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AFFILIATE REVIEW SITE
Example DVD Affiliate Review Site
The purpose of this tutorial is to familiarize the new Red Queen user with the program by providing an example walk-through for a fictional user named Clare. In this tutorial, Clare is about to put together a Red Queen database for a new site for her recently registered domain 1000dvdsworthyourtime.com, the theme for which should be apparent. Clare intends to provide a website which offers insight on what she considers to be 1000 of the best movies--available on DVD--ever made. She intends not only to add these 1000 DVD titles to Red Queen with a brief summary about what makes each movie worthy, but also to have visitors to her site rate and review these titles to add gravity to her selections. She is also an Amazon.com Affiliate and she will link each of these 1000 titles directly to Amazon.com to help monetize her site by collecting a commission on every Amazon.com sale which results from a visitor leaving from her site to Amazon.com.
An example of a category listing of DVDs is shown below for the Animation > Kids & Family category, to give you an idea of what visitors to Clare's site are presented with before they reach a DVD detail page that contains Clare's editorial on the title plus any customer reviews she has accrued.
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As you read through this tutorial, keep in mind that you can apply the basic Red Queen steps, even the affiliate business methodology, to a wide number of products and services offered by third parties. To set up a good selection of review items, however, does take a little thought. In this case, if Clare was able to get her hands on a commonly-available list of "The 1000 Greatest DVD Titles" she should think twice about using it. Why? Because a commonly-available list can be implemented by 100 other webmasters who have the same idea as she has. Instead, what she should do is create her own list--preferrably of movies that she has some experience with. One reason for doing this is that her hand-picked list is copyrighted. The odds of two webmasters picking the same 1000 "top movies" is small if they genuinely create their selections according to their own tastes. This is a general principle of successful businesses. You will stand out from competitors by making your offering unique whereever you can. Of course, a unique offering is worthless if it is not also a quality offering. What defines quality is up to you to decide.
So, Clare knows her list has to be unique. But she also knows that users are familiar with the kind movie categorization scheme that Amazon.com uses, and which most movie-related websites use in one variant or another. Unlike her movie picks, for her navigation scheme it pays to be the same as everyone else. But Clare decides not to reproduce all of the Amazon.com categories available to her. For instance she has no interest in categories such as "Fitness & Yoga", "Gay & Lesbian", "Anime & Manga", "Stand-Up", and quite a few others. She settles on a reduced categorization scheme, a portion of which includes categories such as:
- Animation > Feature Films
- Animation > Kids & Family
- Classics > Action & Adventure
- Classics > Comedy
- Classics > Drama
- Classics > Kids & Family
- Kids & Family > Disney
- Kids & Family > Drama
- Kids & Family > Science Fiction
If Clare wanted to, she could make her categorization scheme more granular, offering for example, Classics > Kids & Family > Animation > Disney in addition to Kids & Family > Disney which would likely share some of the same titles. As it is, even with her simplified two-tier category scheme, some DVD titles will probably appear in two or more categories--an example being Animation > Kids & Family and Kids & Family > Disney. This is fine, Red Queen will allow Clare to assign the same DVD to several categories if she wishes to do that.
For each of the categories added, Clare wants to customize the selection of attributes that can be rated by her reviewers. She decides NOT to use the exact selection that Amazon.com uses. This is an intentional decision which she hopes will help to distinguish the reviews on her site from those that appear on Amazon.com. For instance, in contrast to the overall (out of 5 stars) movie rating that Amazon offers, she decides that the attributes best suited to her Kids & Family > Disney category are these:
- Storyline
- Engaging Characters
- Special Effects
- Watch Again
- Violence
You can see that, in particular, Clare thinks that perusers of this category very well might be parents who are interested in the level of violence present in the movie. And as every parent knows, you might end up watching the movie with your kids several times, so Clare has added a Watch Again rating. By offering these unique attributes for her movie selections, Clare sets herself apart and increases the value of her collection of reviews. Once again, choosing the right selection of attributes for your categories will increase the chances that your overall offering is well appreciated by your web traffic. In Clare's case, this translates to click-through rates on her affiliate links.
Now that you have some appreciation of what Clare hopes to achieve it's time to jump to the next section and see how she goes about doing it.
Next Section: ADDING CATEGORIES
Documentation
Documentation for Red Queen, which is entirely separate from these tutorial pages, is an ongoing project (as is this tutorial). You should find that there is sufficient information in the Red Queen User Manual to answer most of your technical needs. Suggestions for improvement to both the User Manual and this tutorial are always welcomed. As more users gain experience with Red Queen, and issues are resolved for its application in different areas, information gained from that experience will make its way into these pages.
Note: If you cannot find the information you are looking for in this tutorial, try the Red Queen User Manual which you should find far more comprehensive than the instructional dialog found here.
Copyright © 2004 Random Mouse Software. All Rights Reserved.