Are You Allowed To Write A Review On A Product You Have Never Used Before?

Hey there,
You'll get tons of different opinions on this...

I would suggest that you never "lie" meaning don't say...I used this and it works great...if you haven't used it (which, it seems you wouldn't do since you're asking the question in the first place )

What you can do is take the stance of a newspaper reporter. You CAN gather other people's experiences and 'report' on them...either contacting them or giving a general report of what you've collected during your research of the product. You can go over the claims of the sales page and give your opinion about things.

You can write about whatever you want. You most certainly can see, with some degree of discernment, that we are not in dire need of make-believe stuff out there in cyberland. I really don't think the Internet Marketing police will come looking for you for writing some slightly over-zealous hype!

However, it may be a good idea to give potential customers some decent content. It's probably not a good idea to write a review on something you have no experience with, no knowledge of and no interest in. People can usually tell if it sounds like it's made-up or useless. And it probably won't get you great results.

With that being said, you can probably read a number of other reviews or articles on whatever subject it is that you want to review, and then write an article or two summarizing several of those reviews or summarizing several other articles. Just do it better!

It may not take too much reading for you to become something of an expert on the subject. People who benefit from what you tell them, based on what you've read, will thank you (maybe) when you help them.

Dave T

A review copy is always good to deliver a good review, but if you can't get a review copy, I always look for reviews on sites like amazon, yahoo answers and answerbag as well as forums. You usually can get a general idea of the quality of product.

If not read other reviews most of them will be obviously selling you on the product, but try to get the facts about the uses of the product and write a review based on that.

Thank you for this guys....

Do you guys always think writing a review for a product is better than writing

no review for it at all?

What do you mean, you "cannot get access" to the product? Why can't you buy it like anyone else?

Why would you want to? What could you possibly say about it?

Yes, writing a reporter style review based on facts works best. It may take time to find enough information on a product, and in some cases you won't, but it is the way to go from my experience.

Here is my two cents:
Email the product owner and ask for a review copy, but make sure you set up your blog or website so you can include in the email to let them know you are serious.
You can also go to their website and use the bulleted benefits on the sales page to write a review. However, make sure you are honest to say that you have not used the product, but that other people have given testimonials about it and when you say that you are not lying because those may be the testimonials that are on the website or you have read somewhere else. For example, there is a section here on this forum that you can find reviews of products that others have used and been gracious to comment on.
You can also ask questions on this forum or other niche forum about a product that you want to promote and ask if anyone has reviewed it personally. Be creative. People will help you.

Yes, you can review a product that you haven't personally used. To be quite fair, that's a lot more honest than some of the tactics that Internet Marketers use to promote products.

If you use the conduit method then almost certainly you'll be provided reviews of products that you haven't used (if only as comparisons to the primary product that you're recommending).

One way to do this, without being completely dishonest, is to use what I would call meta reviews - that is providing an overall summary of the views of other people that you have sourced elsewhere.

There are a lot of ways to do this without explicitly saying that you haven't reviewed the product. A couple of example phrasings include:
"People who have used this product think that ..."
"There is a consensus that ..."
etc

These meta reviews can have more value than your own opinion, because it is actually adding value to the review and collecting together the experience of many people from a variety of different sources on the Web.

Of course in the time that it takes to accurately find these reviews and collect the results you could almost have used the product itself.

Cool, interesting tips!

You could try writing in a way that subtly lets readers know you haven't tried it - like "I'd buy this if I had the money"

Hi,

Read this post by Admin. It's the best thing on your subject I've ever seen. Be sure to go to the page he links to in his original post.

http://www.warriorforum.com/war-room...ney-maker.html

George Wright

^ I get a "you do not have a permission" kind of error when I go to that link.

Choosing whether or not to review a product that you have no experience with is sort of a matter of conscience, not legality. For instance, on television you see ads in which a celebrity endorses a product that they are highly unlikely to have ever used. (Do all these rich, famous actresses really color their own hair with Clairol?)

The problem is, when you create a website (or, even better, a good list) a lot of your best customers are repeat customers. If you "highly recommend" a crap product, then you may sell a lot of that product then lose half your list. Just ask any IM'er that "strongly recommended" the 12 Month Millionaire System when it came out (which was total rubbish.) You lose a lot of credibility when you push junk products.

Writing a review or criticizing a product/service should only be done when you have tried that product or are closely associated with it. In both the cases you will have the proper information to disseminate it further to the audience.

People writing reviews for various articles/services just for few green bucks sometimes deviates the consumer from making proper decision and he/she ends up in making unprofitable decisions or sometimes dangerous decisions as well, if you have reviewed some medicare product.

So you must only review a product/article if you are authorized to do so.

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It's usually quite tough to decide whether such products, where the product owner hasn't communicated back with a trial or evaluation copy, should be promoted or not. It can be quite a gamble because you risk your own reputation if you promote a product that gets negative feedback later or anything worse.

I would say you make a judgement call. If the product seems reasonable and in your opinion would generate good customer sentiment as well as sell, and isn't scammy in any way, then promoting it without back-and-forth between yourself and the product owner should be safer to do.

Hope that helps~
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