Epinions.com is great site for Internet and Brand Marketers to work in. The site is a user and member driven product/service review website. It is owned by Shopping.com which is in turn owned by…..Ebay.

How and why is the site useful for marketers? Aside from helping consumers looking for information about products, it can also help SEO’s, webmasters (who dabble in marketing) and brand managers by allowing them to monitor their products and develop traffic/awareness.

Epinions is all about writing reviews and interacting with knowledgeable people to get information about products. The basic uses from the consumer side are:

• Reading product reviews for information about the quality of a product or service.
• Finding information about products and services in advance of your purchase to help you with your decision on brand, price, and features; shopping comparison.
• Connecting with retailers who have good prices on these products.

The uses from an Internet Marketing and Brand Manager/Marketer perspective are:

• Connecting with users and showing them your web assets through linking from your profile page.
• Developing referral traffic to your websites.
• Leveraging the content creation capabilities to get your products in major searches.
• Monitoring your Brand and interacting through the sites communication features to help protect / defend it; reputation management.

User profiles are easy to set up and are not that advanced. You can have an avatar, emails, and bio information, but most importantly you can make links back to your own web assets. Important to know though is that the links I mention here on the profile page are not considered for link juice for search engines, but more for direct referral traffic to your site. They are not direct HTML links, but have referral code in between.

With an Epinions profile, you want to build up a “web of trust”. Like many social network sites, you are allowed to “trust” other users which is essentially friending them. The more you write reviews, the more likely others are to review your reviews and provide you the opportunity to join their web of trust / trust you back.

The assortment of user profiles are ranked by contribution status. The levels are:

• Category Lead
• Advisor
• Top Reviewer
• General Member

If you are able to put the time in to attain Category Lead, Advisor or Top Reviewer you can really put yourself in a place to develop a huge network and following in specific verticals and throughout the community. One such person that I am connected to on the site has the following profile page statistics:

Reviews written: 226

Member Visits: 21,466

Total Visits: 1,027,278

Total visits come from around the web, likely from search as Epinions’ pages are picked up in the major search engines. Member visits are from the site members to that user’s page. The user above, having over 1 million profile total page visits gets a lot of traffic to the member page.

Like some other community driven sites Epinions shows the top contributors and authors to the site. The #2 Top Epinion user has has over 3.8 million visits to his profile page. This users has also listed his Favorite website on that page, so imagine how much of this traffic has gone to his website as a result?

Smartly, he has also completed out a very in depth bio page for his company and this allows you to have DIRECT, not no followed links back to sites! These pages are completely indexed in Google as evidenced with this search. It is likely too that this traffic is targeted as the user is a leads in specific verticals.

In all, Epinions is good for:

SEO – Some review’s rank in the search engines – probably not that high for competitive terms, but for obscure terms – the review titles can be found in the search engine result pages (SERP). Here is a recent search with a non competitive query, but when written properly, there are ways to leverage reviews for SEO / SERP purposes. Aaron Shear was behind a lot of the SEO at Epinions.com/Shopping.com and they did a bang-up job.

Referral Traffic – If you develop a strong web of trust by writing and trusting on Epinions.com, it is likely that your profile page will see more and more traffic. With that you can have referral links on your profile page which in turn send traffic to your own sites, or other sites that you want to be trafficked from this targeted group of visitors.

You may want to create profiles for each vertical and do strong reviews (both short and long) in one specific area, say in “Cars” or “Electronics” and just specialize in that area. That way, your Web of Trust, and the visitors coming to your profile are that much more targeted in and interested in your specific sites.

Brand / Reputation Management: Checking in on this site to see what consumers are saying about your products and services is important. When there is something negative , figure it out and solve the problem, and it may be useful to contact some users to make things right. When there are positive things said, let the user know you appreciate it.

Incidentally Ebay also owns StumbleUpon so I wonder when these worlds of StumbleUpon and Shopping.com /Epinons might ever collide? Could there be feature sharing etc and a merge of data / feeds as some point in the future? Already a fair amount of Epinions content shows up on Shopping.com.

There are many other sites that fall into the category of Shopping Review, Comparison Shopping or Product Review sites, but the Epinions.com property has done a pretty good job of developing some quality social and community networking features while keeping the site search friendly and relatively advantageous for marketers – both brand marketers and SEO’s. With Epinions.com , like with all community driven sites you get back what you put in; it all comes down to how much time, effort and value you contribute to the community.

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