Acquiring and Retaining Buyers in Our Review Site

So far, we have created product review posts and a great homepage. But there are other essential review site properties that we need to add, such as more free content (for search engine traffic), opt-in form (to build a list of buyers in the niche), and a video (to make our site look more professional).

All of this stuff goes in the sidebar, so let’s start adding them…

Adding Opt-in Form in the Sidebar

It’s a good idea to build a list of buyers in the niche so that you can send them new offers and product announcements later on.

I use GetResponse, so I built this form in GetResponse’s online form builder:

Then I took the HTML code they gave me and put it in a WordPress sidebar text widget.

This is how it looks on the site:

Add a Video to the Sidebar

Next, we want to add a video to the sidebar. We’ll add the embed code of the video also to a WordPress text widget. So, make a video, upload it to YouTube, and then copy its embed code to the text widget. Don’t forget to adjust the width of the video so it’s not wider than your sidebar allows.

Adding More Content to Our Review Site

Currently, our site is pretty light on content. We wanna add more stuff to it to help us weigh more heavily in Google’s eyes. Basically, we wanna target more long-tail keywords for our niche. So, we will publish articles targeting long-tail keywords and we’ll link to those articles in our sidebar.

After some brief keyword research, I found a whole bunch of long-tail keywords for the woodworking plans niche. I created an article for each one (hypothetically) and linked to it in the sidebar.

I used multiple text widgets to create the unordered lists of links.

Inside each one of those widget is the title that you can see in the image above, and something like the following HTML:

<ul>
	<li><a href="http://solidwoodworkingplans.com/adironack-chair/">Adirondack Chair Woodworking Plans</a></li>
	<li><a href="http://solidwoodworkingplans.com/rocking-chair/">Rocking Chair Woodworking Plans</a></li>
	<li><a href="http://solidwoodworkingplans.com/high-chair/">High Chair Woodworking Plans</a></li>
</ul>

And that gave me the following results on the live site:

Okay — now we’re almost ready to publish and announce our site to the world…

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