I’m not certain exactly when this happened, but Epinions, the grand daddy of review sites, went social and could offer a good opportunity for niche marketers to build authority and gain highly targeted visitors. Epinions now has social networking profiles and offers the ability to build up a web of trust (i.e. friends) with other reviewers in your niche.

I am not advocating doing affiliate marketing and dropping links on Epinions at all! (Affiliate links are prohibited.) What I’m suggesting is that if you have a baby site and did regular reviews about baby products, you could built up your “web of trust” (who would probably be other parents), establish yourself as an expert in the field, build up a following to your baby site and maybe even generate some good traffic.

Take a look at the PROFILE of one of the top Epinions reviewers. He’s had over 3.9 MILLION visits to his reviews and has 415 “friends” that trust him. Note that he is a lead reviewer in the Auto category, and has a link to his homepage – an auto related site. He also is pretty smart in that he has a link to his site in his profile description, which shows up as a LIVE LINK in the Most Popular Authors list and goes direct to his site. Additionally, scroll down his profile page to see the long bio, overview of his site and additional links to it. He’s used Epinions to elevate his authority status in his chosen niche.

Jake over at the 10e20 blog has an in-depth article about Using Epinions.com as an Internet Marketing Tool with some good screen shots showing the features and benefits.

“The uses from an Internet Marketing and Brand Manager/Marketer perspective are:

* Connecting with users and showing them your web assets through linking from your profile page.

* Developing referral traffic to your websites.

* Leveraging the content creation capabilities to get your products in major searches. More…