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IDEA: Publish a blog or site of product reviews specific to a “niche” special interest audience.

I know, I know, there’s nothing groundbreaking or fresh about this idea. But my sense is that the typical consumer online can’t get enough of good feedback from real world users reviewing the exact product the consumer’s interested in.

My initial inclination would be to think big, even for a niche. There’s nothing like a large site with tons of user-contributed special interest reviews to get it bookmarked and revisited by its target audience. Throw in an incredibly wonderful dot com name, one so natural and easy to remember that it’ll bring in serendipitous surfers, and Grasshopper, you’d have a goldmine!

That takes a sizeable amount of work to get to critical mass, however, not to mention quite a bit of luck on the dot-com (unless you happen to stumble upon a fresh unsaturated niche).

Yeah, all that’d be nice, but now that I’m thinking about it, it doesn’t seem like you’d really need all that much to start drawing in traffic. No matter how few reviews you’ve got, if they’re meaty enough, one product per “page” and rich with specific “search keywords” (such as the product name), you may get each review page ranking high on the search engines (OK, Google), so consumers looking for specific reviews may very likely still find your stuff!

If I were going to do this, this would be my “architecture” game plan:

• Do the site in WordPress, or some other easy-to-use blogging platform or CMS (Content Management System). Me, I know WordPress and so do tons of other folks (no lack of support), so that’s what I’ll use.
  
• Create a post for every product, along with a canned description, easily picked up from the manufacturer. I’d do tons of these, trying to cover as much of what’s available for the niche, whether I have reviews yet or not. (Should go without saying that I’ll have the products organized by category and any other sensible way.) In effect, I’ll really end up with a directory or catalog of related products specific to the site’s special interest.
  
• At the end of each product post, I’ll invite people to post their reviews/feedback as “comments” at the bottom of the page. This way, all related content will appear on the same page (search engine keyword rich!).
  
• I’ll probably write a few reviews myself to get things started.

Ta da! Those are just the basics, but I think the resulting core’s sound enough for pretty good growth and income potential.

Monetizing It

Google AdSense’s a given.

This kind of site has a lot more income potential, however, with affiliate programs I think (assuming there are programs in your particular niche). No wonder: You’ll want to aff link each and every product to a merchant for purchases. Heck, aff link each to multiple merchants — let the consumer decide where s/he wants to shop.

You could actually take this a step further and provide price comparison data, but now you’re taking this out of the “easy to set up” arena. If you’re so inclined, knock yourself out, but I’ll stick with the basics described above when just starting out, thank you very much.

Don’t forget to aff link to eBay as well. They provide affiliate tools that’ll let you link to keyword search results pages, categories, and pretty much anywhere on their site you feel like linking to. Although eBay is currently on Commission Junction, I know they’re moving their aff program in-house. But that’s not up yet; not sure, but I think you could probably still sign up as an eBay affiliate through CJ in the meantime (besides, there are other programs on that network you could check out as well), and just move over to the in-house thing with the rest of us when the time comes.

Assuming you develop enough traffic, you could also try selling advertising impressions or inclusions. This is where basically companies pay to display their ads on your site — you know, the way they typically did things before the Internet — instead of by performance (e.g., per click). Actually, there are a number of Pay Per Impression (PPI) affiliate programs out there (making a mental note to explore this further in a separate future post) that you could tap.

The last possibility that comes to me only works when you have enough content (and people know you have enough content): a pay-membership site. Only members can read reviews. This doesn’t appeal to me in concept or dollars, but what the hey, maybe it does something for you. For a good, huge example (something I also happen to be a member of), Angie’s List comes to mind.

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