Review Site

When to use the pattern:

When you want to drive affiliate sales softly without sales pitch. Works best for the types of traffic where sales letters and squeeze pages perform poorly, for example, social network traffic. It's also highly beneficial for SEO and to keep Google happy for AdWords.

How to use the pattern:

Put a simple site, WordPress powered site will work fine. Publish individual posts devoted to the products you advertise (whether your own or affiliate). To notch it up, create occasional posts comparing several similar products and rating them against each other. Or use a specialized software, like one mentioned in the details (and I am sure, Google can provide you with plenty of alternatives).

Don't forget to rate products by customer value, and not by the commission you get from the sales. Make sure all products, you review, are affiliate products with your links. This way no matter what the product a visitor chooses, you get the commission.

Keep the review sites targeted to the specific category: don't review action figures mixed up with photo cameras. Affiliate Link Cloaking is highly recommended as recognizable affiliate links compromise credibility of your reviews.

Direct the traffic to individual reviews and, especially, product comparison articles.

Attribution:

Hard to say. Review site is clearly an evolution of a directory site, which were very popular in late 90s.

Related patterns:

Affiliate sales, Review posts, Affiliate link cloaking

Related anti-patterns:

None, just don't forget to put some effort into it to avoid being classified as a Link Farm

Details and comments:

A message from Perry Belcher reminded me write this post, but I certainly seen this pattern long before, somewhere in late 90s. In fact, my former domain thewisemoney.com, registered in 1998 and lost in RegisterFly meltdown, was essentially a review site for financial services. Of course, that time there was no great automated software like Review Site Monopoly. Even blogging was not really around that time, and I had a simple PHP script to publish simple articles on a simple pseudo-blog on my Galiel.Net site.