the all-time. Nosotros realized not bad customer reviews rely on 2 simple things:

Trust with the author
Bridging features and benefits through real life examples

While we don't publish a ton of reviews (and nosotros clearly should release more), we have had peachy success with them earning 3 – 5 figures with multiple reviews in the by 12 months.

Here are some of our earnings generated Only with reviews.

In this post, we will be sharing the format we employ to write those reviews and earn groovy commissions on affiliate products.

How to Write a Product Review

Create product review summary box
Empathize with your readers
Identify who the product is for
Introduce the solution with the product
Explicate the relationship between product features and benefits through case studies
Offer social proof
Listing product alternatives
Use the right format for your reviews

Enjoy.

What you will learn

The eight steps on how to write a product review.
The psychological principles of persuasion that assist you sell more without looking salesy.
How preselling is stronger than selling.
How to format reviews for maximum efficiency.

The Summary Box

If you've read any of our reviews, you've probably noticed a brusque product summary at the very top of the page.

This summary box is one of the all-time converting sections on our page.

For example, the summary of our Buzzstream review accounts for nearly 30% of our sales. Same for some of the reviews on Health Appetite.

The summary box does two things:

Captures highly motivated buyers who are simply looking for a quick opinion earlier making a final purchase decision.
Summarizes the review and gives readers who are scrolling dorsum up the folio another CTA to click on.

An platonic summary should at least have the post-obit vi elements:

A curt sentence identifying the production and its intended use.
Product ratings under different headers. "Value for Coin", "Support", "Effectiveness", etc. are some common. Brand these visual past using icons.
A summary of the production's pros and cons. Important to throw in the cons otherwise your review will feel biased.
A summary of the review. Keep this limited to 1-2 paragraphs.
A CTA. Use actionable copy on the CTA text.
The product price, since many of your readers will decide to purchase or non based on this factor alone.

This specific box was built with the elements available out of the box with Thrive Content Builder, y'all should exist able to recreate it quite easily with it.

Empathize With Your Readers

For those who are still reading and are here to actually read your content, information technology's time to go personal to stand out from the competition.

Take you ever come beyond a review where the reviewer was more interested in rattling off the product'southward features than actually solving your issues?

Such reviews are a dime a dozen online, and normally do a miserable job of helping readers.

Sympathise that buyers read reviews not to see the features, they can practice that on the seller's website.

What they want is to learn whether the product can actually solve their problems.

They don't want to hear about all the absurd things the product tin can exercise; they want to see how the product performs in real life for someone in the aforementioned situation as them.

Therefore, the first pace in writing a good product review is to understand with your readers.

As information technology turns out, empathy is directly linked with your likability. This, in turn, affects how much people trust and follow your communication.

Empathy And Likability

In the volume Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, author Robert Cialdini says that likability is one of the six pillars of influence.

The thought backside this is simple: you lot are more liable to follow someone you already similar.

According to The Likeability Factor, how much you lot like someone is a function of three things:

Realness: Whether a person comes across every bit 'existent' and 'authentic'.
Friendliness: Whether a person has an open, friendly disposition.
Empathy: Whether the person can relate to you and your problems.

How To Use Empathy In Your Production Reviews

Follow these tactics for empathizing with your review readers and making yourself more likable:

Friendly voice: Use first-person voice with a coincidental, conversational style. You should come up across as a friend gently guiding the reader through his/her problems.
Share your problem: Earlier you even mention the product, talk about your problems and how the product helped solve information technology. Attempt telling a story about how your life was before and after y'all used the product.
Pressure the hurting: Ask rhetorical questions (such as "practice you experience you're wasting hours on social media?") that pull the reader in and make him silently sympathize with your situation.
Exist a real person: People sympathise more with a person than with a brand. Address the reader straight as "you" and use real pictures to draw the reader in.

Your objective in the first few paragraphs of whatever review should be to tell the reader that y'all're just an ordinary person like them, and that the review is your personal experience of using that product.

For an example, take a await at this review of Earn1k course from Ramit Sethi:

The reviewer conspicuously identifies that he's merely a "university student" stuck in a dead-end job. If you are in the market for Ramit'south class (which usually targets millennials), your eyes would instantly light up – this guy is just similar me!

Another reviewer had the aforementioned approach – he identifies his profession, says he was bored and wanted to brand something on the side.

