These review sites convert like crazy and using WordPress and a slick plugin by Dan Grossman make them pretty simple to setup. It’s not like a review site where you give your opinion about 3-5 similar products and create a Buy Now link for each one (which is also a high converting type of site), it’s quite a bit different. The reviews on these sites are actually from customers of the products (or services). The example given on the Review Site Plugin page is a review site for web hosting providers, but it can be for virtually anything. You can go very micro niche on these types of sites. You could have a review site for just Windows Hosting Providers for example or hotels in Windsor, Ontario, Canada as another viable example.

After you have decided on a product or service you need a theme. A one-column theme works best. The plugin includes customized themes with the download. They are customized for easy integration of each element of the review plugin. Additionally, the themes have built-in support for the hReview microformat! If you aren’t sure what that is, I’ll tell you this, it equates to loads more traffic from the search engines!

On the actual post page is where you will put the description of the product. In the comments area is where a past customer of the product leaves their reviews….or a customer that returns after purchasing it through your site, or in the case of the hotel site…booking a hotel room online.

The comments display like they normally would but the the ratings are integrated into the theme files. You decide before hand using the review plugin admin interface as to what you would like the customer to base the ratings on and what the maximum values are. It’s pretty flexible. The software will then calculate and display an average of the ratings. It will also determine by the ratings if it was a positive or negative review and add those up as well.

To get the ball rolling on the reviews, depending on the niche, there should be a forum for the company or service you are promoting. For example, if you have a hosting company reviews site, you might go to the LunarPages and the GoDaddy forums and ask customers to drop by and tell you what they think about their hosting package. You will get mixed reviews naturally. Do not filter out the bad ones. It’s important that the reviews are genuine. It will improve conversions if there are also bad reviews, believe me.

If you decide to set one of these up and run into any snags, leave a comment and I will try to lend a hand. If you like the hotel idea (and it works well) and you want to set one up for your city, I use TravelNow.com as the affiliate in case you are wondering (same company as Hotels.com). Good luck!

Take a look at some of the other features of the plugin here or download it here…. OR…. TRY THIS REVIEW THEME

More info: Create A Review Site Using WordPress

Do you use BANS or WordPress with phpBay? My answer… WordPress with phpBay 99% of the time.

Do you use posts or pages when using WordPress? My answer… Posts 100% of the time (think RSS)… plus there’s way less manual work, use the archives page for what it is meant for.

Where do you get the content? For some of the sites that I want to test or just set on auto-pilot I will use free, unique, automated content. With the automated content, sometimes I check each article before publishing and integrate the appropriate auctions into the posts. For some, the real auto-pilots, I will just insert some generic phpBay code into the post template file.

For 100% unique content (without the backlinks that are in the free automated content), I either look to DigitalPoint forums, TextBroker.com or write it myself. Then I will integrate the auctions in as I publish them.

What about comments?

Sometimes I use comments, sometimes I don’t. Depends on the niche and if it seems to go well with it. Plus, as you may know, monitoring comments can be a bit of a pain sometimes, so with the auto-pilot sites, I just turn them off. Also, if your post ranks for a certain keyword, then some say it may lose the ranking of that keyword if there ends up being several comments over time because the page becomes diluted. Even though that may be valid, on the sites that I consider the most important, the ones I pay the most attention to, I will leave comments on but with a twist…

The WordPress Review Plugin

There is this amazing plugin (I discussed it in the post: Create A Review Site Using WordPress) that can be integrated very well with the sites that you build following the N1Way guide. With this plugin, previous customers of the product that you are promoting, can leave a review and a rating. The plugin takes over the comments in your blog to gather this data. It will also calculate averages, etc. and show Amazon-style ratings on the product posts. It will even put in the necessary microtags that the search engines can read when trying to review data for certain queries! If you aren’t sure what I mean, look up hReview, more search engines are looking at this data and showing preference to sites that implement it. With the WP Review plugin, the microtags are all automatically integrated.

You could probably get fancy with custom fields and some changes to your template file to include auctions below the comments as well. A bit advanced. If enough people ask I will post on how to do it.

More info: Review Site With eBay Auctions And Customer Reviews