Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

Sometimes you want to make certain listings stand out more than others on category pages and with conditional formatting Review App makes it happen. Just choose the CSS style you’d like to apply to “special” listings, choose the field that will determine “specialness,” and the value that makes a listing special. It’s that easy.

Here’s a practical example. On our camping website we offer campground owners the opportunity to purchase a “sponsored listing” for their business. We created a hidden input/output field called “promotion” and for sponsored campgrounds we set the value of promotion to 1. On the “Category Appearance” page for our campground section we set conditional formatting to use CSS class “highlight1″ for any listing where promotion = 1. You can see the results in the right image above.

Conditional formatting is just one more way Review App helps you monetize you online business. Stay tuned for more BIG news…

After using Review App ourselves for over a year we realized that the available review statuses - pending and active - weren’t enough. If you administer a website you know that sometimes you don’t want something posted online but you also don’t want to delete it forever - and it’s not really “pending” either because you already made a decision about what to do with it. Now Review App allows you to mark any item - a listing, review, or photo - as “inactive.”

So how does this work in practice? Here’s a real world example: On our camping website we’re only set up for campground reviews in the US but every now and then a member tries to submit a Canadian campground. Instead of deleting the campground forever, we mark the listing as “inactive” so it doesn’t appear on the site OR in our pending queue. If, one day, we decide to add a category for Canadian campgrounds we can simply activate the appropriate inactive listings - nothing is lost!

We also enjoy keeping funny (to us anyway) reviews or listings like this one:

how do Igetthere fromdayton,ohio

Seriously, though it’s helpful to keep reviews like this to track usability issues. Perhaps your site is confusing to users and several folks make the same mistake thinking your review form is a contact form, for example.

Inactive listings are super helpful for managing high volume, user-generated content websites - just one more way Review App allows you to rock your online business!

Remember the late 1990s? It was such a magical time for the internet with big promises of using the web to slash prices on everything from pet food to real estate to airline fares by “cutting out the middle man.” Yes, the late 1990s were a trying time for the middle man but it seems like in the era of Web 2.0 he’s been able to get back on his feet.

I’m particularly disappointed to see the middle man butting his way into the online ad sales market. You see I’m an online publisher who makes a living building great websites for niche communities (like mountain biking) and online ads are a major revenue stream for me. Advertisers like REI and Sierra Trading Post place their ads on my websites and I get paid every time someone either views or clicks on an ad (depending on the arrangement). Seems simple and fair, huh? It isn’t.

Instead of working with me directly, REI and Sierra Trading Post end up buying ads across multiple websites using services like Google Adwords or the increasingly ubiquitous “ad network.” For those who don’t know, an ad network aggregates publishers within a particular niche (say outdoor sports) and then bundles pageviews across all those small and medium-sized websites into a neat package for advertisers. The ad network does the “hard work” of tracking down the advertisers and convincing them to purchase online ads and for that, they are rewarded half (50%) of the ad revenues generated via their publishers’ pageviews. Fifty percent is a pretty steep commission for a middle man.

As a publisher I look at it this way: I work hard getting people to visit my website (branding, marketing, coding, writing, etc.) but at the end of the day I give half of my money to someone else who sold my ad inventory for less than it’s worth. Why did they sell it for less than it’s worth? Because to them any sale is worth more than no sale at all (as a publisher there are always alternative ways to monetize pageviews). Ad networks are classic middle men - they don’t allow buyers and sellers to speak directly to work out a deal that makes sense for both parties.

I could go on about why the online ad industry is horribly inefficient and unfair to publishers but I’ll close this post with an idea: Why not use the internet to match ad buyers and sellers? It’s a novel concept I know (sarcasm) but consider that when financial stocks are bought and sold the middle men (traders) take just pennies per share for matching buyers and sellers (less than one percent of the transaction value). A fifty percent cut, on the other hand, is simply an embarassment of riches that economics tells us will be competed away in the future (sooner rather than later I hope). A NASDAQ for online ad sales? I can only dream.

From the beginning we’ve worked hard to keep Review App simple but in some cases we made things a little too simple. For example: in order to make it easy for users to sign up for an account on a Review App site we kept the questions to the bare minimum - email address and user name. Many of you, however, wanted to find out more about new members upon sign up and we support your right to choose (though our own sites still keep it old school).

To add a user data field to your new member sign up form, simply mark “yes” to the question, “Ask on sign up?” and it will be a part of the sign up process. We recommend you keep the fields asked on sign up to a minimum - maybe add short questions like gender and zip code - to keep the new member registrations flowing. Remember, even if you’re offering free accounts no one wants to fill out a long form just to access your site features!

Just wanted to talk about two new features we added to Review App recently:

De-dupe tool

If you run a medium or large size review site you know that from time to time you’ll end up with duplicate user-submitted listings. Sometimes these “dupes” can go undetected for months until you realize you have two listings for the same place, each with its own reviews, photos, etc. What to do?

With the de-dupe tool, just enter the duplicate listing ID and the original listing ID and presto! Review App handles the rest. All the duplicate listing reviews, photos, tags, and list entries will be moved to the original listing and the duplicate listing will become inactive. Sweet, huh? That feature has already saved us countless hours on the sites we manage so we know you’ll appreciate it too.

Improved notifications

With Review App you can choose to be notified via email when new listings, reviews, or photos are added and we’ve given you even more flexibility in setting notification rules. Only want to be notified for guest reviews but not for registered user reviews? No problem. Want to auto-approve registered members’ reviews but moderate guest reviews? Review App makes it easy.

Other stuff

We’re also working on behind-the-scenes stuff that makes Review App easier to upgrade and customize while improving speed as well (although it’s already lightning fast). We’ll keep you updated right here via the blog…