Hi everyone-

I was asked by our SEO specialist to let you know what we were up to in regards to topics.

We're running a test with advice essays in the cellular phone and video game console categories. There is a lot of useful information in our advice sections, and we want to improve this area of our site. This test requires better organized information and up to date essays to help shoppers make purchase decisions. We’ve gone ahead and updated these sections with a improved structure and up to date topics. Now we need your help!

Here are a few things we’re trying to accomplish:

1) Help people figure out what to buy
Product reviews are very helpful for shoppers when they have specific products in mind to research and compare. But there are many shoppers who need higher level overviews and guides to help lead them to specific products. We feel that you can help fill in this gap by creating essays and guides that help shoppers figure out what to buy.

2) Drive more traffic
Since guides and essays are not limited to specific products, but rather to broader categories, they will be able to gain traffic from broader category-level searches. We believe that essays will be able to attract traffic from broader search queries, and also drive additional traffic to your reviews as people narrow their searches.

3) Leverage our network of sites
During this test, we plan to link directly to essays from shopping.com. We believe we can drive more traffic to the most helpful advice by providing useful information (in the form of high quality essays and guides) to shoppers during their shopping mission.

4) Expand beyond reviews on single products.
We believe you can contribute their knowledge in more ways than single product reviews. There are many great opportunities to write in the form of comparisons (ex: xbox 360 vs ps3), guides (ex: best business cell phones), and a host of other consumer related topics. We hope that these essays offer a different and fun way to write in addition to reviews.

We're limiting this test to only two categories to help us validate this project's goals before rolling it out to more categories. If you feel that writing these articles can be fun and rewarding, we would love your help in making this pilot successful by contributing helpful essays.

You can find a list of topics for cell phones at:
http://www.epinions.com/topics/url_~elec-Comm-Mobile_Phones-Hardware-All

Video game console topics:
http://www.epinions.com/topics/url_~Video_Game_Consoles

Thanks,

CC