Sometimes I recommend products on this site. If you’ve come to this page, you’re probably wondering how I pick them, whether I make money from them and whether or not you should trust my recommendations.
How I Make Money
I often link to these products with affiliate links. If you click one, it takes you to a seller’s site – 90% of the time, that’s Amazon because it’s where people like to shop online. If you buy any product on that site within a certain amount of time, I make a small commission.
How I Choose Products to Recommend
In many cases, I own or have used the product and would recommend it to a friend. Or I have a friend who owns a product and has told me all about it, the good and the bad.
In some cases, particularly product roundup posts (like this one for video doorbell cameras) which list several products for a particular need, I don’t own all of them. When I own or have owned a product, I say so in the description.
Why Should You Trust Me?
It’s true. I’m not a big magazine with staff to thoroughly test products. Those websites are great, but they don’t test every type of product.
Here’s my process for picking which products to recommend. I search online for products I think I would buy, just the way I shop online when I am buying something. And then I do some research.
I read customer reviews around the internet and look for consistent pros or cons. If a lot of buyers are having the same problem, that’s a red flag. It may stop me from recommending the product. Or the product may be so good in other ways that I go ahead and recommend it, but describe the problem in the description.
I do not at this time accept free products to review. I have in the past, and always kept my reviews totally truthful. Then I had a seller become upset with me because I found minor issues with a product. So I quit accepting these products. If I ever start again, I will always be honest and I will tell you if I got a product for free.