Review portals are sites that collect opinions from customers and publish them for others to leverage when gauging a brand or business’s reputation. The principle is based on curating the wisdom of the crowd and ensuring reviews of products, services or companies can provide value even with paid reviews, biased reviews and brand management teams trying to influence these review sites.
Usually, reviewers give one to five stars, optionally write a text or share a picture. There are plenty of dating sites online. Some are industry-specific, others are free to use, and some charge a fee. When looking at free sources of review information, popular review services like Yelp, TrustPilot and even Google Maps take the lion’s share of review traffic.
Why reviews are so important for your company
Today commerce is not limited to your local area, and consumers are spoiled for choice. More choices are great for competition, but weeding out the best is a game of trial and error. Reviews and the associated portals provide a decisive marketing tool to distinguish yourself and your company from the competition, to increase traffic online and in-store and to convert it into loyal customers and sales:
Visibility and brand awareness
A potential customer is looking for a “sports shop nearby“, or a tourist wants to visit the “best Mexican restaurant” in town? Potential customers are no longer asking the next passerby but are looking by themselves on the relevant sites or search engines. The more reviews you have, the higher you appear in the results and the more favourable customers feel about your brand, even if they’ve never been a customer.
Purchase decisions and customer trust
Reviews from other customers create a feeling of security for every potential buyer. Instead of relying on one person’s experience, you draw from a range of experiences throughout the years to help you shape an opinion of what to expect. Compared to paid advertising, a customer places greater trust in the opinion of others and makes better-informed purchase decisions.
Interaction and customer loyalty
For reviewers, online reviews are an easy way to get in touch with a company directly, especially if they had a bad experience. If the rated company reacts correctly to positive and negative criticism, the customer feels that they are being taken seriously and will be happy to come back. A company’s reaction to reviews also shows others that customer appreciation is a top priority.
What is Apollo?
In bitcoin, there is a mantra of “doing your own research” or DYOR, but being committed to research and finding resources to form your opinion are two different things. Social media sites can be carefully curated, ad campaigns, and press releases and only emphasise the positive about a company, brand, product or service.
The real valuable research is often buried in Tweets, Reddit Posts, Quora submissions or blogs that don’t get much visibility and makes the task of research that much more laborious when it comes to bitcoin. Since there is no “bitcoin company” defending the brand and ensuring that anyone associated with the brand acts based on a certain standard or set of principles, you tend to be left in the wild west when exploring products and services to use.
When you consider that in bitcoin, you’re dealing with money that can easily be removed from your possession if you make a mistake, the stakes are even higher when it comes to using services like exchanges, wallets etc.
If you’re entering the bitcoin ecosystem and you’re looking for sources of information to draw on, it can be tough. You can easily be led astray by some influencer, podcaster or paid promoter if you’re centralising your knowledge base around a few compromising actors.
Instead of relying on people with misaligned incentives, relying on the hive mind of plebs willing to try out products first-hand and give their brutal unfiltered opinion is a much better source of information.
Apollo aims to fix the scattered pool of available bitcoin experiences by providing a platform that curates bitcoiners experiences and rewards them for taking the time to share their reviews. Anyone can create an account on the site and share their opinions:
- For every review you post, we’ll send you 1,000 Sats
While those who use the service to find information on products and services can “boost” certain reviews by upvoting them and paying the reviewer for their efforts.
- Every upvote is worth 10 Sats.
Everyday plebs worldwide are trying out different bitcoin products and have valuable insights to share, and you can find their hot takes on Apollo.
Is Apollo free to use?
Yes, Apollo is free to use; all you need to do is head to the website and sign up; once you sign up with your preferred method, you can start submitting reviews.
What do I need to get started using Apollo?
All you need is a smartphone or laptop, an email address or a Lightning wallet. You can create an account using one of three methods.
- Sign up with an email
- Sign up with Twitter
- Sign up with Lightning
Once you’re set up with an account, you’ll receive 500 sats. You can use these satoshis to upvote valuable comments and drive more “signal” to the best reviews. If you’re keen on netting a few more satoshis for your efforts, you can start creating reviews on products and services you’ve used.
