How do Review Sites Make Money Online? I’ll Show You.

Ever landed on a review site and wondered how it actually makes money? That’s what I’m going to show you today. I’ll even show you how to make one 🙂

I’ve actually been engaged in making my own review sites for years and many of them have actually made money and still do today, including the following one. There’s actually a NUMBER of ways any page can monetize by simply reviewing some of the most popular products on the market.

The 3 keys to understanding how review sites make money:

1) Firstly, we can all agree that no matter what the subject (well the popular ones), there’s countless products on the market available.

Take fitness equipment for instance. You’re bound to find so many machines, supplements, juices, workout programs, you name it, that are available for people in this market.

Or how about any type of computer, phone, phone accessory, ect…, there’s just so many products.

I can write several books on all the products available and I doubt I’d even hit 1% of all the products available in this world and the beauty is that this list is growing, because companies and people are inventing and releasing new products, with the goal to solve problems.

2) Second, while there are countless products available, very few become extremely popular and viral. These are the ones which explode with sales and make the most money. I happen to have an example of such a thing, where a viral diet broke out in popularity and made me a ton of money, because I reviewed it on a site I had. It was just a 1 page website.

Read about that 1 page website case study here and how much I made.

3) Third, with the mass amounts of products available out there, a huge chunk of people who hear about it through marketing go online and look for REVIEWS of these things and find them on blogs like mine. 

In some cases, just landing on that site gives the owner a profit and if the visitor buys from that same page, that too earns the owner money, but we’ll get into details on all of that shortly…

The beauty of these 3 keys is that:

1) It’s never ending because products are constantly being released for countless markets, so a person who chooses to start a review site has a plethora of ideas on which product to choose to cover.

2) You can make some seriously good money if you are in this business and like I said I will be showing you how, but if you’re anxious, read about the Wealthy Affiliate program which teaches you how to establish blogs that review products to make money from them. They are the ones which taught me this.

Here are 5 ways review sites can make money:

There’s a bunch of options I will be citing, but the truth is, it won’t really cover ALL the options, I’ll just be showing you the most profitable types that I personally know work:

1) The page runs ads, and gets paid for each click.

Pages can choose to serve ads on themselves from companies who are ready to pay them for each click. Even Google itself runs a program called Adsense where they do this and yes, that means Google can pay you to run their ads.

This is a method that works better for pages that get a lot of visitors, so a good way to make this work would be to create as many product reviews as you can to attract the most amount of people.

More people landing on the page = more people potentially clicking the ads = more money made by the page owner.

Examples:

My drone site and my mud run site both have Adsense ads. So far, I made about $100+ from ads alone on the site (they also make money in other ways). Here is proof:

2) The page runs ads, but the ad company pays for every visitor.

This is actually a better way to make money because here you get paid for every single visitor that hits your page. Now Adsense won’t produce this type of opportunity, but places like Mediavine will. 

They are a company that pays page owners GOOD money for each visitor that lands on the page. The important quota one needs to meet in order to be eligible to work with Mediavine is to have a website that gets at least 25,000 visitors to their site, ORGANICALLY, meaning from search engines.  

I have friends who blog about products on their site that have Mediavine running ads on it that get paid $1,000’s every single month from it. The above link explains and shows the proof.

3) The page sells products as a middleman (affiliate).

Any site that sells products for another company, online is called an affiliate marketing site. Out of all the options I am showing you here, this is the one I personally practice most (This is where I earned most of my money from my review site from, about $800,000).

Here are some of my stats from this:

Affiliate marketing is an awesome business model if you know how to make it work and it really comes down to having a site that manages to get tons of visitors to it that need to buy something to solve a problem.

For example…

Suppose a blog goes over a fitness product that aims to get people six pack abs and the person who covers the blog, explains how they used the said product and got so and so results in so and so weeks, whilst showing pictures for proof and evidence that it works.

Throughout this blog post, that person places links to the same product so visitors can buy it too and if they do, the blog owner will make the commission.

That’s really one of the best ways to describe how the affiliate marketing process works and the other beauty of this option is that you as an affiliate can choose to promote any product you wish, in most cases, for free. It’s very freelance if you want to call it that.

The really hard part of this though is knowing the keys to getting the laser targeted visitors to your page, the ones which are most likely to buy that is.

4) The page sells it’s own services or products.

Many review sites like to attract visitors that are interested in a particular product, but then end up funneling those visitors to their own services.

For example:

If a page goes over fitness programs, and gets people interested in them on it, they can sell their own fitness product to that audience. 

5) A combo of the above things.

Generally speaking, combining different methods of monetization for a page is not a smart move because sometimes this ends up cannibalizing the profits of a page, but when one intelligently, it can work.

Let me give you an example…

One of the friends I told you about above who runs Mediavine ads on his site, ALSO practices affiliate marketing and he literally told me, doing this combination of things had NO NEGATIVE impact on sales, in fact the opposite happened. 

There’s a few core things you need to have in order for this to work…

How can you get in on this review style business? 5 things that are needed:

By this point in the article, you already know how review sites make money. And after seeing the options available, you’re likely thinking of trying the same thing and want to know what’s needed. Well it is:

1) The first thing you actually need is a blog.

Why? Because that is the place where the reviews you choose to write will be covered. 

2) The second thing you need is to choose a topic.

It is very much recommended that you choose a specific topic and cover the specific topic’s products that are available in that market, and those which you know a lot about. The best pages that cover products generally come from people who know a ton about what they are covering. 

3) The third thing you’ll need is to find a list of products to review.

Since they come out frequently, your goal is to spot the newest products in your market and cover them on your blog. My advice would be to bookmark popular pages that cover the products you also wish to cover and this will allow you to piggyback off the trending products that are selling hot. 

• If you’re in the internet marketing topic, I’d suggest Muncheye. There’s other places and blogs too, but that will be a great start.
• If you’re into fitness, pages like Beach Body and blogs that cover these topics are also great starting points.

Those are 2 examples, but you can see they can give a newbie blogger plenty of products to review.

This is why you need these 3 things:

Blogging about the most popular products is how you get your page out there, to be found by Google and then rewarding your blogging efforts by sending that page traffic.

From there, the 5 options of how to monetize from the products you’re covering comes into the picture!

4) The fourth thing is, you need to know how to actually write reviews.

The better you write, the more money you can make. I have a breakdown of how to write product reviews that sell on my other site that I linked to, which covers this.

5) The fifth thing is to figure out how to best monetize from the page.

To be honest, figuring this part out is the easiest, because you have so many options to choose from, and you can switch at any point (or combine ideas like I showed earlier), that it’s not much of a loss if you choose incorrectly, you can always switch it up and start earning more.

What does absolutely matter is that you get to blogging about the products to get the visitors, to make the money. 

Want a step-by-step plan that’ll teach you how to earn from review sites?

One of the best places to learn this art is from Wealthy Affiliate which actually helped me become a blogger who earns money from the reviews he writes and it will teach you the same things.

If you have any questions on how review pages make money or have some personal ideas you’d like to check on with me before you start, ask below :)!