How to find impartial reviews

One of the first things I do before I spend significant money on any product is search the internet for reviews of that product. It might be a physical product such as a computer monitor or a digital product such as a file storage service. One thing I’ve found over the years is that not all product reviews are truthful.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few product review websites that give positive reviews to sub-par products. The root of the problem is that almost every product in the world has an affiliate program that backs it. Webmasters join these affiliate programs and receive compensation for every customer that clicks through and purchases a product.

Whenever there is a financial incentive to sell products, webmasters will be tempted to write positive reviews no matter what. The more sales these webmasters generate, the more money they make. This can make it difficult for us searchers that are in need of legitimate, unbiased product reviews.

EDITOR NOTE: Please note that Technology Bloggers admin team will never give a good review of a bad product, it is unethical and against what we stand for. We will also never enter affiliate schemes which require us to promote a product we don’t believe is value for money – note by Christopher

1. Search For Discussions

The most unbiased product reviews are written by people that have no incentive to sell those products. Two of the most reliable places to find reliable product reviews are discussion forums and the comments section of major websites.

Discussions:

Let’s take online file storage for example. You can search the internet for “online file storage reviews” and find dozens of websites that review online storage services. Some of these websites are dependable, others… not so much.

What you can do instead is run a Google search for reviews, but then narrow the search down to discussions. You can narrow down the results by first running the search and then clicking on the “more” link on the left side of the Google and then the “discussions” link beneath that. See below:

Google search for discussions about online file storage reviews

Clicking on this link will change the results to only include discussions related to your term. These tend to be real discussions between real people and are therefore pretty reliable.

Note: Remember that you are likely to see more negative reviews than positive reviews when you search for discussions. People who are happy with their products post fewer comments than people who are angry. Keep this in mind as you read through various discussions.

Comments:

If you’re looking for a physical product, you can often find a good number of comments by visiting large websites such as Amazon.com and BestBuy.com. Visit those websites and search for the exact product model that you’re considering. The chances are you’ll find unbiased comments related to that product.

2. Find Trustworthy Websites

Not all review websites are bad. In fact, some are awesome. They will break down the product in its entirety and give you both the pros and cons. The key is knowing how to identify these websites.

For the most part, you can tell if a website is trustworthy or not by reading through a few reviews. The writing style will tell you a lot. Trustworthy review websites tend to stick to the facts. They will tell you both the pros and cons of any product. They will also give you hard numbers that you can use to compare various products.

Low quality review websites tend to offer more generalities than facts. For example, bad review sites will tell you that a product is “amazing” or “life changing” but they won’t back those claims up with hard numbers or legitimate reasons to like the product.

However, it is worth noting that some websites make it a point to only review products that they deem to be of high quality. They don’t even waste your time writing reviews of products that are inferior. But even in this case, the reviews include hard numbers and are willing to note both the strengths and weaknesses of each product.

How to show more screen options in WordPress

I have noticed that most of the other authors on this blog have failed to write a short excerpt for their article. It’s usually really easy and takes seconds to think of a short phrase to sum up, or entice people into reading your article.

When Marc (from the 360 Blog) wrote his most recent article, I emailed him to ask him why he never filled in the excerpt field, as he is now eligible to apply for author status, but that requires each article to have an excerpt.

Marc emailed back and told me

“You mentioned that you would like a short excerpt written, but there wasn’t a place to do that.”

Out came my thinking cap!

I then realised that when I had started Technology Bloggers, when creating a new post, the excerpt field wasn’t showing ether. The trackback field didn’t show, nor did the discussion field etc.


Do you have problems with

  • Excerpt field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • Trackback field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • Discussion field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • As well as other custom fields not showing

well if so I have your solution!

Screen Options.

The 'Screen Options' button in the WordPress admin consoleYou see at the top right of the admin console there is your name, log out etc. well just below that you should see a tab that says help, and next to that a tab that says ‘Screen Options’.

Click ‘Screen Options’ and it will pull the tab down to revile loads of new fields which you can choose to show or not.

The WordPress 'Screen Options' for creating a post in the admin consoleLike to work light? You may just want the publish box and the article writing area. Prefer to go into detail? Tick/check the ‘Categories’, ‘Post Tags’, ‘Custom Fields’, ‘Send Trackbacks’ etc. boxes for a more advanced view!


Under ‘Screen Options’ you also have the option or changing the screen layout. You can decide how many columns your dashboard uses, to display your selected widgets. On the homepage of the dashboard you can split it down in 1,2,3 or even 4 (if you have a very wide screen) columns. On posts pages you can choose to split the view down to two columns, or just the one.

Ever asked yourself ‘how can I show more comments in the WordPress admin console?’, if so, ‘Screen Options’ could help here too. Just click it and you can show as many or as few comments as you like. I have it set so that the WordPress comments page shows 50 comments per page, although I sometimes change it 🙂

Good luck bloggers with using WordPress the way you like it!