This is a situation many people in the market for Ramit'due south course find themselves in as well. By stating this first thing in the mail, the reviewer manages to empathise with the reader.

Y'all are not a nobody in their optics anymore and the narrative makes people desire to know what happens in the end, keeping them on your page.

Place Who The Product Is For

This is something most reviewers miss – they write reviews for everyone, even if they aren't the correct fit for the production.

The result? Tons of tire kickers who waste your and their own time reading the review.

Therefore, the third step in writing the review should be to conspicuously identify the production's target market place.

This is quite straightforward – simply include a section in the review that explains who the product is for.

For example, our Buzzstream review states in no uncertain terms that this isn't a product for y'all if you send only a 100 or so emails a month.

This does two things:

It qualifies prospects. If someone isn't a good candidate for the product, he/she can simply leave at this point without wasting everyone's time.
It builds credibility. We identify a few free alternatives or tell unqualified people they should not buy the product. This tells readers that we aren't simply afterwards their money but desire them to get the all-time possible product for their needs. You tin can earn a lot of trust with that.

Introduce The Solution

By at present, the reader knows he has a problem and is searching for an answer and trusts you.

This is where you step in and introduce the solution.

You lot tin do this by giving your readers a cursory overview of the product. Show them what the production includes, what its capabilities are, and what results users can expect from it.

I like to practice it in a video because it makes me more relatable, puts my review on Youtube search which generates traffic on its own and gives a nice multimedia feel to the postal service.

Essentially, your job in this function is to pre-sell the production.

The Principle Of Pre-Selling

In sales, pre-selling is divers as the process of creating an environment that helps customers cull a product.

Past demonstrating the product'south value and answering buyer questions, you can go out such a favorable impression that people buy your product without fifty-fifty being pitched to.

Pre-selling is the process of creating an environment that helps customers cull a product, i.e. sales without selling

Which is to say, pre-sales is sales without the selling.

Pre-sales tactics are very effective in production introductions. It lowers your readers' guard and demonstrates the product's usefulness without the added force per unit area of making a purchase conclusion. Hither are two ways you can pre-sell the product:

Demonstrate value: Demonstrate how the production can solve issues by showing off your own results.
Brainwash: Answer questions and doubts readers might have near the product.

How To Introduce The Product

The best mode to introduce the product is to show off your results through screenshots and videos, and clear away common doubts they might have about the product.

For instance, in our Buzzstream review, we start off by talking about why nosotros don't take whatsoever link edifice product recommendations on our website (short answer: they're mostly crap).

Then nosotros talk about how Buzzstream is different – it'southward a human relationship building tool, not just a link edifice tool. Then we get people interested by posting a few relevant emails that resulted in a backlink:

This way, we've managed to tell the readers what the production is all about, and how information technology tin help solve their problems.

In our Thrive Leads review, we accomplish the same with a short production walkthrough video:

This demonstrates the product'due south value, and hooks them in for the rest of the review.

Moreover, it shows them I actually ain the products which pushes trust a trivial further.

Explicate The Relationship Between Features And Benefits Through Case Studies

A large part of writing a review is explaining the product's features and benefits. Almost reviewers (and vendors) merely list them out one by one.

The results from this approach, equally you might have guessed, are less than inspiring.

The correct way to explain products and features is to actually show how they assist solve issues. Y'all can do this by creating a case report inside the review. This accomplishes two things:

It shows how the product works in a real world setting.
It gives value to the reader, builds trust and they feel compelled to exercise something in return (buy from your link)

The second office – doing something to become something dorsum – is actually called the principle of reciprocity.

The Principle Of Reciprocity

Robert Cialdini Writer of Influence:

"We are human considering our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honored network of obligation"

Which is to say: if you do something for someone, they feel obligated to requite back. This is the principle of reciprocity in a nutshell.

We've seen this principle at play firsthand on Authority Hacker. We give away and then much content that we often go comments from readers request why we're doing this in the beginning identify.

That's non all – we've fifty-fifty received emails from readers request united states to share our affiliate links. People have read our reviews and got so much value from them that they feel like they owe u.s.a. a auction.

This is a powerful concept. Utilise it in your reviews and your conversion rates volition skyrocket.

How To Create High Value Product Case Studies

The purpose of a case written report inside a review is twofold:

To demonstrate the production's features
To help potential buyers picture themselves using the product and improving their lives doing so.

