How Do I Get Products For FREE to Review On My Blog?

Frankly, few people know as much about this subject as Robb does – as her demonstrated in his recent interview for this site.

I think you will agree, Robb has done an awesome job, and just for the record, he is not paying me or rewarding me in any way for featuring him here. Armed with the information Robb has supplied I am confident a good number of you are going to set up some amazing review blogs – gee, I am even considering it myself

If you want to learn more about creating a review blog and getting products for FREE to review on your site, then check out Robb’s eBook, Ramped Blogging!

Enjoy the interview – I look forward to your comments.

Best Wishes

Michael

How To Get Products For FREE To Review On Your Blog

An article by: Robb Sutton

Robb Sutton

With the recent fire from the FTC in the United States requiring full disclosures from bloggers on their relationships with firms in regards to product reviews – product reviewing on blogs has gotten its 5 minutes of fame. The thing is that in reality, legitimate product reviewing on blogs and other media outlets has been going on since the beginning, and they can be a tremendous source of traffic, subscribers and revenue for your blog.

If you take a minute and scour your favorite blogs on the web, you will find a very high percentage of those blogs review a product related to their niche periodically. As you look around, you might find that your favorite blogs are reviewing product a lot more than you originally thought! Before we jump into the how…let’s look at the why on both sides of the fence.

Why Do Bloggers Review Products On Their Blogs?

As a blogger, this is an easy question for you to answer, but lets break it down to the basics. Why do you want to post product reviews on your blog?

Useful, Quality Blog Content - Product reviews are a source of quality content for your blog. Your readers want to know what you think about products and services that relate to your niche. Your blog is their resource for topic related information, and – by providing this resource – you can assist your readers by providing useful information that impacts buying decisions. By offering product reviews on your blog, you are expanding the resourcefulness of your content for your readers.

Search Engine Gold – For quite sometime now, I have been calling product reviews search engine gold for a reason. Properly written product reviews can bring a massive amount of new visitors to your blog. By writing product reviews, you are targeting long and short tail keyword strings that have very low competition. Over time, you will create a massive library of content that is extremely search engine friendly. On top of that, product reviews are attractive link bait as other bloggers, forum users and general internet emailers will link to your review articles as a resource for information.

Increased Blog Revenue – Product reviews are still the number one way to increase affiliate revenue on blogs. Want to increase your affiliate sales outside of the pennies you are generating from banner ad placement? Review that product on your site and include your affiliate link at the bottom of your review to increase conversions. Little tip: Honest reviews that outline both the good and bad on a product convert at a much higher rate than glorified advertisements.

Why Do Companies Give Bloggers Product To Review?

Now we know why you want to review product on your blog, but why do manufactures, firms and service providers actually want to give you their product to review for nothing (or even for a fee!)?

Cheap, Long Lasting Advertising and Promotion – Once a newspaper or magazine hits the newsstand, you see the ads and then throw that mag away until the next issue comes out. That advertisement is only good until the next issue. With the web, your product review stays on your blog unless you decide to shut it down. The company that provides you with the review product get the increased benefit of long term promotion by giving you something to review on your blog. Future readers will find the article in the archives, search engine users will find your review in the results and you will refer back to your product reviews over time. For the company in question, you – as the blogger – provide more value with a product review over the larger media competition.

Did I Mention Cheap? – What many bloggers fail to realize is the true cost of the review product provided to the blogger. For the company involved, their true manufacturing cost is the cost to them. What did it cost the company to product the product for review? Not nearly what it costs off the shelf for the typically retail buyer. When you convert this to software and services, all of their costs are in the back end development, so they are even more willing to work with bloggers to get the word out because the true cost is an email!

Social Media Is Changing The Retail Environment - If someone would have told you 10 years ago that Amazon.com would be the largest book retailer in the world and the iTunes music store would be the largest music retailer in the world, would you have believed them? The online world has completely changed how people shop and make purchasing decisions. Firms, companies and service providers know this and they want to tap into your audience. Free review product is their ticket to the big show that converts into increased sales.

How Do I Get Free Product To Review On My Blog?

Unless you are an internet hot shot who already has a huge amount of credibility online, you are going to have to cold call, email and fax your perspective review product companies. For many bloggers, this can be a nerve racking road as they have little experience in the corporate sales and marketing world. Here are a couple of tips to get you going…

Research Before Contacting - If you are just starting out in review blogging, do some research and see which companies in your niche will be receptive to giving out free product for review purposes. Check out other blogs in your niche and look for patterns. Is there one or two companies that seem to have reviews on every site? Contact those companies first with your idea and try to look for one of their products that is not well represented online (not a lot of reviews). This will be a great starting point to get things rolling and increase your chances of success on the first go ’round.

