Step 5: Upload to your website
Lesson 11
IMPORTANT!
This course has been retired and is now available for free. HOWEVER, be aware that it is outdated and therefore some of the information may no longer be valid or may be even be detrimental to your online success. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Now you are ready to add your review to your website. Just be aware that the actual structure of the website really doesn’t matter too much.
So you can go with one of the following options when deciding on how you want to promote these Amazon products:
1. Create a website based on a particular niche…eg. Gardening website, baby blog, fishing blog, cordless drill review site, home improvement site
2. Create a website that covers a wide range of niches…eg. Gift site, shopping blog or portal.
3. Use a website or blog that you already have set up… you will probably want to choose products that in some way match your sites topic.
4. Create a Hubpage, Squidoo page etc…just ensure that they allow affiliate links. (Not recommended however as you have limited control and they change their rules constantly – go with your own site wherever possible).
5. Create a free blog using Blogger or WordPress.com – (Again, not recommended as you have limited control. Only use if you can’t afford to create your own website or blog).
Any of these will work…we have used all five methods in the past. With our method it is all about the pages not the actual structure of the website. Remember that Google ranks pages not websites. Each page on the internet is given its own ranking by Google so you don’t need to worry so much about the actual website itself.
And there is no need to create a separate website for each individual product you find in Amazon. It can work but what can happen is a product no longer becomes available for some reason and you have a website that is basically useless.
Our preference, out of the five options above, is to use a self-hosted WordPress blog (ie. not the free WordPress blogs). For us it is the simplest method and it has so many more options over the other methods.
When adding the product reviews to our blogs we don’t really do anything particularly special. However, what we do differently is create Pages rather than Posts. Why?…mostly because it gives us the ability to remove the sidebar. The reason we do this is that it reduces the amount of distractions for the reader. We want them to solely focus on the review and not be distracted by the links in the sidebar. Removing the sidebar creates a full page review but still includes our normal header.
However, not all WordPress templates allow you to remove the sidebar on individual pages. We use the Flexsqueeze theme because we can easily remove the sidebar. I am sure there are other templates that do the same thing but you will need to search around a bit to find them.
But honestly, don’t fret over it if you can’t. This is not going to make or break you so if you have to leave the sidebar in your theme then that’s okay. If that’s the case then you won’t need to create Pages – you can stick with creating Posts.
NOTE: The only problem we find with adding a Page instead of a Post is that the Page is added to the navigation menu of your blog which you don’t really want especially if you are going to be adding lots of review pages. To prevent this from happening just download a free plugin called Exclude Pages. This plugin places a checkbox on the Add or Edit Page in WordPress to enable you to exclude that particular page from showing up in the navigation menu.
These are the steps we use when adding a product review to our site:
Steps in uploading a page to WordPress
- Click on ‘Add Page’ from your WordPress navigation menu. You can also click Add Post if you prefer to add the review as a post.
- Insert the title of the review. This will be the title you created for your product review in Step 5.
- Paste in the content of the review. Obviously you might want to do a little formatting to make sure the review looks okay. Bold any headings and sub- headings and make them larger than the rest of the text so they stand out. Use dot points here and there and separate long strings of text into separate paragraphs to make it easier to read.
- Add images to the review – You can use images from Amazon for your review. We normally take the main photo from the Amazon product page and save it to our computer. Then we upload it to our product review at the very top and right or left align it so the text sits aligned to the image. It just looks better that way. (See Attachment 6 on how to add Amazon images to your product review.)
- Add Amazon affiliate links to the review – In a 1000 word review we might add between 4 and 6 links. I wouldn’t use any less than this and you can use more but just don’t overdo it. The links are text and image links only. We don’t use widgets.
You can include links in the following places:
- when the actual product name is used
- whenever the word ‘Amazon’ is mentioned
- in the conclusion when you are talking about where to buy the product
- behind each image – see Attachment 6 on instructions on how to do this
Take a look at the completed review at the end of this ebook. We have highlighted the links in blue where we would normally add our links.
- Add tags – Use the keywords from your keyword list as the tags.
- Select a Category – The category will depend on how you have structured your website. If my website were only about cordless drills then I would create a separate category titled ‘Panasonic Cordless Drill Reviews’. If instead my site were a generic shopping site that catered for all sorts of products then my category might be Cordless Drill Reviews.
- Publish the review.