Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

You may have noticed that our regular posting streak was broken a couple weeks ago and things have been quiet here ever since. We ended up taking our own advice about focusing efforts on our other blogs and that’s meant the Review App blog is no longer seeing daily updates. Clearly we were running out of good material as our last post was about Office Max for goodness sake.

We’ll continue to post new stuff here when we have useful information to share. Like today - we’ve been busy improving Review App over the past month and have some cool new features to share. The first is actually a minor change to a Review App plug-in called AdZone.

For those who don’t know AdZone is a lightweight ad server that’s integrated into Review App to allow you to rotate ads, track stats, etc. on your website. Anyway, we noticed that some ad network servers can be slow at times which means your pages will be slow to load, particularly for ads placed near the top of your pages. AdZone now allows you to selectively place ads into iframes so your pages load completely even if an ad loads slowly or fails to load at all. Some ad servers use iframes exclusively and we considered making this the default behavior but it turns out Google Adsense has trouble with iframes since it serves contextual ads (and an iframe page has zero context).

The second feature we added is one we’re really stoked about: default category sort settings (primary and secondary). On the surface this might sound fairly boring but wait - this is pretty sweet. For most webmasters a primary default sort is a no brainer - you generally want your category listings to be sorted alphabetically by title. But what if you have an e-commerce site and you want your products sorted by highest rating to lowest? Just set your primary sort field to rating (descending) and your secondary sort field to product name (alphabetical) and your best products are front and center but still easy to find!

Here’s another way you can use this feature: Say you run a vacation rental website where property owners can purchase ’sponsored listings’ that place their properties at the top of their category page. Just create a hidden numerical field on property listings called ‘promotion’ and for paid listings set ‘promotion’ to anything greater than zero (say 1). Now set your category to first sort by promotion (descending), then by property title (alphabetical). You just created a new revenue stream!

Look for more new Review App features this fall as we deploy our software to even more consumer review sites!

We’re putting the final touches on the latest Review App plug-in called Best Listing. With Best Listing you can create a custom algorithm to find the best of what your site has to offer: whether it’s restaurants, mountain bike trails, or even books and products. With Best Listing, you set the factors you’d like to include in your ranking plus the weights of the factors themselves and Review App will dynamically build your ‘best’ list instantly. As members add more reviews and place products or items on their lists your best listings page will be updated every 24 hours with the latest rankings.

Adding a Best Listing page to your site is a proven way to increase search traffic. On our camping website we’ve included a ‘best campgrounds’ lists for the entire US and state-by-state and it’s our number one source of natural search traffic! The best part is that once the list is created you can change the weights used to calculate the rankings and your list will remain dynamic as users add more content to your site.

Stay tuned to ReviewApp.com over the next few weeks as we’ll be posting a new section for all the available Review App plug-ins, including Best Listing.

One of the things we learned a few years back is that turning viewers into users is pretty important in growing an online business. As anyone who runs a forum-based website knows it can be frustrating to see so many “lurkers” who simply read the online conversations taking place without ever contributing. On the revenue path, a vistitor usually needs to become a user before they can become a customer - any webmaster’s ultimate goal.

Here are three things you can do to graduate your visitors to users:

1. Offer something of value for free. Some sites promise free stickers in the mail if you sign up for an account, others dangle email coupons for subscribers to newsletter lists. Review App gives registered users access to online features like wish lists and the ability to post photos. Users won’t sign up just to be on your email list - give them a reason to take the next step.

2. Hold out your best content for registered users. This is similar to the idea of offering something of value mentioned above but it can oftentimes have a much larger impact. For example, on one of our web projects we routinely saw about 200 users sign up for accounts each month to access online “members only” features like those above. We then decided to make a key piece of information on our site - directions to bike trails - available only to registered users. We instantly went from 200 registrations a month to 2,000 and today the site is registering more than 100 folks PER DAY! Since the information left off is minor in relation to the other content available our search engine-visible content is  affected very little.

3. Make it easy to sign up for an account. You’ve seen it before - a sign up form that scrolls for pages and pages just to get a free account. Some sites may even require a credit card to start a “free trial” while other sites’ sign up forms are choked with marketing offers for seemingly unrelated items. The shorter your member sign up form, the more likely folks will get through it and become users of your site - so keep it simple! Review App new user forms ask for 2 things: an email address and a screen name - that’s it.

Giving your visitors a reason to become users and making it easy for them to do so is a great way to improve the number of folks entering your transaction funnel. Take a look at your site and see what you can do to increase your user base!

We’re giving away a free Review App installation worth thousands to the best idea for a new consumer review website. We’ll even throw in 2 years of free hosting services for the winner to be announced in September. Just post your idea in the comments section of this post. Be concise but specific about your idea - after all we need to understand it to judge it!

For those of you who might be afraid of sharing online and that others may “steal” your idea: Don’t worry. For one thing, it’s probable that your idea has already been attempted, completed, or is under construction by someone else as we speak. It’s ok. Our experience has taught us that the idea is such a small part of starting a business - in the end success comes down to your product, marketing, operation, etc. Review App is here to help with those things.

So tell us your wild ideas for a Review App website - who knows, you could have your very own professional site before you know it!

One of our clients needed an event calendar for a consumer review website so we decided to create a calendar plug-in for Review App. The plug-in allows online users to add events to a calendar and even link calendar events to listing pages. For example, if your site has listings and reviews for concert venues you can link individual shows to the venue listings via the calendar.

Review App calendar events work just like listings: you set the input fields and permissions plus you can set up as many individual calendars as you like. Editing and deleting events and fields is a snap and the admin interface is integrated into your Review App dashboard.