Contact Perspective Companies By Email – Email rules the world at this point in time, so you are going to have to research the company and find a valid email address. Many times, this email address will go to a default inbox, so it is essential that you cut the fluff at the beginning of the email and get straight to the point to insure it gets on the right computer screen. When contacting companies about review product, 100% honesty about traffic, subscribers and expectations is essential to success. With a little research, web savvy companies are going to be able to tell if you are stretching the truth and your credibility is shot. Even small blogs can get a ton of review product if they are creative and stick to the honest truth.

Do Not Limit Yourself To Email - Especially with larger companies, your email can get trashed without even being read. If the companies website lists contact information for sales and marketing professionals within the firm, contact those specific people via fax or snail mail with what you would like to accomplish on your blog. Most bloggers are not doing this and it will show your dedication to targeted results.

Stay In Contact – Once you have reached an agreement, stay in contact with updates. Send an email when you receive the product, when you finish the review process, once the review is posted and a follow up email with educated results. It is your job as the blogger to keep them informed, so take that part of your job seriously.

Reviewing Tips That Equal Affiliate Conversions

There is a misconception among bloggers and other review naysayers that there are glorified advertisements on the web to convert into sales even when the product is terrible. The truth…those glorified advertisement convert at a rate that is much lower than an honest review from a blogger. As a blogger, the credibility of your content is everything. New and old readers are going to absorb your content and present their own educated opinions based upon how you presented the facts. If you throw up a review that is blatantly positive in an attempt to increase revenue on your blog, the reader is going to see straight through it and leave your site (without clicking your affiliate link).

The #1 best way to increase affiliate sales is to be completely honest and fact based in your reviewing.

Spell Out The Perfect Consumer For The Product In Question – A perfect way to convert visitors into affiliate income is to spell out exactly who you think the product would be perfect for! Is there a certain group in your niche that would greatly benefit from that product while another might not see any benefit? Lay that out for them. Your readers want to know if that product will work to fill their needs…so tell them!

Show The Good And Bad - There is no such thing as a perfect product. By specifically stating the good and bad points, you are showing that there is also room for improvement. The side affect to this is that companies eat this information up as constructive feedback to make their product better in future revisions. By stating what you think the high and low points are…you are adding value to your review process.

Keep Things Fact Based – Your opinion is your opinion, but it needs to be based off of fact. If you throw up a review that is a bunch of opinion with no reason why…you are going to have a difficult time with review blogging. Every one of your opinions on the product need to be backed up with facts.

Review Blogging – The Big Picture

Review blogging is a great resource to companies within a niche, the blogger and the readers when done correctly. As with most things in life, when you stay honest and work hard at completing a task, good things result. The reason for the FTC disclosure regulations is from black hat techniques that are completely monetary focused by questionable internet marketers. As a blogger, you should want to continue to provide valuable resources for your readers and your niche. By providing 100% honest product reviews, you are achieving just that.

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A Footnote By Michael:

If you have not already done so then you should check out the recent announcement by the FTC in the USA that Amateur Bloggers must Disclose Freebies when doing a review or be fined (Actually, there is much more to it than this one point)

I know many of you are thinking, well I am not in USA, so this does not apply to me. My view is that is is good practice to have Full Disclosure in any case no matter where up are located.

Here is helpful link that goes into more details:
FTC Tells Amateur Bloggers to Disclose Freebies or Be Fined

I should also here do my usual Legal and Financial disclaimer – namely, I am not qualified to provide such legal or financial advice, anything you read here is merely discussion, you must do your own due diligence before making a decision.

In this interview Robb and I will cover just how he was able to get so much great FREE stuff (some bikes are worth over $5,000!) and how you can to.

Interview Transcript:

Like I just said, you have nearly got $100, 000 worth of review products. Would you like to go over with us how you began to approach companies to get products to review?

Robb: Most contact is through email, obviously. When I go through certain companies looking for different products to review, I take a look at their websites and see who that first initial contact could be through email.

I then send out a… Basically I blast out not a form email but a personalized email towards the company showing them that I know what their product is, if I have used it in the past, and what I would like to do with their product on my site.

