AP 0536: How Do I Write Review Posts On Expensive Equipment?

AskPat 536 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 536 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help, you by answering your online business questions five days a weeks.

We have a great question today from Curtis, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com. An amazing, amazing company serving over three million small businesses, helping us all keep track of our business finances. From our income, to our expenses, to even invoicing, if you do any invoicing, for any reason, you gotta check out FreshBooks. I remember when I first started keeping track of my finances back in 2008, I was using Excel, and that worked, it organized things, but then when it came time to understand everything, and actually, my business started to grow, it just became a huge headache, and I'm so glad I got hooked up with FreshBooks. And you can too. You could try it out for thirty days for free by going to GetFreshBooks.com, and by entering “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section. Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat.”

Alright, here's today's question from Curtis.

Curtis: Hey Pat, my name is Curtis I have a blog at everythinghamradio.com. My question for today is on review posts. I always wanted to write a review post from my blog, and my biggest thing to wrap my head around is: How do I write a review post on something that I don't have in hand? Equipment, or otherwise for amateur radio starts at 100, 200, 300 and goes up to like 3 or 4000. Obviously, I can't afford to buy everything that I want to write a review on. So question is: How do I do it with it actually being in hand, for me to play with? Any tips you can give me would be awesome. Love your podcast, both this one, and your SPI, listen to it all the time. On my way to work, or home, or whatever. Keep up the great work. Thanks. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey Curtis, thank you so much for the question. This is great. I know a lot of people who want to do more reviews of things, and for the very reason that you said, because things are expensive, because you have to buy them, they don't do them. Now, that doesn't mean you can't. You could in fact do reviews of things that you see online that you don't have access to. Now, it's not going to be quite as authentic, not authentic that it's not wrong, but, as long as you're up front, and you don't say that you had access to it, when you really didn't, then you're okay. But you would be able to base these reviews off of articles that you read, videos that you watch, and you'd want to make sure you give credit to where you found this information. But you can put your own voice to those things. You can have your own opinion on these things that happen or come out based on these different radios that you come across.

So that's one option, but of course that's not necessarily the best option, because in order to provide the best information, and the most value to your audience, and also have the most authority, you want to get access to these things, so you can come at it from a real perspective, you'd actually get your hands on them. There's a few things you could do. I know a number of people, not in the HAM radio industry, but other industries, who have reached out to companies and have asked for versions of those products to review. And they actually get them sent, and then they actually send them back after the review is done. So they don't get to keep them, they get to play around with them for like a week, and actually do a real review on them. And because they have a little bit of authority in that space, these companies are likely to say yes, because they want exposure, they want people to review it and they want, they know how powerful blogs and websites are at spreading the word about things. So, if you were to do YouTube videos and things like that, that would be a great opportunity for you to get those things in your hands, without you actually having to pay for them. So, that's one option. You could ask companies to send you, temporarily, those items and then return them.

Some people who have a lot of authority, and I don't know how much authority you have in this space right now, but some people get so big that companies begin to send them stuff anyway. There is a kid name Evan, he has a YouTube channel called EvanTube, and I know this because my son watches him, and Evan, he's incredibly popular, millions of subscribers. And he's popular because he builds Legos on YouTube. He literally builds Legos on YouTube. He does a few other fun things, but his dad films him and he's just a kid, he's building Legos, and he gets all these sets sent to him by Lego because he knows, or Lego knows, that he has this huge audience. This kid Evan's just going to play with it, put it together, it's time lapsed, so you're not watching him for like hours, put together the Millennium Falcon or something like that. But, yeah, it's amazing, and he has an amazing audience and he goes to these events like VidCon in Anaheim, and there's just crowds of people who want his autograph, and he's like 11 or 12 years old now. My son started watching him when he was like eight.

But, anyway, if you're at that point, you could command and actually reach out and say, “Hey, I have this audience that's this big, I'd love to get access to some of your product and be able to review it. Just send it here.” I actually did a video once where I was vacuuming, using a Dyson, and I had shared that on Instagram and it went like a little viral, not even really viral at all, and then Dyson just reached out to me, and they were like, “Hey, we saw you using our vacuum, how would you be interested in using some of our new fans?” And so, that conversation happened, which is really interesting, but again because I had some authority, and a lot of followers, that was able to happen. But, if that's not for you, or can't happen yet, then you could actually reach out and actually do this sort of review in exchange for getting access for a small period of time to these devices that you're reviewing.

Now another thing you could do, and this is something I just thought of while I was preparing to answer your question here, is you could find somebody, or go to places where there are these radios that you can review, and you can do them in one fell swoop, a whole day of just reviews of each of those different things. So, you'd have to batch process each of these reviews, or you get pictures, or you'd be able to take videos, and just actually have them, you would have access to them, but you're going to go where these things are. If you go to, I don't know, a convention, or conference, or somebody, you might find somebody with a collection, for example, that you can get access to, who you could give credit to on your site, or wherever, you could get access to a whole bunch of 'em and then run a bunch of reviews all at once. Record those, or just keep notes, or whatever, while you're there, and then actually use that as content that you could use for blog posts, or video content, or what have you. That's another thing you could do without you actually having to go and pay for each and every one of those things. But, you go to where those things are.

So, yeah, those are some ideas that I'm just thinking of that you might be able to play around with. But Curtis, I want to thank you for the question today, and if anybody else out there has any ideas for Curtis, use the hashtag “AskPat536,” and Curtis keep track of that, #askpat536, because many of the SPI audience, the AskPat audience has great ideas, often better than my own, so guys, help out Curtis. What else could he do to do a review site for or to have products to review without him actually having to purchase those things? Let 'em know what you think, #askpat536. Curtis, we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. I want to thank you so much for it, and everybody else out there whose asking questions. Obviously this show wouldn't exist without you, because this is AskPat.

Anyway, I want to thank you guys again for listening in. I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com. You gotta check 'em out thirty-day free trial, if you go to GetFreshBooks.com and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. What they'll do for you is they'll make it incredibly easy for you to manage all your business finances. Keep that headache elsewhere in your business, not in your finances because we all know we got so many things going on. We all wear all the hats in our business, at least at the start, so you might as well let the software do all the work for you to keep track of everything, especially come tax season, which is coming up, or some of us are already in the middle of it, getting everything organized. Again, it just makes it really easy to have everything all in one place, easily organized and so you can also see what's going on in your business. Or you could cut costs, what's working, so you can do more of that, and all that sort of stuff. So if you want to check out FreshBooks.com. Go to FreshBooks, or excuse me, GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

Thank you so much, and as always I like to end the show with a quote, and like I said yesterday, all the quotes this week are coming directly from my book Will It Fly? Today's quote is a quote from my book, which is actually a quote of JFK, in my book, a little bit of meta going on there, but this quote is, “There are risks and costs to action, but they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.”

Man, JFK was the man. Cheers, thanks guys, and I'll see you, and I look forward to serving you in tomorrow's episode of AskPat. Thanks guys. Bye.