Earlier today over at TheMinimalistFisherman.com we launched a new, in-depth product review for the SEEKWAY Water Shoes.

These shoes were sent to me – for free – in exchange for a review. (The review took a lot of my time, so they weren’t truly free… never forget this point.)

If you are running a blog or a website or a Fishing YouTube Channel or a Twitter feed or anything in between – there is a good chance that companies will be happy to pay you with free products in exchange for a review, distributed to your audience.

How Do You Get Companies to Send You Free Products to Review?

Here are 5 critically important tips to get free products from companies:

1. Get really, really good at creating engaging content (any format)
2. Build a strong website full of that quality content
3. Build an audience
4. Make it very easy to find your contact information
5. List the fact that you will complete product reviews in exchange for products

It’s that simple.

If companies can see that you have an audience, and that you’re not a complete moron, and that you’re not building some sort of “link farm” full of clickbait and ads to unrelated items, and if they can see you are a real person willing to review their product, they will start to reach out to YOU.

Later in your journey, you may want to reach out to some of the companies you really want to work with – but it needs to be after these 5 steps are complete. If they’re not… you’re going to have a very hard time convincing them to partner up with you anyway…

How Do You Write Product Reviews that Visitors Trust?

If you want clear direction & hands-on help setting up your blog or YouTube channel for product reviews, click to schedule a website consulting call.

If you just want my top 5 tips for writing trustworthy product reviews, here they are:

1. Never, ever lie
2. Put your name on it
3. Never, ever lie
4. Make sure you have some product reviews on your site that are critical of other products, with low scores
5. Never, ever lie

Here’s an example of a low review score for a product, which generates additional trust for the other reviews I have on my site that have higher scores:

It’s not rude, but it’s honest.

If I had 50 reviews on my site, for unrelated products, all with 5 stars, it wouldn’t take long to see this was just a con-job for free stuff.

Lame.

Nothing on a site like that should be trusted.

Your audience deserves your honesty – and if they feel like they’re not getting it… they won’t be your audience for very long.

Enjoy the rest of your day, and get some work done!