Convert Offline

They found your site and they liked it… you charmed ‘em with that ‘about us’ smile… and they are just about to pick up the phone and call you… but they stop and think… “wonder what others are saying about this business.” Then back to Google and they type in:

Review + Your Business

What comes up? Do you know? Is it important?

A recent survey conducted by Nielsen Netratings found: (as quoted on the Kelsey Group Blog)

Favorable reviews in blogs play a key role in local purchase decisions – but only if the review comes from credible sources.

The use of the term blog here is strange, it makes me wonder if the sample is a little more web savvy than average, but it tells me that the review strategy of Fake
review optimization isn’t the way to go.

Small Businesses Should Have A Good Review Strategy In Place

A good review strategy should start with Search Engines. Begin by doing a couple of simple searches in Google that include the word review: 1 for your business name + review and in the second use the business category. The goal here is to find the review site that Google is most likely to return for your business. The review sites Google returns will likely vary by geography and business category. So, play with the geography a little bit, if necessary.

 If you look at this search in Google, the geography I used was a state plus the category. In this case, Insider Pages was the top 2 results.

When I added Paramus, a city in NJ, the top were CitySearch and Yahoo! Local.

These 3 sites will be the first 3 I target.

I will begin with Yahoo! Local believing that if my name is typed in with the word review, this will be the first place Google looks.

First, I will verify my business with Yahoo! Local by doing a search for my business and then click on the update listing link. If you need to add your business go here. In either case, you will need to set up a Yahoo Account. Then make sure you have a listing on Insider Pages and CitySearch.

Next, is to just encourage your customers to go on and review you. Some business owners I have talked to about this are hesitant to bring it up because they don’t know how to do it. Simply, sign up with these sites and add a review. Go on and review your favorite pizza place. Write down each step you had to take to complete the process including signing up in an email. Copy and past the link into that email and save it. Repeat the process for each site you’re targeting. This pizza place will love you.

Some Will, Some Won’t, So What!

Next, just have a conversation with your customer. Ask them if they were happy with the work you did. If they were you have a good candidate. Ask them if they wouldn’t mind reviewing your business online. If they say yes, thank them and tell them that you will email them to make it easy. Send them the email and your done.

When you’re satisfied with the reviews on these sites, you should try and get some reviews on popular internet yellow pages such as Superpages.com and Yellowpages.com. And don’t forget Google Maps.

You might later create a page on your site including all these reviews. Include the town of the reviewer at the end of each testimonial and you will have a page laden with great keywords.

And that’s it, you now have a solid review plan in place.

In this post, I will show you how to add subscribers at a blistering pace; as I have over the past month.

Power Tip #1 - The Awesome Default RSS Widget

This image is from the Google Analytics site overlay, which provides a graphical representation of the links on a page that are clicked most often.

This particular post was viewed 369 times on Saturday; and as you can see the little blue thing is farther to the right on the subscribe link than on any other. Indicating this was the most frequently clicked link on the page.

Now, what’s cool about this RSS widget is that when you click the subscribe link it does not bring you to feedburner, where you could actually subscribe to my blog, rather it brings you right back to the home page. So, you can see… I have effectively trapped my visitors.

The goal here is to frustrate your readers into finally clicking on the smallest rss icon anyone has ever seen.

Another cool feature of this rss widget is that you don’t need to know HTML or any coding at all to change what the link says. So, it would be easy to change the anchor text in this link to read: How to hose yourself 369 times in one day.

Power Tip #2 - Use Search Engines To Get Traffic

Search engines can be a great source of traffic to your blog and attract many new subscribers; so you’ll want to get as many pages of your site indexed as possible. This can easily be accomplished with the default settings of your blog and careful internal and external linking. As you can see by clicking on the image below, I was able to get many of my pages indexed 3 or 4 times. This is sure to help get more traffic.

Power Tip #3 - Multiple Domains

Glance at the image and it’s easy to see how the default set-up of this blog provides an additional source of traffic.

As you can see, I was able to garner a visitor from convertoffline.com in addition to traffic I already get from www.convertoffline.com.

The idiots at Google actually call this canonicalization, because they don’t see the power of an entirely new source of traffic… Myself.

And since I am not currently subscribed to this blog. This alone has the ability to drive my subscriber count up by more than 7%.

For New Bloggers

When you first get started blogging, you will probably hear a lot of crap about usability and seo. And believe me it is just that… crap. Pay it no mind and focus on developing great content.

Also, you will not only want to use many of the tips from this post, but also share them with your readers. As many bloggers are interested in getting new subscribers, and these tips are sure to make your new blog very popular.

Oh! You Don’t Believe Me? - Read ‘Em & Weep

Andy Beard’s Blog On Niche Marketing - Subscriber Count.

VS.

My Feed Count

Now, all I need to do is keep up my torrid pace of adding new subscribers and I should catch Andy in 14½ years.

Edit: 11/07/07 - I finally changed the subscribe link; I hope this does not reduce your enjoyment of this post.  I should only need 13 years now.