Web Review sites are popping up all around the net at a pace which is hard to keep up with. Why is this the case? Is there lots of money to be gotten from them or are the owners making these sites up for altruistic reasons?

In a nutshell, there are a myriad of them because it’s good for business. Whatever business you are involved in, review sites are becoming an ever more important part of your marketing tactics. We are now in a world which is getting more and more distracting through a huge array of choices put forth to us all the time.

We as a consumer society just do not have enough time to carefully research the purchase choices we want to make and as a result we need to make shortcuts in our decision making process.

Think about the last hight price item you bought. Did you pull out the wallet on a whim and go for it. I’m betting not - I’m betting you probably probed your friends and colleagues to solicit their input and see if they had previously bought the item in question.

You were looking for their advice and their opinions count.

Whether you like it or not, we are all very similar when it comes to this buying decision making activity. We are at heart a “marketing herd” and are persuaded by other peoples outlook - even the opinions of complete strangers!

There are reviews on pretty much every conceivable subject known to the world, from cause-related marketing all the way through to the best types of cameras you should purchase. You can perform a quick search on any search engine and you are next to guaranteed to locate some useful reviews in next to no time.

Does this mean you trust all the reviews you come across? Of course not. There are lots of of people out there giving reviews with their own hidden agendas. You cannot rely chiefly on the word of a single review. Instead, you need to put the review in context, try to get a few more reviews (you might want to put in some more searches with keywords like “scam” for example to find some alternative points of view.

Review sites work, have worked and will continue to work because they provide us the easy promise of discovering useful information about something we are interested in and protecting the most valuaeable resource we have - our time.