While doing my usual recky (reconnaisance) to see what's new and hot (or not) in Clickbank, I stumbled across Niche Review Templates and Ready Made Review Sites – products of particular interest to affiliate marketers who aren't keen on either site design or writing articles and product reviews.
I've reviewed the ‘review' products, and you'll find a list of inclusions for each product below, along with my assessment of advantages, disadvantages and product quality.
Niche Review Templates
Niche Review Templates is by Farihan Bahon and Bobby Walker and sports some very attractive review site design templates and in digging around the ‘Net, I found their templates in use on a number of different affiliate review sites.
The package includes:
- 2 Complete Niche Review Templates with CSS style sheet
- Custom Graphics in a variety of niches such as Internet Marketing, Health, and more…
- 20 keyword-rich articles
- 6 product reviews
- 2 sets of 7 Autoresponder Messages
- 17 training videos related to setup, installation and traffic generation to your niche website
- 24/7 support (apparently these guys don't sleep)
Niche Review Templates is priced at $37 a month.
Learn more about Niche Review Templates
Ready Made Review Sites
Ready Made Review Sites is put out by Anthony Hull & Jason Gazaway and features review sites and product reviews limited to the Internet Marketing category.
- Top 3 Clickbank Affiliate Products
- 3 Professionally Written Product Reviews
- Custom Header
- Professionally Designed “Review” Site
- Optimized for Search Engines
- Privacy Policy and Contact page
- Integrated Affiliate Link Cloaker Script
- Clickbank “Top 20” page.
- 10 Professionally Written “Marketing” Articles Each Month
- 1 7-day Autoresponder Series
- 5 x Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads + Comprehensive Keywords List Every Month
Ready Made Review Sites starts at $37 per month and includes an upsell option to get 3 video reviews every month for an additional $10, for a total of $47 per month.
Learn more about Ready Made Review Sites.
Advantages and Disadvantages
But the question was, “Should You Buy Niche Review Templates or Ready Made Review Sites?“ Well, let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of the packages individually and compared to one another.
Disadvantages
My primary concern for any affiliate marketer purchasing ‘ready-made' product review packages is the possibility of incurring duplicate content penalties. Neither package stipulates how many will be sold, although Ready Made Review Sites implies that numbers are limited with the “Order now while there are still spots available” statement at the bottom of the page. Of course, that doesn't really mean anything without a specific number attached to it. That said, it's easy enough to avoid the wrath of Google and duplicate content penalties by making changes to the content.
Too, they're static templates, not blog templates which means that you won't gain as much natural or organic traffic as you would if you were blogging, meaning that you'll have to use PPC to drive traffic.
Being static pages, you'll have to upload the pages to your site (Ready Made Review Sites comes with a web-based uploading tool).
The Ready Made Review Sites is limited to Internet Marketing products while Niche Review Templates offers a broader variety of mainstream topics.
Advantages
Diehard bloggers could simply use both services as PLR providers and post the content to a blog to gain the SEO advantage and lessen PPC costs.
Both packages offer exceptional design and graphics, although I have a slight preference for the look of the Ready Made Review Sites templates. Bloggers with design talent (and time) could cannibalize the graphic components and build them into their blog template.
If you don't count the video product review option in Ready Made Review Sites, Niche Review Templates offers more product with twice as many templates, articles, product reviews and autoresponder series delivered per month.
Based on the limited number of product reviews and articles that I've read from these packages, I'd rate the writing quality for both as GOOD — not terribly inspiring or exciting but definitely better than average — and I'd give Ready Made Review Sites a slight quality edge here as well.
At $10 per month, the videos in the Ready Made Review Sites package are a valuable addition.
Summary
In summary, any disadvantages can be offset by making some time and effort to end up with what you want (isn't that ALWAYS the case?). Furthermore, I think $37 is incredibly cheap for what's being offered – especially in terms of graphic design, considering I regularly pay $60 and more for WordPress blog themes that don't come with pre-written articles, autoresponder series, or product reviews.
Bottom line therefore — I see enough positives in both Niche Review Templates and Ready Made Review Sites to warrant a $37 per month (or even $47 a month) investment in either or both packages – and both come with an 8-week guarantee.
With alot of people using these types of templates…do the search engines devalue these sites of the footprints they have, or does the content within balance it out? Also wondered this on these types of templates.
I too have wondered about whether the search engines dislike or will slap a review site just because the themes are very similar. I have set up a few review sites over that past few months. I like using WordPress with a niche review site theme. I have been dancing around a bit on Google but you never know quite what to expect with Google do you?
I agree that it is better to have unique and personal reviews that you write yourself or have a good writer to write for you. It is very time consuming but gives a more honest review I believe. Sometimes I wonder if I make them too long and that it might work against me but I like to give a really good honest overview of what people think of a product.
I guess live and learn. Time will tell. If I have learned anything in this online venture it is certain that one needs PATIENCE! lolol
Thanks for listening
Sandi
I feel that the uniqueness of individual and unique views give affiliate marketers their ‘voice’ which may lead to better commissions. I also wonder about the duplicate content issue here. On the other side, this is great for the majority of affiliates who cannot develop their own unique presentations.
This would be completely useful if you were running mass websites and wanted to eliminate some of the mundane work at a good value.
For a single website, I’d make my own.
I think people are missing the real point, which is how do we upload these templates and make them into a complete sales funnel, with downloadable free reports and autoresponder series?
