Reviews

When you review other people's books, products, or services, you accomplish two things: First, when you create a review, you provide highly valuable content to your reader base in the form of an objective opinion. When you direct a critical eye to something your audience might want to purchase, revealing the pros and cons, you become a trusted resource, one they know they can count on to help them make decisions.

The second advantage to doing reviews is often overlooked: When you review a book or a company's products, you'll likely get the attention of the author or company. This is especially true in the case of book reviews. When you place an honest assessment of authors' work up for public consumption, you gain a major opportunity to give a gift to high-profile individuals. This could become a foot in the door to working with an expert down the road.

Sometimes people will ask you for reviews. For example, SocialMediaExaminer.com does a monthly book review that has become highly coveted by book authors. Because we only review 12 books a year—and dozens come out related to social media annually—we're rather picky about the books we review. We've become known for our reviews. Authors come out of the woodwork trying to get a review from us. Many of these experts later turn out to work with us in other capacities.

In addition, we also regularly review new social media tools, providing detailed assessments. Our reader base loves reviews because they help them determine where ...

Get Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.