Building A List With an Amazon Review Website

Yes - thousands of people have tried it. It doesn't work all that well for many people, and that's perhaps even one of the reasons why the overall success-rates in internet marketing are so low. It's a fundamental conflict in objectives for the traffic. Either you're primarily trying to build your list, or you're primarily trying to sell Amazon items "off the page". If you try to do both, you detract from each and may well end up with a low opt-in rate and a low conversion-rate, too. It's the worst of both worlds. Some people who try this even go on from that "unfortunate" result to draw the even-more-mistaken conclusion that list-building isn't very helpful for Amazon sales.

In my experience, the best customers are very often the ones who will opt in but are a little less likely to buy something "off the page" at their first visit. I earn much more by concentrating on those (it took me many months to work this out, across a range of different niches). I think the "key concept" (to the extent that there is one!) is that in order to attract and retain the best customers, you need a site that doesn't look "just like any other marketer's site".

I look at it completely differently.

The thing I try to avoid is distracting the visitors away from my opt-in.

I strongly suspect that looking at it "your way round", in the long run, as it relates to income prospects from the site, is chasing 20% of the potential income (the faster part) and the expense of the other 80% (the slower part).

I would.

I think that's an incomparably inferior idea, and that your testing will quickly prove that (as it has for so many others), if you test it carefully for yourself, using the same traffic-sources, etc.