Luckily, in the beginning I had some initial relationships with people in the industry that were able to help me get going. But for the most part it is cold calling at this point, or they have, at this point, contacted me to see if I want to review their products on my site. So it is growing nicely and it is getting easier by the day.

Before Robb Started Blogging

I was talking to you earlier and you told me that you started about a year and a half ago.  This is a crazy amount of money to be able to get in such a short amount of time; $100, 000 worth of products to review. How much of that do you actually get to keep? Do you have to send it back?

Robb: At this point we are right at about the $50, 000 mark on being able to keep it, which is pretty crazy. If you walk into my garage it is like a toy store.

A lot of the bikes that get up into the pretty expensive range are demo bikes that have to be sent back. But most of the components, several of the bikes, and a multitude of electronics and that kind of stuff all get to be kept after the review is complete.

Were you blogging much before you started this blog review site?

Robb: Actually none.

So you just jumped straight into this and…?

Robb: At first.

Wow. That is pretty impressive. Where did you find out how to blog? Were there any courses or books that you read? What would you recommend for anyone new starting off to learn what you had to learn?

Robb: Well originally I started off like probably most people do with a blogger format. And after about four posts I knew that wasn’t going to do it because I wasn’t able to customize it enough.

So I started reading sites like problogger.net, Yaro’s entrepreneursjourney.com; all the big guys that everyone already knows about. Luckily, they have a lot of really good content that is all buried in the site. So I just spent hours and hours reading.

After about three to four months worth of blogging I had seen pretty good success, actually, from what I was considering. And I decided to join Yaro’s Blog Mastermind course to just fine tune what I was doing.

Luckily, after going through the course I was pretty surprised. I was doing a lot of things right, but I was also hurting myself in a lot of ways as well. So that really fine tuned my margin of error. And after I cleaned up some things, got some different content up, things really started to grow.

Can anyone just start asking for products to review like you did, or would you recommend you start your blog and build up a bit? What is your advice on that?

Robb: I would definitely build up just a little bit. It is hard to ask someone to review their product if they go to your site and they don’t see any product reviews. So normally I tell people to review everything you can get your hands on. If you are passionate about what you are reviewing, you should have some stuff lying around, or at least your friends should.

So what I started doing was just reviewing everything I owned, everything my friends owned, and built up basically a little bit of a database of reviews on my blog, about 20 to 30, so that I had a track record to go off of when I approached companies for their review product.

I was able to point to search engine results, point to certain reviews, comments left on my site, and that kind of stuff. So if you build up your own resume it definitely helps during the process.

So it is great that you have got all these free products, but what is the point if you are not going to make money from it? So how do you turn these reviews into profits?

Robb: Well one, review products or reviews on blogs are very search engine friendly. When people are searching for something on the web, they generally go to Google or somewhere else, type in the product name review. So you can convert that traffic alone through advertising and several other conventional blog avenues.

But what I found is really the affiliate sales through product reviews is probably the most profitable from a product review blog post standpoint. For just about every single product out there, there are affiliate programs that are either online retailers or directly through the company.

So if you write an honest review that tells the good and the bad of the product, you normally can convert that into sales right at the end of the review, even if for a lot of online retailers it is only 5%. If you are talking about a $1, 000 product at 5%, you can see that adds up pretty quickly.

Robb's Garage Now That He's Got A Review Blog

Robb: It is affiliate, direct advertising, and you can sell the product also if you are complete.

Not many bloggers actually know you can get products to review for their blogs. So does this give you a huge advantage over your competition? And if so, how would you drive traffic to these reviews and let people know about them?

Robb: Absolutely. I think there is a misconception out there that the free product for review is limited to big publications that have a lot of money backing. What companies are starting to realize now more than ever is that the concentrated audience you have as a blogger is exactly what they are looking for.

Lead generation from companies these days is extremely expensive. So for the price of one product, they can reach your target audience that is looking to purchase things in that niche.

And what a lot of people also don’t realize is that it is not the retail price that they are counting. It is the cost to the manufacturer. So there actual cost to give you, say, a $1, 000 product is probably only about $500 or $600 max.

So once you realize that you are really able to play off of that and provide a real worth to the company that is about to give you something to review.

It also takes a little bit of time and effort on your part. I don’t think a lot of people out there really want to take it seriously. They have this idea in their head. They love to get free stuff, but they don’t technically want to put the work into it.

