Learn How Bloggers Convince Businesses to Send Free Products for Review
If your blog is about a topic that lends itself to product reviews, then you can ask businesses to send you free products to review on your blog. Of course, you can purchase products and then publish reviews on your blog, but getting free products is always nice! Here's how to request them:
Build Your Blog Audience and Traffic
No one is going to send you free products to review on your blog if your blog doesn't get any traffic. That's because your review post won't be seen by enough people to make it worthwhile for the business to send you free products. Before you start asking for free products to review on your blog, take the time to publish a lot of great content on your blog and to increase traffic to your blog. The likelihood that a business will consider sending you free products to review depends on how much exposure your blog can give to its products and brands.
Remember, your blog doesn't have to be the most popular blog online, but you do need to focus on your topic and build a powerful niche audience if you want to have a chance at getting free products to review.
Review Some Products and Publish Those Reviews on Your Blog
Purchase and test some products that your blog audience is likely to be interested in. Many businesses will look for these posts on your blog before they'll consider sending you free products to review. Create a category and use tags or labels to identify product review posts, so it's easy for visitors and businesses to find them. When you request free products from a business, you'll need to be able to prove that you publish well-written reviews.
Gather Your Blog Traffic Data
Use your blog analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) to gather data about your blog's traffic. You need to prove to businesses that giving you free products to review on your blog will give them a good amount of exposure. Provide the business with your unique visitor and page views data for your blog as well as for specific review posts you've published in the past.
Also, gather data from Alexa.com and Compete.com to show businesses more information about your blog's traffic and authority. Don't forget to include the number of RSS subscribers that your blog has. If your blog has an active Twitter or Facebook following where you share links to your blog posts, gather that information, too. Finally, collect as much data as you can to demonstrate the demographics of your blog audience in terms of age, income, gender, occupation, and so on.
Write Your Request for Free Products
Once you've completed all of the activities listed above, you can write a request for free products that you can email to businesses. Share all of the data gathered above as well as links to prior product review posts. The goal is to make your blog sound like a place where the business is sure to find a sizable number of people that match their desired target audience.
Be sure to explain how soon you can write a review post after receiving free products. Many businesses send free products out to bloggers for review, but the blogger doesn't have time to test the product, write the review, and publish it for weeks or months. Stating up front that you can turn around a product review post within a specific time frame is something many businesses will be happy to hear.
Finally, personalize your request for free products. While the statistical information in each request that you send to businesses might be the same, the introduction, closing, and supporting details should be personalized to each business. Form letters will end up in the trash, but well-written and personalized requests have a much better chance of getting read and securing you free products to review on your blog.
