Tips for Starting Out as a Tech Reviewer

This post contains affiliate links.

I had someone reach out to me on YouTube asking how they can get started with being a tech product reviewer and I thought about it and turned out the following suggestions.  This is just a high level overview of suggestions for those who seriously want to get into reviewing products in exchange for receiving them.  You won’t make a lot of money or any money at first unless you are lucky and get a lot of Amazon affiliate or other affiliate commissions, but this is more about the thrill of getting new stuff to review and providing valuable feedback for readers and brands as well as building your own reputation.
Here are some suggestions, the Amazon tips only apply if you are in the US location.

How to Become a Technology Product Reviewer

TIP #1 Become An Affiliate ASAP

If you aren’t an Amazon affiliate and Gearbest affiliate, become one immediately. Sign up and if you haven’t ordered a product from Amazon, order one (anything) you have to have bought a product to leave Amazon reviews which many brands want.  You may also want to sign up to become an affiliate on cj.com and ShareASale.com right away as well, CJ.com has NewEgg store and you can become an affiliate there. Building affiliated sales links to every product you review will help generate you income, but also give you analytics and detailed reports you can use to show brands how you provide an ROI (return on investment) to them for sending you a product to review.  I would also take the time to become an International Amazon affiliate (amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.de, amazon.it…etc.) and use Prourls.net or Geni.us to start global affiliate linking for maximizing revenue.  Better to get established now instead of having to proactively fix your links later which means you could lose income.
Build out a full reviewer profile on Amazon and other stores where brands may ask you to leave a review, or you can leave reviews there to also help with attracting brand attention.  Make sure all your contact details to contact you are listed on all your store profiles.

TIP #2 Review Everything You Have

Start reviewing everything you own that you can, even stuff that is 6+ months old, past stuff still sells constantly. Link everything in your vids to the product pages (hopefully where you can affiliate too and earn.)  You can review tech and non-tech products, vacuums, kitchen appliances, just start looking at what you have and use and best of all create how to videos to help people figure out how to use it or solve a problem, these do well and leverage Quora and Yahoo Answers to find questions that people ask and do videos and responses to solve those problems, use Google Search to find out what people are asking/searching for and answer those questions with videos you publish as well.

Tip #3 Create an Introduction and Featured Video

Make an intro vid that showcases what you offer and set it as featured vid for your channel, this is mine for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x6ZpF1vDTY

Tip #4 Collect Analytics and Show Value to Brands

Start building analytics for your views/sales so you can show brands and encourage them, this will be very low, but start doing monthly collection of how many clicks, visits, impressions and sales and start adding to it to show brands later.

Tip #5  Start Contacting Brands

Start reaching out to brands, use an intro letter (contact them via Amazon or direct brand press page) let them know you are a new tech blogger, show what you have so far and that you want to review their product and showcase. Start with smaller known brands and < $50 products, there will be a lot of bluetooth earbuds, headsets, budget mice at first until you can show ROI to brands.  If you would like a sample reach out to contactme@dragonblogger.com and I will send you a sample.

Tip #6  Create Videos About Products and Featuring Stuff

Create videos featuring products/software/brands even if it isn’t a review. Showcase a screencast of a website, or video yourself talking about a product/brand that you want and what features you want to see. Make 2-3 vids per product you get, unboxing, review and a how-to do something with that product for maximum effect.

Tip #7  Freelance as a Product Reviewer for DragonBlogger.com

You can temporarily work for my site as a freelance, where you do vid reviews/written reviews for my site and then you can do a separate one of the same product for your site. I have helped many tech bloggers get products and use my site for their review, then they get to review same product for their site after, it helps add content to my site and get them products to flush out their channels too. Reach out to me contactme@dragonblogger.com if you are interested.
Justin Germino
Gadget Reviewer and Technology blogger who lives in Southern California and dabbles into a little bit of everything.