Review sites still work?

With only two exceptions, I gave up review sites a long time ago.

My feeling about them is that although they can work, to some extent, they're not what they were at all, and other methods are much better. I don't deny that it's possible to earn some money from them, of course (and perhaps especially with search engine traffic, in which I have very little interest, myself, because that's always my very worst-converting traffic source).

I'm biased, probably. I admit that I instinctively think of review sites as pretty poor marketing, overall. (For what it's worth, if anything, many of my customers say they feel that, as well).

For myself, I prefer to attract to my sites highly targeted traffic comprising people who first visit because they already like what I have to say, having originally seen some of it elsewhere, wherever it was published in front of pre-targeted audiences known to be receptive and responsive. Those are people who will buy from/through me. This is how I do that.

(The two exceptions I mentioned are a couple of Amazon sites on which I promote a bewildering array of books, CD's and low-ish priced "gifts". I keep these sites going only because of Amazon's unusual affiliate-payment methods, of which the "total number of items sold in a month" is a significant component of one's pay. In other words, I'm doing it not for the tiny commissions on all those low-priced items but to boost my sales volume so that I earn much higher commission on the more "serious sales" I make - through other means - at Amazon each month. I have other, non-SEO-based ways of attracting plenty of traffic to those sites, and they're the sort of sites from which almost anyone can buy something. It's quite a nuisance to have to do, but one of my VA's now more or less takes care of them for me. A peculiar system, but it actually works very well for me. It could certainly be argued that those two sites are "review sites", and I can't therefore claim that I don't use review sites!)

Depends which niche I think would be the short answer.

i still use review sites, its all about keywords and the niche that you're in. remember to attract targeted traffic and you'll see some progress.

They still work/convert if you can get them to rank. That's what's getting more difficult, in my experience anyway.

I dont do review sites, but i often do product reviews to my email list. I do it maybe once a month, and the response rate and orders from them continue to be good. I dont want to "abuse" the technique, so i make it scarce and a "once every so often" kind of thing.

Yeah, review sites still very much work. If you plan to build a larger, niche site with multiple products and articles that you plan to stay in for a long time because you, yourself, are part of the niche, and you have a passion for it, doing social stuff should be a part of it. With that said, you can still use social media with smaller, niche sites as well. If you plan to build a larger, niche site, you should also build a list.

Joey

I used to average $300 / day from a review site that I made less than a year ago. You can visit it at Parxy.com. Unfortunately it got hit by Panda hard. Once you're hit by Panda there's no going back, so while review sites can work, they are risky and you must know how to SEO them properly. I also recommend that you use an authority domain instead of starting from scratch. Authority sites can bring a lot of money, but you must be really careful with your content. Other people will also try to negative SEO your site (it happens a lot for review sites where there's so much money at stake).

I was starting to experiment building e-mail lists based on product review niches. That was going well. I would be probably making $500 + / day now from that site alone if I hadn't been hit by Panda, but that's life and now I focus on other methods to generate traffic that don't rely on Google.

Yeah the reason I want to target social side of things first is that I can get traffic right away, compared to search witch could take a while to rank anyways. I have been doing some research too about how Google works these days.

I read a few things that seem to make a lot of sense, and they were basically the idea that if you build up your social network first and become popular threw that method Google will see more value in your website and help give you a good boost in your ranks.

I just don't know if review site will convert well with the social sites, and thats a problem as social sites will be one of my main traffic sources.