This essay on negative reviews first appeared on GeekAffiliate and is being republished here (with a bit of editing) to give it a wider audience.
Internet marketing — and affiliate selling in particular — involves a lot of fear. Not in the sales pitch — although there is certainly a lot of “buy this now or you’ll regret it!” messaging — but in the attitudes of the seller vis-a-vis the potential customer.
And let’s be clear: these are customers we’re talking about, not “visitors” or “readers”. Don’t sugar-coat it: if they’re giving you money, directly or not, they are your customers.
Almost everyone engaged in affiliate selling exudes boundless enthusiasm and a “it-can-do-it-all” attitude in an attempt to convince a potential customer to push the Buy! button and hand over their money.
Desensitization
The problem, of course, is that potential customers then become desensitized to the whole sales process and view everything with a certain degree of skepticism. (As well they should.) With everyone babbling on exuberantly about how wonderful the product is and how it’s the cure for your problem and how it’s so easy and how only a few are being let in on the secret… well, really, is there any doubt that the conversion ratios — how many people see the message versus how many actually buy the product — are so low?
This is why, in a crowded arena of me-too sales pages, the negative review has a disproportionate amount of power. Not to dissuade potential customers from buying — the sales pages already do a good job of that — but to convert them into actual customers. Let me explain.
Idealism Is Inauthentic
Nothing is truly perfect in real life. Ideals are pursued, but never reached. If asked to describe your spouse’s faults, you can probably rhyme off a half-dozen without thinking. But so what? You know what those faults are and you’ve accepted them. They’re part of the price you pay to have that person in your life. The faults are outweighed by the positive attributes that drew you to him or her in the first place. (Don’t forget it’s mutual: your spouse has to put up with your faults, too.)
This is why the fear of saying anything negative about something you want to sell is counter-productive. It doesn’t seem authentic, to push a concept that Seth Godin espouses.
Negatives Are Relative
But negatives are not absolute. What you think is wrong with me (and there are many!) my wife may consider attractive. Just because you think a book can’t teach you something doesn’t mean that it’s not useful to someone else.
Books are a perfect case in point. Look up any Amazon book that’s a bestseller — say in the top ten — in its category. Read the most recent customer reviews for that book. Which reviews were the most useful to you? The exuberant utterances of the personal (or paid) friends of the author or the ones that say “I didn’t like this book because…“.
Look at my first AdSense book: Make Easy Money with Google, which just celebrated its second anniversary, has now been reviewed by no less than 45 customers on Amazon.com. While I’m happy to report that it’s maintained a steady 4-star rating, there are several quite negative reviews. Here’s a sampling of them:
- Perhaps this book would be useful for a person totally inexperienced in just about everything, including tying their shoes.
- … this book is aimed squarely at the absolute beginner, who have no idea how to build sites, and who want in on the money race.
- Overall, valuable if you’re a novice that wants to get into internet publishing monetized by Adsense but worthless for pretty much anyone else.
Ouch! I can’t say those reviews thrill me, but they’re honest. They’re authentic. I’m sure they’ve put people off from buying the book. But I bet those people were never in my target audience. However, a novice looking for a good introductory text on AdSense would look at those comments and say Hey, this sounds right for me! and he or she will buy the book because of them.
To such a person, those negatives are actually positives, because they don’t want a jargon-filled book that they can’t understand.
Expose Those Warts!
I wrote a review of a software product called Desktop AdSense Cash Machine. It wasn’t a perfect piece of software by any means, but it did an adequate job. I acquired resale rights to it and decided to sell it to anyone who wanted to buy it, but given its limitations I priced it low at only $10, not $37 or even $67 like some others do. Because I thought $10 was a fair price for what it actually did.
Now, I didn’t sell a ton of the product or anything, but I got some great feedback about my review. People thanked me for the detailed review (with screenshots) and for giving my honest opinion about it. It was like a breath of fresh air for them.
All I did was expose AdSense Cash Machine’s warts: here’s the product, it does this, it doesn’t do that, it’s worth this much, take it or leave it. (Note that I don’t sell it anymore, as the product stopped working due to changes to the various article directories it pulled things from and I haven’t had the time to go looking for an update.)
You Still Get Well-Targeted AdSense Ads
If you’re an AdSense publisher, as opposed to an affiliate marketer, rest assured that the AdSense ad targeting will still work exceptionally well with negative reviews. Why? Because those reviews are still chock full of related keywords and phrases.
An Opportunity For The Geek
If you’re a geek, take heart, because geeks excel at negative reviews. They’re happy to deconstruct products and ideas and to tell you exactly why they won’t work and how to fix them. Where the marketing type wants to build, the geek wants to destroy. Well, maybe destroy is too strong a work. Deconstruct would be a better way to phrase it. And that’s where your skills (you, the geek reading this) come into play.
Does the thought of writing a sales page make you sick? Then don’t! Write an authentic review instead. Don’t just parrot the sales copy. Don’t shy away from exposing the warts. Describe what the product does and what it doesn’t do. Who will benefit from it, who won’t. How to use it, how to abuse it.
Don’t underestimate the power of the negative review!
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
I agree 100%. There’s nothing less authentic than all those JV sales page endorsements. I mean…how is it possible that every one of these products is “the greatest thing since sliced bread”?
A more accurate title would probably be “The Power of the Balanced/Accurage/Honest/Authentic Review”…but, of course, it’s been unbalanced from the get-go, so at this point, it IS about adding the negative back in where it belongs.
There are lots of ways of looking at this. Whether or not he was really a jerk, the Rich Jerk was primarily a marketing angle…as are the approaches that guys like Shoemoney and John Chow have taken in crafting their images (scrappy, politically incorrect, “evil”). Even though those are probably put-on to some degree, they seem refreshing because so few people say what they really think, and what their real experience is with a product or strategy.
Anyone with half a brain or any experience in life could have figured out a long time ago that this “blow smoke up each other’s skirts” tactic was shortsighted, and would result in nothing but short-term gains. But, then again…I guess that was good enough for them. Problem is, there are a lot of people out there still searching for honesty who really don’t know where to go to find it. So, authentic reviews like those you post on this blog deserve a wider audience.
And that goes for so many other areas as well. THE NEED EXISTS. In my mind, instead of blogging about making money or blogging about blogging, more folks need to get into the business of HONESTLY providing information, context and reviews of products of all kinds. Music, books, movies, gadgets, etc.