The best way to do this is to create a short tutorial that walks readers through a sample use instance of the product.

For example, in our Buzzstream review, we show readers how nosotros used the product to become backlinks for Wellness Ambition. Not only do we list out the steps nosotros followed, we also prove our results:

For your own reviews, follow these steps:

Place cadre features: These are the features that readers care about the most. Whether they decide to purchase the product or not will depend on how well these features really work.
Show core features in action: Apply a video or screenshot walkthrough to evidence how the product actually works. For inspiration, take a look at our Buzzstream video review.
Give value by explaining how to use the product: This is where you can give value and trigger the principle of reciprocity. Your aim should be to walk readers through a short tutorial explaining how to get real results from the product.

In our Buzzstream review, we offered readers a quick overview of the outreach procedure, and then showed them how to use Buzzstream for successful outreach.

Nosotros never tried to hard sell the production. Instead, we but focused on helping people with the outreach process. Selling Buzzstream was merely an added benefit.

This does not just work with software tools though, you could do the same with blenders by showcasing some smoothies yous have put together with information technology or showing a case study of how you practical the learnings of a grade you are reviewing.

Social proof is the third pillar of persuasion, and it can really set y'all autonomously from the dumb review sites using spun user-generated content.

According to Robert Cialdini, quoting results from the Asch conformity experiments, he shows that people are more likely to follow something that is already pop.

People are more probable to follow something that is already popular.

Cloudlare Review
WP Rocket Review

Equally you'll see below, you can use this fact to your advantage while writing reviews.

How to apply social proof in your reviews

Follow these steps to add social proof of the product's success to your reviews:

Add together reviews and quotes from other users: To show how others perceive your product, only add reviews and quotes from other users. You can hands find such reviews on sites similar Amazon, Clickbank, or speciality sites like GSMArena, etc.
Add together reviews from ability users: "Power users" are bloggers, reviewers and other recognizable online personalities. If they've already reviewed the product, apply their quotes in your review. This gives readers a nice balance betwixt what lay users and experts call back of the product (the same format used by MetaCritic and RottenTomatoes).
Incentivize comments: A large number of comments on a product shows that it is pop. You can get people to comment on the review by offer incentives through a contest. Check out our earlier post to see how to run a contest.
Go more social shares: Higher social shares = college popularity. Buy some ads on Facebook or Twitter to pump up the share count on your reviews. This subtly shows readers that the review is already popular.
Employ giveaways: Another tactic to get more social shares is to run a giveaway on the review page. This volition pump up the social activity as your social media followers jump in to accept the reward.

For example, in this review of the Earn1K course, Dave clearly mentions results from other reviewers:

This was a corking endeavour but something that works even ameliorate is to actually quote the other reviews. This way you both earn more than trust and avoid "review shopping" considering all the of import information of all the major reviews are on your page.

No need to become and read anything else until you make your decision almost the product and click the link on that page (your affiliate link) if the answer to "should I buy this?" is yes.

List Alternatives

We included listing alternatives as ane of our 17 well-nigh effective affiliate marketing tactics in 2015.

This holds particularly truthful for reviews where listing alternatives accomplish 2 objectives:

Increment sales: If people are not interested in the reviewed product, they might yet be interested in the alternatives. More importantly, it changes the question from should I purchase information technology to which 1 should I buy. This is a powerful change in frame that can accept a profound impact on sales.
Show impartiality: Past offering readers multiple alternatives, y'all subtly tell them that you aren't partial to whatsoever particular product.

List alternatives is a rather straightforward process. You can just include a department titled "Alternatives" or "Competitors" and list out candidates.

We did something similar in our Activecampaign review where we offer Convertkit as a decent alternative.

Same thing happens With our Ahrefs Review and KWFinder review.

Shane from Activegrowth goes a step further and offers an unabridged 'Do Not Buy' list, along with alternatives for each product.

While most people endeavour to shy away from doing that because they're afraid of not making a sales, remember that alternatives may also have affiliate programs so if you are playing smart you volition brand more than money doing this not less.

Utilize The Right Format

By now, y'all accept a powerful, persuasive review that gives tons of value to your readers. Merely before y'all can hit publish, you also need to format the review for maximum impact.

We have already established the power of formatting in our previous posts.