If someone knows how to do all that, then I see no real need for the templates as they are easy enough to garner from the Internet. If you’re not techie enough to build a complete sales funnel, then I think you will still struggle with these packages.
In other words, what they lack, and need, is full installation on your website as a full working sales funnel, for a nominal fee.
The templates sound like a great product, really useful for people to get started with Clickbank and to see how good reviews are constructed. Congratulations on the product, hope that its working well for you!
All the best
Hi Ros,
I have followed your comments for a while now and read NPT when rec’d so your input is valuable to me.
Both products RMRS & NRT seem to have their value and I can see using them both. But duplicate content is a concern for me too. Is their any reason I can’t use either program for their PLR , either re write and add to it myself or Spin all the articles with a article spinner and make them my own and submit all those articles to all the top article directories to gain back links. Or even make ebooks from their PLR(after spinning)? Do you know if there is the option to upload our own headers? and add your own clickbank products other than what they send you each month? Just so it wont totally look like someones else site? I don’t mind doing the work, I have been using xsitepro2 and love it. But this seems fairly easy to use to promote click bank products and if I can edit all things I mention above, what would be the disadvantage to using either of these review sites templates. What am I missing? Please Advise ~Steve
Hi Steve,
If you are thinking about doing all that work, why not just buy a PLR package and rewrite those instead?
BTW, I never recommend using a spinner. The quality of the final article is usually just awful.
Cheers,
Ros
Unique blog designs offer good nice review templates, you can purcahse that theme and modify it according to your niche…
Im currently using that on my blog…
Cheers
Chris
Well Rosalind you have spoken my mind. I am for one a big fan of originality, and as such, never bought either “plr” stuff nor these niche review templates. Being used by every affiliate, his mother and their dog, at the end of the day, there is very little originality left in the review templates. To anyone thinking about venturing into this business model, I highly recommend writing your own original reviews and creating the templates yourself (or hire someone to do it for you).
Thanks for the post. I managed to find a few nice templates at the links provided.
I do agree that duplicate content can be an issue especially keeping in mind the fact that 100s of affiliate marketers would be using these cut-and-paste templates without doing any editing. If you even do some basic editing you can stand out from the crowd, not to mention that it offers more credibility to your reviews.
Just think about using plr content “as is” vs. rewriting the plr completely. The difference is certainly visible!
Those are very professional looking templates!
cheers for this, the ‘out-of-the-box’ nature of these products will really appeal to novice IM’s. Iy wasn’t like that in my day.
It’s hard for me to choose. It seems both companies are watching each other and trying to better the other at every level. I just see good competition going on between them.
Both have quality templates and $37 per month sounds cheap for me. Ros, though you seem to prefer Ready Made Review Sites a bit, I tend to like Niche Review Templates more. Ready Made Review Sites is restricted to only one niche while Niche Review Templates is diversified.
Like you said Ros I would be concerned about dupe content issues..I would rather come up with my own stuff or pay a freelancer to do one for me..its not that expensive..I cant believe you are paying 60 bucks for a theme? that must be an incredible theme! I pay 20 bucks for my themes and they are pretty good and would be good for a lot of IM’ers but I guess not good enough for you! lol
Ah… yes. 60 bucks a pop seems expensive (actually I buy the packs for 199 and get unlimited use) but when you see it, you’ll understand why.
I’m planning to discuss site design and templates in Tuesday’s newsletter.
Cheers,
Ros
Ros,
You mentioned that one could make content changes. To make sure that we are on the same page, could i place my own uploads, offer products/info products/services in addtion to or apart from those offered by these review templates? And also place some of my own original contents?
Pam
Pamela,
Once you have a template, you can easily create a copy of the page in which to enter your own information.
If you don’t have an HTML editor – I recommend NVU, an open-source product. You can get it at http://www.net2.com/nvu/
Hope that helps.
Cheers,
Ros
I’ll throw in another vote for Nvu. I’ve used the expensive HTML editors (FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc.) over the years, and Nvu does all the basic stuff that most affiliate site makers would need – and costs nothing. And, best of all, you can dig right in without a steep learning curve if you’re new to it all. Gotta love open source!
Regards,
John
for those of you who CAN write (there must be at least a few of you out there – somewhere), then there is another option: create your own reviews after actually researching the products yourself.
yes, i know it’s an old fashioned approach to doing affiliate marketing, but i actually kind of like reading unique content myself. Google does too, so there’s that side benefit – pages that rank in organic searches.
cheers,
Stephen Carter – creator of Review Site
I agree with Stephen 100%. Nothing like writing your own reviews. No matter how badly you write it, your review will still stand out from the plr stuff that everyone is using and re-using. I would also add that Stephen’s review software is one of the best in the industry, though a bit pricey.
So, until you can afford Stephen’s software, use WordPress or drupal for your review site. DO NOT use some cheap review site software.
Disclosure: Stephen is not paying me to endorse his product! 😉
Well this one is sounding great but I am confuse at one point … as you have mentioned that these guys will give 20 keyword-rich articles … how many words this will content. They will provide on any niche …
Just read only – Niche Review Templates
Hi ZK,
Not really sure I understand what you mean by “how many words this will content”.
As to providing on any niche…
Each month they produce a package that relates to a specific niche topic, so you don’t have much choice in the matter.
Although I suspect that those topics are all in big niche markets and that they will accept suggestions.
I hope that helps!
Cheers,
Ros