Writing Quality Reviews!!

A Review has a purpose!!

The purpose of your review is to give others a better understanding how the equipment might relate to their performance and uses out on the hill. If your review lacks depth that will allow other to find it helpful it may be considered to be spam.

Here are some steps to follow when preparing to write a product review:

•       Test Your Product
•       Product Performance Evaluation
•       Review Specifics
•       Compare Products
•       Be Specific and the Extras

Test Your Product

Product Testing and Use

A quality written review comes form properly testing your equipment. Make sure that you have had sufficient time to test the product and can adequately make comments based on multiple aspects of the equipments performance, durability and best used application.

Conditions and Terrain

Make sure to test the equipment in as many types of terrain as possible to fully understand how the product will handle different areas of the mountain and changing snow conditions; jumps, jibs, pipe, powder, ice, chop and groomers.

Product Performance Evaluation

Product Performance

Test all aspects of performance of the product. How does it handle carving vs. basic skidded turns? Test a board's flex and pop by doing ollies, butters, presses and stay in tune to how it pops of the lip of a jump and handles the landing. Did you get a chance to take it off a jump while spinning? What size of jump?

Review Specifics

Personalize your Reviews

When building on aspects of performance of a board you should include your weight, height, boot size and ability level. This information is very relevant to what riders can expect from the equipment. A 100lb rider on a 155cm board is going to have much different performance than a 200lb rider on that same 155cm board. Your review should allow the review to understand a little bit about how you affect the products performance.

Durability

For products that you have had for any length of time, you can start to build on your review by discussing aspects of the products durability. Make sure to include the estimated number of days that you have used the product.

Customize your Reviews

Different styles of products will need the review catered to that style of product. All your soft gear should be tested in a number of different weather environments. How do does the waterproofing hold up? Is it better for warm spring days or cold winter nights? For boards make sure to hit on how well the base holds wax and holds a tune.

Compare Products

A great way to gauge performance is by comparing one product to another. This is also a great way for the readers of your review to get a bit more of a bearing as it relates to on-snow performance. If you are comparing a similar product from one years model to the next it allows for people to better understand how the new technologies relate to performance.

Be Specific and the Extras

Be Specific

When writing your reviews don't over generalize. Keep your explanations of your points of view very specific to situations and terrain. Knowing that a board was tested on a number of kink rails is a lot more info than saying that you tested the board on jibs.

The Extras

And the final and least prevalent aspect of the review is how you liked the graphics and colors of the product.  It can be a nice touch to your review, but make sure to cover the more important aspects of the review first.

Quick Tips:

• Keep it performance based.
• Your review should be based on how the product performs in a variety of conditions and terrain types.
• Reviews should help others relate to the experiences that they might have on that same equipment.
• Try to be objective, have a point and base your review on real experiences you have had with that given product.

Brand Reviews

If you plan on writing a brand review it should be objective and non-biased!! Base the review on real situations you have had with the given Brand's products, customer service and Brand interactions. A brand review should allow a reader to understand more about given company’s products and industry interactions. If you are new to a Brands Products you might just want to wait until you write up your brand review for this company.

I'm just getting back into snowboarding after a 5-6 year span of only going occasionally and found some of the reviews to be a big help in finding out about what gear was going to be right for me. Then I saw a lot of complete garbage that had nothing to offer for insight at all.