So the people that actually want to put the work into it and show that they are serious have a pretty easy time getting in free stuff to review.

So it is clear you have got a great passion for biking. Do you think your blog would be anywhere near successful if you didn’t have this passion for biking?

Robb: Oh, absolutely not. I probably would have given up six months ago.

The thing about blogging is you have got to do it everyday, and you have got to write, and write, and write. And if you are not passionate about it you are eventually just going to fizzle out because why are you doing it then?

Most of blogging, the first six months of the year, you are not making much, so you have got to have something to keep you going through the growing times. And the only thing that keeps you going is enjoying what you are doing.

So you have mentioned that you have got to blog pretty much everyday. Do you ever get blogger’s block where you can’t write anymore? How would you overcome this?

Robb: Every now and then. Sometimes you brain just locks up and you are like, “Wow. I have got to put something up, ” and you can’t seem to think of anything!

Whenever I do that, I really just imagine myself in the situation that I am blogging about. With mountain biking, it is real easy to think of last weekend when I was out riding. Or, I just get out and ride.

Interacting with your subject matter is probably the easiest way to come up with topics. If you are blogging about blogging, you blog, and then that comes up with ideas. Or if you are blogging about gardening, you go out and plant a flower. I don’t know.

You know, it jumpstarts your brain and it gets you thinking inside your subject matter instead of on the outside just trying to write an article.

So you actually wrote an e-book on exactly how you have managed to get all these free products for review. Do you want to share with us just a bit about this e-book and what we can expect to learn from it?

Robb: Yeah. The e-book is Ramped Reviews. It actually happened on accident. After about eight months of blogging with the mountain biking site, I started getting a lot of questions from other bloggers on how I got in on this free product to review.

And when I started researching around online I saw that there really wasn’t a good resource to show you how to build a review blog. So I just filled that need. My background in corporate America helped me write an e-book like this, because I had actually been on the other end of the spectrum.

I have had people call me asking for my stuff I used to sell for review. So I took that process step by step from day one all the way to the end on how to start a review blog, how to write a review, how to contact companies, and what to do after they have given your product a review.

There is a lot of that back and forth conversation that I don’t think a lot of bloggers out there have had before. A lot of them come from Internet backgrounds but not business to business relations. It is basically everything you need to know about review blogging.

So you have mentioned how you get the product, and you have mentioned that you need to write review on that product. But how do you write the review so it actually makes you money, because you said you have to promote product, but it is important to write in a style that will actually sell?

Robb: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. The glorified advertisement no longer works, especially in the blogging world. If every review you put up is how great the thing is just because you are trying to convert sales, you are not going to convert any.

People have become really skeptical of reviews that seem like it is too good to be true. So as long as you stay completely honest with what you are doing, those convert very well into sales. It really just boils down to honesty is the best measure.

So pretty much what you are saying is nothing is perfect and you have to point out what is good and what is bad.

Robb: Yeah. And it is also good to tell the readers who is the perfect person for this product. Kind of spell out, “Look. If you do this, this, and this, this is probably for you. If you do this and this, it probably isn’t.” Really, pinpointing your lead is basically the best way I could put it.

At the beginning of the interview you mentioned you were doing some things right, but you were also doing quite a few things wrong. So if you could just jump in a time machine and go back to when you started, what were those things you did wrong and what would you do differently?

Robb: I am paying for some of those right now. In the next 60 days we are going to fix some things. One of the biggest things that I have come across is that when I picked the URL, MTBtrailreview.com, it had a lot of meaning for what was going to be a user submitted site. But it was hard to remember. And at that time I really didn’t think about it.

So if I could jump back, I would have picked something a lot easier to remember that I could tell people as far as, “You can get to my site by going here.” When you say mtvtrailreview.com people get like, “What? I need to write that down.”

So a URL that is related to your subject matter that is easy to remember would be the first step. Try not to get too complicated. The other thing would be… I am pretty happy with the way I did a lot of things. But organization from the beginning is a big thing also; categories, tags.

I had to go back later and fix a lot of that stuff, because I made way too many categories and was using way too many tags. So there was a lot of wasted time in cleaning up old posts that could have been avoided if I would have stayed more organized from the beginning.

And really, that comes down to having a clear game plan and not just winging it. If you sit down and really plan out what you want to do at the very beginning, you can get over a lot of headaches in the future.

