What’s wrong with reviews today?
Let’s face it. Most online reviews run a lot longer than they need to. Most consumers are looking for a star rating and either a thumbs up or thumbs down. A brief description of the product being reviewed might also be helpful.
With this in mind, there’s a unique opportunity for passive income to be found. I’ve used it myself to generate both social growth and affiliate revenue. Interested?
Here are the details.
Micro-Reviews
My Theory
My first experiment with micro-reviews was with book reviews for all of the audio-books I had listened to over the last few years. I had no idea if there would be any response. But, there was no cost involved so I gave it a shot.
My theory was that I could create a valuable set of reviews for social media that would generate affiliate income. I believed that I could create these reviews quickly and with a pattern that would be easy to repeat. Each review would have common elements to help my audience become familiar with the reviews.
Each Review would consist of:
- A Graphic with a Star Review embedded in it.
- A short text review
- An affiliate link
- Hashtags
The total length of the review text, link, and hashtags would be less than 280 characters, twitter being the lowest common denominator text length.
Finally, I would post the reviews daily to my social media timelines to generate expectation in my audience.
My Approach
Graphic Review
To create the graphics I created a template image using Canva. I selected a blank social media post template, added a title, added an image, and used Canva’s filled and empty star elements to complete my template.
Here’s the result.
What this achieves is a complete review in graphic form. My audience can see what the book is, who wrote it, and where it falls on my spectrum of approval. For many, this will be all they need to make a decision. They appreciate the brevity and will be on the lookout for more reviews from me.
Text Review
On the next level I create a text review. I keep it brief and to the point. I let my audience know what I liked or what I didn’t like. A negative review can be just as valuable to your audience as a positive one.
Affiliate Link
In addition to the text review I include an affiliate link to the product I am reviewing. I am a member of Amazon’s affiliate program so for my book reviews it fits well.
Hashtags
Finally, I include related hashtags for the product I am reviewing. I have some standards like: #bookreview #books #reading, and I also include some specific to the product. For the Stephen King example above I would add: #shortstories #stephenking #horror.
These are important to help attract the attention of people that would be interested in what you are posting but are not yet part of your audience.
Limits
My goal is to keep the texts of my posts including the affiliate link and hashtags under 280 characters. This fits Twitter’s tight character limit and fits comfortably within most other networks.
Posting
The key here is consistency and frequency. I post my book reviews daily. This gets audience familiar with what I am sending and encourages them to look for my content daily.
When I started, I was doing everything manually each day. It’s not a tremendous amount of work but I did make me anxious. In the next section I will talk about some improvements I made to help make things smoother and lower my stress level.
Process Improvements
Batch Post Creation
The first major improvement I made was setting aside time each week to create my posts in batches. I made a list of the books I was going to review in a spreadsheet, added the text description, found and added the affiliate link, plugged in my hashtags and then created my graphic.
I did seven of these at a time to get a whole week’s worth of content teed up. It took about an hour when I started but I got it down to just over thirty minutes as I perfected the process. That still seemed a bit much so I used some automation to speed it up.
Post Creation Automation
Since everything was in my spreadsheet, I used the spreadsheet built-in functions to concatenate the review, the affiliate link, and the hashtags into a field that concatenated everything into one field that I could copy and paste into my social media accounts.
This cut my time down to about twenty minutes of image creation, filling out the spreadsheet, and copying the assembled review into my various social media accounts. That was great!
But could I do better?
Even Better, Scheduling posts in Batch
Visiting each social media account I posted to was time consuming and it was entirely likely that I would forget one. So, I started looking for a better solution. The one I settled on was Buffer.
Buffer allowed me to enter all of my social media accounts, create a group for them and create posts for them all at one time.
I could now create and schedule all of my weekly posts in about 15 minutes. About as passive a system as I could achieve for book reviews.
Conclusion
This micro-review approach is fast, low cost, and simple to set up. You can start posting today and seeing results tomorrow if you use the right hashtags or have a fair sized audience already.
My audience responded well. I started getting more interaction on these posts that most of my other content on social prior to adding them.
Affiliate clicks went up right away and affiliate revenue followed about two weeks later.
Tools of the Trade
If you would like a copy of my spreadsheet tool it is available with my other digital tools on The Exchange. Get your copy today!
NOTE: Some of the links above are affiliate links. That means if you click on them and make a purchase I will receive a commission payment. That being said, I only recommend products or services that I think will be of benefit to you.