Once you submit a review, it is sent for moderation, and you’ll receive satoshis for each approved review.
As you stack sats to your custodial account with Apollo, you can withdraw it to any Lightning Wallet you prefer to use or spend it somewhere else.
Categories available for review
Now that you have an account set up, you can opt to browse through the featured categories and find products or services you’ve used and review them.
Categories include:
- Mobile wallets
- Custody Services
- Newsletters
- Exchanges
- Nodes
- Desktop wallets
- Hardware wallets
- Loans
- Rewards
Alternatively, you can search for the brand, business, product or service you want to review and see if they already have a review listing page available.
Note: If a business is unavailable in one of the categories above, you can submit a business, and the Apollo team will review your submission. If it all checks out, the business will be added to the preferred category, and you can go ahead and provide a review of the product or service.
How do I fund my Apollo account?
As of now, the only way to find your account is through sign-up satoshis and the satoshis your receive for approved reviews. You cannot fund your Apollo account with external Sats to upvote other reviews. However, the team at Apollo have stated that they will implement funding options in the future.
How do I withdraw my funds from Apollo?
The Apollo application is a custodial service, so any funds you earn in there are retained by them until you withdraw them to your wallet. To enable withdrawals, you will need to perform the following actions:
- Confirm your email
- Review a product
Once you’ve earned enough satoshis, you can withdraw them to a wallet of your choice.
- Head over to your profile on Apollo
- Select the Withdraw option, and the Dashboard will open
- Submit the amount you would like to withdraw
- Use your LN-URL or Lightning Address and withdraw the funds to your preferred Lightning Wallet.
Payouts are currently available via the bitcoin Lightning network, which is ideal for conducting micropayments.
Who would benefit from using Apollo?
If you’re researching a specific wallet, for example, you’ve probably ventured into blog articles, tutorials and YouTube videos which are often introductions to the product. Adding reviews to your research, you get a more in-depth look into problems others face and the benefits that other users highlight.
These reviews can provide valuable information on things to avoid and products to choose from based on your preferences. You can even interact with reviewers to get more information or discuss certain issues in the review in the comments section.
For consumers
If you have some free time to spare and want to share your thoughts for a few sats, who will resist using Apollo? Especially if you feel a business has not lived up to certain expectations. Who wouldn’t want to get paid 1000 sats to leave a scathing review of a bad experience?
For businesses
As for businesses, unless you’re an outright fraud or scam, it’s always beneficial to have places where customers can review your product or service. While most brands send users to Facebook and Google as a review management tool, you can add Apollo to your ORM (Online Reputation Management) stack and build another piece of digital real estate online that speaks favourably about your work.
Take reviews with a pinch of scepticism.
While Apollo has added micro-transactions and a reward system for providing content users find helpful, like all review sites, it still has to deal with review manipulation. Fake reviews paid reviews, and affiliated reviews by staff will always be an issue. While they can be diluted out by real customers over time, they can still affect customers’ perceptions.
In future, there could be ways to reduce the effects of these manipulation tactics, like attaching your reviews to your wallet via an LSAT and having a reputation score based on a range of on-site and off-site metrics.
Get the app
There you have it, another application you can use to try out Lightning, earn some satoshis and expand your bitcoin experience. If you’re new to the Lightning Network and you’re only getting started with your wallet and all the things you can and should do, it can be overwhelming but take your time to learn more about each app and why you would want it added to your Lightning stack.
Earning sats is a great low-risk option since you’re only trading your time for a few satoshis, which you can then use to fill your wallet and try out other Lightning-based applications.
If you’d like to try out Apollo or want to learn more about it, we recommend checking out the following resources for your research.
Are you a bitcoin and lightning fan?
Have you been using Lightning to make micro-payments? Stream sats or engage with apps? Which app is your favourite? Have you tried all the forms of Lightning payments? Which one do you prefer? Let us know in the comments down below.