Earlier in the interview you also mentioned about SEO and making sure people could find you on Google for each review. Obviously this is very important to you, so would you like to just quickly share a couple tips for writing, on how to write for the search engines to make sure people can find you?

Robb: Yeah, definitely. And this is actually a funny subject, because I emailed a manufacturer of a bike last week and I told him to search for one of his bikes, and I popped up in the number one ranking above him. He got a good laugh out of that.

But the biggest thing I found is title selection is incredibly important. When you go to pick your title for your post, it needs to have all the necessary elements of a product review. If your model year is very specific, you need to have model year, make, model, and the word review.

Robb Doing What He Does Best.... (Nope, not blogging.... Mountain Biking ;D)

I see a lot of review bloggers try to get really creative with their titles, which looks great when you are looking in your RSS reader. But when Google is searching for relevant content related to that product, it needs to be able to find it quickly and easily.

So by having a very specific title, “Widget Review 2008″, or something like that, it is very good for search engine results. I have also found that as many pictures and as many multimedia objects as you can is also a good thing.

Labeling all your pictures correctly, from the file name, to the alternate text, to any captions helps your keyword density. If you are going to use title tags, which most people do, H2, H3′s, make sure you have the product name in each one of those.

Basically, you want to spread the product name throughout the post as much as possible without sounding like you are just trying to repeat the product name over and over again. You are writing for the reader and you will always be writing for the reader.

But there are certain ways that you can tweak that article, so that Google and other search engines see that as a relevant topic for their readers that are searching.

I would probably say the title, title tags, doing images, and other multimedia correctly is probably the biggest.

Search engines obviously bring you quite a lot of traffic. Is there anything else you do to drive traffic, anything else you would recommend to other review blogs?

Robb: Yeah. Luckily, since I was already so embedded in the industry, I was a member of several different forum sites that are pretty large. So once I started, especially in the early days of starting the blog, I would put the link to my blog in the forum signature. If something came up that I thought people would find interesting, I started a thread on that article.

The key there was is that I wasn’t just at that forum to promote my blog. I was actually integrated in the community, so it wasn’t looked at as spam. You run a risk with forums and they are very sensitive to spam.

So if you just get on there and you have only got five posts, and all of a sudden you are promoting your stuff, you are just going to get laughed right out of the forum site. You really need to be an integrated part of that forum before you start pushing your own stuff.

I also partnered with the largest mountain biking forum in the world in helping them star their product review section of their site. So I was able to promote my blog through my reviews that I wrote for them as well, and that helped out a lot.

Quick Fire Questions:

The first one is what is the best advice you have ever been given?

Robb: Never give up.

What do you like least about the Internet?

Robb: People that like to put you down just because they can’t get what they have got going; negative comments, that kind of stuff from anonymous people who would rather not say their name but have nothing wrong with saying something negative.

Michael: Oh, yeah. I get that pretty much every day of the week.

Robb: Exactly. You get immune to it, but the first ones sting.

Michael: Yeah. Definitely the first few times you are just sort of sucker punch. You just want to take a few minutes out. It can affect you but you have just got to look past it and get used to it.

Robb: Normally if someone is saying something negative, you are doing something right.

Michael: Yeah. Exactly. All publicity is good publicity they say. When you do something wrong and people pick up on it, it is not always a bad thing.

Robb: Exactly.

What do you like most about the Internet then?

Robb: The social media aspect of it. I have met a lot of people through my websites and that kind of stuff. I have got friends all over the world now where 10 years ago that wouldn’t have been possible.

Who do you look up to most online? Who is your role model for your business?

Robb: That would probably be split between Darren and Yaro. Darren just topped 300, 000 subscribers on his digital photography blog, and that in itself is amazing. That and Yaro’s ability to create member sites and really live that dot com lifestyle that everyone talks about is a pretty cool deal.

I know there are probably a lot of people that probably go to them as their go to, but after dealing with them on a professional level and personal level, they are both great guys.

Is there anything you want to share with us before we end this interview? Anything personal, business, perhaps a biking event?

Robb: The biggest thing I always just try to remember is that the only thing that stands between you and success is yourself. A lot of people give up way too early. Just when it gets the hardest is when you are about to make it, so you have just got to keep pushing through. If you know you have a good idea, just stick with it.

To check out and buy Robb’s eBook showing you how he got given $100,000′s worth of FREE stuff from companys to review on his blog, click here. You can also check out Robb’s mountain bike review blog by clicking here!