**REVIEW** AMZ Review Trader (for businesses & reviewers)

For the longest time, Tomoson had been my fave place go-to spot to find products for reviewing. I still like Tomoson, but I'm fast becoming much more attached to another source: AMZ Review Trader.

AMZ is an Amazon Review Group. The products that Sellers/Businesses put out to be reviewed come from Amazon. It's perfect, really, because I love and use Amazon for almost everything anyway.


What I like most about AMZ is the ease of using it. Tomoson has gotten a little complicated and I sometimes find the businesses/brands are too particular. Some of them want a lot of work out of a reviewer in exchange for not very much return on that time investment. Still, I really discovered a lot of my favorite brands that I continue to buy from, separate from review obligations.

If you are a blogger, reviewer, "influenser" - or whatever label you use, you might want to check out AMZ. Let me run down specifically what I like so much about the site (as a reviewer):

• Easy to apply for review opportunities
• Opps are shown with a countdown to the expiration date
• Easy to track what you've applied and been accepted for (or not)
• Allows you to control whether or not to accept an opp up to the last minute
• Has lots of variety and categories
• Reporting problems is super easy
• Let's you sort the promotions in various ways
• Your obligation is very to-the-point
• Verifying your completion is so easy

Of course, every site or program has glitches. Until recently, there was no way to page back and forth between the lists of items. That was just fixed and adds another plus in their favor. Sometimes, the Search feature doesn't work well. You have to be very specific in searching or you pull up all kinds of non-relevant items.

There's really nothing big to go on a list of Cons and, when there is, it's due to a Seller or business and not AMZ. Even in the case of a problem like that, that reporting system is on point. I love that.

As a blogger, I try to learn from other product review bloggers. When I see that another blogger is structuring their posts in a way that makes it easier for their readers, I will copy that. No shame in my game. Matter of fact, that's one of the reason I started using numbered and bulleted lists. That's called flattery by imitation. I wish the product review groups and sources would learn from each other.

I have to say that when I check between the different sites. looking for possible items to review, I usually go with AMZ. Basically, they make it easy for the blogger to view and review items, then they make it even easier to verify the review. 

If you are interested in getting into doing reviews, I'll repeat what I've said in the past: start by building up your profile as a reviewer. Use Amazon to review things that you've bought and can speak about with reasonable knowledge. Find all the various places that want you to review things. Actually, there's really no system for getting started except to just start. Check out SheSpeaks, BzzAgent, Influenster, etc. (I've posted before about these different places.) 

By the way, most of the product reviewers I personally know of are female. Are there lots of men getting in on doing reviews? I hope so. If you don't know, there are a ton of products that would be of interest to almost anyone, regardless of gender. For example, I pretty much stick to cosmetics, kitchen and natural health/beauty items. Every day, I skip over a lot of cell phone accessories (though I have done quite a few of those), foods and beverages, clothing (maybe when I get back to my fighting weight!), gardening tools, work tools, books, automobile accessories, medical items and aids, and toys. Some lucky person got to try a counter-top washing machine. I saw the photos on Instagram and was just salivating for a chance at anything as cool as that.

Let me know if you know of other places. Let me know what you men think of product review.

Peace

--Free