The Review App calendar is just one example of the powerful ways you can extend your consumer review website’s functionality. Best of all, the Review App calendar add-on is free to existing Review App customers!

We don’t really like classifying Review App as a piece of software since software alone is never a complete solution. As such we’ve tried to stay away from talking about Review App in terms of what IT can do and instead focus on how WE can help you build a successful online consumer review website. But we understand if you’re curious about the features included in the Review App software - heck, the features page is usually the first page we hit when we’re shopping for software!

So now, for your convenience, we’ve posted a list of the features included in every Review App project. Just click the ‘Services‘ tab at the top of this page and scroll down to the ‘Review App Features’ heading. Here’s a little taste:

• License includes initial installation, configuration, template creation, and customization allowance
• Accepts user generated content of all types: listings, reviews, photos, and more
• RSS feed with links to latest approved online submissions (listings, photos, and reviews)
• Dynamically generated meta descriptions, page titles, and keywords
• Highly flexible and robust template system with access to raw data output
• Customizable system messages and email templates
• SEO-friendly URLs enabled at the click of a button and customized by section
• Business rules honed over 10 years of managing successful consumer review sites
• Built using open source technologies: PHP, MySQL, XHTML

And those are just the basics. Click through to read more about user management and user-generated listings, review, photos, and more - then contact us to talk about getting your Review App project started!

We’ve made it simple to extend the funcationality of Review App through a system of plug-ins and one of the included plug-ins, AdZone, offers a nifty way to rotate and serve ads on your consumer review site. We actually developed AdZone several years ago for another site and it’s worked so well we decided to bundle it with Review App.

AdZone works like a standard ad server, allowing you to create your own advertisement zones based on ad size and/or placement. Within each zone you can add as many ads as you’d like to rotate within that zone and you can even set a weight for each ad. So if you want Google Adsense ads to be shown 70% of the time and your own house ad to be shown the other 30% you can do that. AdZone supports image ads, HTML, and even dynamic scripting ads - pretty much anything you can think of, AdZone can handle it.

AdZone tracks the number of impressions each ad receives daily and tracks clickthrough rates for supported ad types. You can also set ads to “expire” after a certain number of clicks or impressions, perfect for pre-paid ad sales on your site. We’re using AdZone on sites with 1M+ ad impressions per month and it’s lightning fast.

Implementing AdZones within your Review App templates is a breeze - just place a single function call in your HTML and your ads will be shown immediately! Like all Review App plug-ins, the AdZone control panel is integrated into your admin page for easy access and real time changes.

AdZone is a great piece of web software on its own but when integrated with Review App it can be a real moneymaker - start managing your own ads today!

Yesterday we re-posted the Review App help docs online to make it easier for you to learn more about the Review App software. In your admin interface you’ll find links to related help docs at reviewapp.com and we’ll do our best to keep the information relevant and up to date. So if you’re on the category page and you find yourself confused, just click the ‘?’ icon beside the page heading and the category help section will open up in a new window. Simple - just like Review App

An important Review App feature is the ability to upload spreadsheet data to your website: listings, categories, and even input field choices. Yeah, we went a little nuts with the spreadsheet tools but they speed up the configuration process so much that we couldn’t resist.

Loading new listings via spreadsheet

On SeriousRunning.com we needed to transfer our ‘places to run’ data from an existing site into the Review App framework. Using a common spreadsheet format we simply exported the data from the old site, manipulated the columns in Excel, then loaded all 200+ listings into Review App. Total time to completion: less than 30 minutes.

SeriousRunning also uses data from Amazon.com’s affiliate program for running shoe listings and we were able to load a spreadsheet downloaded from the Amazon API into Review App as well. Sure beats typing hundreds of listings by hand

Editing Listings in Excel

Not only can you load new listings using the Review App spreadsheet tools but you can edit them as well. Just download your existing listings, make changes in Excel, then upload the file to Review App. Your changed listings will be updated and new listings will be added at the same time from the same file.

Loading/Editing Categories and Field Choices

Review App also makes it easy for you to quickly add or update categories and field choices using spreadsheet data. Import categories from your old website, create new categories using data you found online, or edit all your category names at once to make them more consistent - spreadsheet uploads make it simple! Field choices (the choices in your input forms’ drop down menus) work exactly the same way - simple. All our spreadsheet forms include simple step by step instructions: download the spreadsheet template, edit your data, upload to Review App. Done.

Some web software packages include spreadsheet data support as an ‘add-on’ (read: extra charge) but with Review App you get it all standard. It’s your data - upload and download it however you want!

We’ve spent a lot of time on this blog talking about search engine optimization and what it takes to improve search engine rankings so it seems appropriate to talk about some of the search engine friendly features included in Review App.

First, Review App makes it easy to create search engine friendly URLs for your page listings - just check the ‘Enable SEO URLs’ box and choose the field you’d like to use for your document name - and that’s it! All your listing URLs will be transformed from ‘item.php?c=1&i=2′ to something like ‘1/2/Restaurants/Famous-Daves.html’. For most situations your listings’ title field will be your best choice for the document name but with the ability to add hidden fields to your listings you can manually set the virtual document name to anything you like.

In addition to SEO-friendly listing URLs, Review App includes many features that will help improve your site’s search engine rankings. Custom lists and user contribution logs increase internal links and our category filters and tags add dozens of additional pages for the search engines to crawl. Within each section of your Review App site you can configure the page title and description fields plus you can quickly set overall meta keywords and description content with one simple form.

We’ve been steadily growing our own web businesses using these techniques - let Review App do the same for you!