Follow these formatting guidelines in your review:

ane. Utilize Enough Of Pictures And Screenshots And User Generated Images

Pictures are crucial for creating cracking reviews, particularly if yous believe in the "bear witness, don't tell" philosophy.

Use them generously in your manufactures, but make sure that y'all only use real pictures, not stock images lifted from the product creator's website.

Try to aim for a 3-4:1 ratio betwixt pictures and images. That is, for every three-iv paragraphs, include an image.

This gives much needed visual flow to your review.

Sites like Trustedreviews.com utilise this tactic with great success and a study has shown that user generated images greatly improves conversions by a lot.

2. Divide Review Into Sub-Sections

Writing a keen review isn't enough; you as well accept to make sure that information technology is easy to navigate.

You can do this by breaking downwardly the review into separate subsections. Nosotros do this for most of our long posts.

Authority Hacker Post Navigation Example

Try to employ both headings and pictures to mark subsections.

I must admit I have skipped that ane for Authority Hacker and have had complains nearly information technology, then I will accept my ain advice and implement those soon!

3. Use Symbols And Icons

When list out features, benefits and ratings, utilise symbols and icons to add visual flair to the page.

It won't make a bad review slap-up, but it will definitely make your review easier on the optics, and faster to scan through. Apply a plugin such as Thrive Content Builder to make this process easier.

If you are using Thrive Content Builder like nosotros do here is how you lot can add together icons to your content and help increase it's readability:

1 – Go In Your WordPress Dashboard And Click On Icon Manager.

two – Proceed Icomoon.Io And Click On Icomoon App

three – Select The Icons You Want To Import On Your Website

4 – Once You Take Done Your Option, Click On "Generate Font" At The Bottom Right.

5 – Then Click Download

six – Take The Zip File You Simply Downloaded And Import It Back In The Icon Manager On Your Website

7 – Refresh The Page Yous Are Editing And Pick The Icon Element. This Time It Should Work!

iv. Offer Star Ratings

Star ratings or scores out of 5 or 10 are used in nigh every review. Your audience implicitly understands what they mean.

They know that iv/5 stars means an virtually great product, while a one/five is universally recognized as "don't buy" product.

You tin can either utilize star ratings:

Or you can employ a score

Both piece of work equally well. You lot can also add your star rating to your search results with the all in ane schema.org WordPress plugin.

5. Divide Comparisons Into Columns

If you're offering comparisons (say, a pros-cons list, or a characteristic list across ii products), it's useful to place them into carve up columns.

This is a simple, visual way to make a comparing.

Users tin can juxtapose two features/benefits side by side and better empathize the product and have been used past magazines forever, it's a classic visual code.

6. Utilise Multiple CTAs

Lastly, brand sure to use multiple CTAs throughout the review. You should have at most 3 CTA – one each at the top, middle and bottom of the post.

Utilise simple, value-driven text on the CTA. Don't write "buy now". Instead, apply something like "Try the [product name] free trial", or "Larn more about [product name].

Don't go beyond three and maybe a few links inside the content otherwise readers will retrieve that you're trying too hard to sell.

Brand sure that the CTA stands out on the page. Use a vivid, bold color that isn't used heavily elsewhere, and give it a big enough size to concenter attention.

I accept too noticed that animating the phone call to action and the telephone call to activeness alone increased the number of clicks on our affiliate links.

To Animate your CTA'due south with Thrive Content Architect follow the steps described below:

1 – First Select Your Button And Click On "Event Manager"

2 – In The New Window That Opened Click "Add Event"

3 – Then Select Trigger "Comes Into Viewport", Action "Blitheness" And Choice Your Favourite Animation For It.

On our own reviews, we use Thrive Content Builder to create all the above visual formats.

From CTAs to star ratings, it has everything you need to make highly readable, visually hit reviews.

Conclusion

Writing reviews isn't quite as easy every bit getting the specs and stringing together some thoughts. If you want your reviews to sell products (and rank well), you'll have to do some legwork.

Don't exist like one of those spammers who write imitation reviews and get banished from the SERPs every week.

Instead, offering real value to readers and they'll thank you by buying from your link.

Master the fine art of influence to create reviews that not only deliver value, just also sell products.

And lastly, brand sure to organize and format your review well — it'south the difference betwixt a review no one will read, and one that gets hundreds of shares.