About a year or so ago there was a marketing method so effective the United States government had to step in and shut it down!

The marketing method was people building blogs and recommending other people’s services. Basically you would have an affiliate site selling a product; I would build a blog and talk about how wonderful your product was. Anyone that landed on my blog would see me talking about how great your product was and they would then go to your website and make a purchase. You would then pay me a percent for sending you the client.

This method worked so well; that the United States government had to step in and say you had to let people know if you were affiliated in anyway with the product you were recommending. The whole ordeal went something like that anyway. A marketing method that worked so good the United States government had to step in and stop it!

I was talking with some friends the other day about this method and how it is still being used today but just in a different way. Of course you first need to understand why the method worked so well!

Many years ago I was told about an experiment where they took three monkeys and some bananas and put them in a cage.

If any of the monkeys touched the banners it would shock the other two monkeys. It didn’t take long for the two monkeys getting shocked to figure out what was going on and attack any monkey that went near the bananas.

A new monkey was added to the group and one of the original three removed. When the new monkey headed for the bananas the other two attacked him. So the new monkey never tried to touch the bananas again. However one of the originals were again removed and replaced with a new monkey. Now only one of the three remaining monkeys had ever been shocked or even knew what happened when you touched the bananas. Yet both joined in on beating the new monkey for touching the banners.

The test went on and eventually none of the monkeys were the original three, yet none of the monkeys would touch the bananas. They even removed the mechanism that shocked the monkeys, but none of the monkeys touched the bananas! They didn’t know why they didn’t touch the banners, they just didn’t do it. We follow and do what the group does. When in a group setting, you look to see what everyone else is doing, to see what is and what is not the correct thing for you to do. It’s rooted in your DNA!

You want to fit in, and you want to belong.

For this reason when you are in a social situation you look to others to see how you should behave. It’s something you do unconsciously!

There was a study done where a person pretended to have a seizure. The study showed that if someone was by themselves there as an 85% chance that person would stop and help. However, if there was a crowd of people there was only a 35% chance that someone would stop and help. People looked to see what everyone else was doing before doing something on their own.

Let’s say you wanted to use the above on your website. One way of doing this would be setting a rating system for your products. The first thing you want to make sure of is that you put the rating information on the product page. Otherwise the consumer has to click to see the rating. By waiting until the second screen to show the rating information you risk losing the customers attention. Keep in mind that the more reviews you have, the stronger the impact on the website visitor.

I was told about a study that was done in 2007; they wanted to see if recommendations increased sales.

They ran some split test on two different websites to compare products and services. For the product they used a digital camera shop and for the service they used a tourist destination website. According to them their split test showed someone was 20% more likely to purchase a camera with a review then a camera without a review. The travel destination showed a 10% increase of reviews over non-reviewed destination and a 20% increase if there was a photo included with the review.

In addition to the reviews you could have something like “Most People That Visited This Page Bought this Camera” in the right side bar. If you wanted to take it a step further and could figure out a way to add some graphs and charts into the reviews then you would really be talking to the subconscious mind. Data, charts, graphs or statistics done correctly help build trust and make the end-user feel more comfortable about his or her decision.

The more information you have about the person who wrote the review the bigger the impact they will have. You want to give a sketched out mini persona of the person who wrote the review. This makes the review more powerful. Review sites become more powerful when we know something more about the reviewer then just their name and date of incident.