A hardware review site without hardware to review is kinda useless, right? Well, there are many sites in this kind of situation. Manufacturers are not dumb. They're not going send you their latest video card just because you've setup a hardware review site. Until your site gets over 50,000 impressions per month, you can pretty much forget about getting any free hardware from manufacturers.

Now you have a problem. No hardware equals no hardware review. No hardware review equals no traffic. No traffic equal no hardware, and so on. How do you get out of this loop?

Until your site traffic builds to a level where manufacturers will send you hardware to review you will either have to buy your own hardware or find a local computer dealer who is willing to loan you hardware to review. That was how The Tech Zone got started. I was able to get loaner hardware from both PC Planet and AMK Services to review. Check with your local computer shop and see if they will do the same for you. Please don't call AMK or PC Planet as they no longer loan out hardware.

Content is king in this business. Without unique contents (hardware reviews in this case) visitors have no reason to return to your site. Posting news that is happening at other tech sites is not unique content. Ideally, you should do one unique articles per day. However, three per week is enough to keep people coming back.

While manufacturers may not send you hardware in the beginning, there are a number of smaller internet vendors who will help you. I have received many small items like heatsinks and controllers from many internet vendors like 2CoolTek, CoolerGuys, The Card Cooler, Bigfoot Computers and The Overclockerz Store just to name a few.

Another way for small sites to get hardware is to become an iBuyer affiliate. iBuyer has a plan where they will loan you hardware to review as long as you link back to iBuyer to do a price search of the reviewed product. It's a good deal around. Head over to the iBuyer website and click "partnership" at the bottom of the page to find out all the info.

Just remember to be totally honest in your reviews. If something sucks, say so. Just because you got the product free doesn't mean you owe the vendor/manufacturer a good review. Do not give in to pressure and believe me, some manufacturers can apply a lot of pressure on you, especially if you're a fan site who depends on manufacturer support.

I have posted a few reviews where the manufacturers disagree with what I said. Stick to your guns if you believe your review was fair. They will kick and scream at you, they will tell you that your testing method was wrong, they will tell you your site sucks, but when they have a new product release, they will send it to you.

Most manufacturers will want to see proof of traffic before they send you anything. The easiest way to do that is to use a 3rd party stats tracker like Yep or Web Trends. Not only do these services tell you a lot of information about who and how many people visit your web site, it's the best way to prove to a manufacturer that your traffic is not made up. Just point them to your Yep or Web Trends stats so they can see for themselves.

Even if you have no hardware to review you can still create content in the form of articles and editorials. Articles on tweaking and various how to don't require any hardware in most cases. Do you know how to do something that no one else knows? Do you have some secret BIOS tweaks that will make a system run faster? Do an article on it!

So you have your own domain name, you got your site hosted, and you got a review or article ready to go. Now where are the visitors?

Next page: Getting Traffic

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