Review Style Presell - Use Negatives to Increase Sales...

I completely agree.

If a "review" is nothing but raving about the product with an affiliate link attached you're going to lose trust.

I've written probably thousands of product reviews, and depending on the niche I'm targeting almost always use a few negatives.

"You can learn to play guitar over a weekend, but you WILL have to put in a few hours playing along with the lessons...."

Things like that. Solid advice though.

Hi Scott, I know that when I am reading reviews on products that I always like to know what any of the (perceived) negatives are. Especially if there is a need to already have purchased a precurser product or if some type of product knowledge is required beforehand. There is nothing worse than buying something based on a great review and then finding out after the purchase that I need to have a phD in "whatever" to use the product.

Hope this made sense. I quess this is not so much needing to know the negatives as much as what use the average person can expect to get from their purchase.

Cheers,

It's okay to have one or two negative comments in the review. Same thing goes to rating if you have any. This is for the purpose of adding credibility to the entire site.

Fairuz Talib

It's not really a trick, just a more balanced and honest review. Almost any product has some negatives, at least for some customers (such as "if you're just starting, this product may be too advanced for you").

Yep, you have to point out what a product lacks.

A good way to do this without trashing the product is to point out what you would have to give up to fix this negative. Like low price, or ease of use.

So give the negative and then take it away...

If you use a negative, followed directly with a positive, it will increase the value of the positive a great deal.

"Now I must admit that it took more than 3 days to clear my acne, it took about 9 days. But I am absolutly thrilled to finally be able to look at myself in the mirror again."

"I did have to spend a little more than $X like they claime on their website, it was closer to $X, but at the end of the day, I am still saving more than $X per month and I am more than satisfied"

Also,

If you are going to be running a review style page, do yourself a favour and actually buy the product first and do a proper review. Most of the affiliates out there either copy the review from someone else (my reviews get ripped off all the time), or they suck thumb for the info (these are the guys with 1 or 2 paragraphs per product with their aff links - they are also they guys who dissapear in no time flat, probably due to a low QS :-) Ethical issues aside, this is just the wrong approach. Put some work into your review pages. Provide some real VALUE and you are sure to make more sales.

Remember that those clicks you see in your adwords account are real people visiting your pages (in most cases). If you don't give them a real reason to buy through your aff link (ie VALUE - this can be in the form of a good and honnest rieview) they will go elsewhere.

Another tip:

If I run a rieview style page that is up against a lot of competing review style pages for my keywords (using Adwords), I will look at what most of them choose as their #1 Product. I will then make that my #2, mention that most people make it their #1 (a lot of searchers will go to a number of these pages) and provide strong FACTUAL reasons why my #1 is better. Going against the trend can work wonders in some cases.

AffiliatePPC

Everything has some negatives to it

I was reading some Joe Sugarman copywriting techniques, and he always recommended on putting the negatives at the beginning

Ed