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How to Boost Sales with Online Review Sites
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Online review sites such as Yelp, Citysearch and Google’s local search make it easy for customers to spread the word about your business.
Some business owners have found these sites to be a great way to attract new customers and help the owners gain insights about their current customers’ expectations and experiences. But other businesses have been damaged by vindictive or fraudulent posts.
Following are some things you can do to make review sites work for you:
- Set up a complete profile on all the review sites.
- Actively monitor your listings on the sites.
- Encourage your customers to write honest reviews and post them in the directories.
- Make a bid deal out of your positive reviews.
- Learn how to dispute reviews that are fake or false.
- Respond to reviews that you can explain or clarify.
- Mine the sites for insights about your business and about your competitors.
- Become an active reviewer of the companies you patronize as a consumer.
You can monitor the review sites to see what customers are saying online about your business by subscribing to an RSS feed for your review profiles or by setting up email settings that notify you when a new review or comment has been posted. Consumer reviews can be a terrific source of leads and referrals for small businesses. After all, word of mouth is still the best kind of advertising and the hardest to get.
You can see our Google Place page at 
If you want to learn how we can help you get more leads with this method or you are a busy business owner and want us to manage it for you go to TargetedLocal or call us at 404-530-9564.
Facebook Fan Page Notifications With Hyper Alerts Free App!
Posted by: | CommentsOften when businesses set up a Facebook fan page they don’t necessarily have the time to monitor the page regularly for fan activity. Notifications of fan posts and comments would be ideal for so many small businesses and/or new fan page owners.
Fan page notifications have been sorely missing on Facebook. (I always figured it was a sheer volume issue. Could you imagine fan pages that frequently get anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of comments on each post receiving notifications from Facebook? Think of pages such as Vin Diesel, Ellen DeGeneres or Starbucks! That would create a mega notification logjam.)
Many Facebook users have been eagerly searching for a solution. There are certainly plenty of social media management tools and services out there – some free, some for a fee. But, how about a nice, simple, clean email alert any time a fan posts or comments on your wall?
Introducing…
Voila – a beautiful and exciting new app that sends you an email for all posts and/or comments on your Facebook fan page. The app is called “Hyper Alerts” and is currently in public beta. Hyper Alerts was created by Are Sundnes for Hyper Interaktiv in Oslo, Norway.
I must say, I love the graphic design, clean and simple layout, and super easy set up and navigation!
Step 1 – Sign up:
Go here to sign up: http://alerts.hyperinteraktiv.no/
Step 2 – Click the “+ Add new alert” button:
Step 3 – Enter the address of your Facebook fan page:
NOTE: The system does not use Facebook Connect and does not need access to your personal data. Love that!
Step 4 – Select your four settings:
Choose from four different settings: the frequency of alerts, fan posts, fan comments, and your own content. Click save.
Step 5 – Keep an eye on your email!
Even the emails are beautiful: clean and simple with the exact view of what you’d see on your Facebook wall. Plus, they are all text (not an image of the text) so, guess what? Yes, that means your fan page content can now be archived and is searchable! All links are active, too.
Pros:
- Hyper Alerts does not require access to your Facebook account.
- It’s free.
- It’s a beautiful and easy-to-use interface.
- You can easily monitor multiple Facebook fan pages. (“Add as many alerts as you like,” says Hyper Alerts!)
- You can set up multiple alerts for the same fan page – e.g. receive alerts immediately for fan activity, plus a weekly (and/or monthly) report.
- PLUS, you can archive your fan page content! By receiving emails with all your Facebook page content and activity, you now have a *searchable* archive! YES – this is reason enough for me to sign up and just filter the emails to a folder.
Cons:
- Perhaps the ability to reply to fan posts right within your email would be handy.
- Other than that, I can’t see any downsides to Hyper Alerts – try it out and let me know if you find anything not to like about this fabulous app!
Huge props to one of my Facebook community members, Erik Eskedal, for the tip about Hyper Alerts. This blog post is completely unsolicited and unpaid; it’s simply a wholehearted review of the fabulous Norwegian peeps’ great app. I hope they have tremendous success with it!
Other Facebook activity alert systems
Alternative solutions for Facebook fan activity alerts include: the Fan Page Notifier app and Page Notifier app.
Plus, the awesome Postling app which is a complete social profile management system I’ll be reviewing in a future blog post.
In addition, you’ll receive notifications right inside Facebook any time you a) like your own posts or b) @ tag your personal profile in posts. These two methods only cover fan comments though, not fan posts.
There’s also Google alerts which isn’t as reliable, though you might give it a whirl. Try this search string: ago site:http://facebook.com/yourusername. (Make sure there is no space between site:). This will pick up from the timestamp where it always says “xx minutes ago.” Use this method for any keyword alerts too – you’re basically asking Google to search your fan page for whatever you wish. I would recommend against using this method alone.
So, there you have it, a very exciting new app to try out!! Do let me know what you think and if you use Hyper Alerts how it works out for you. Anything else you’d like to see added to the app? Let me know in the comments below!
iHoliday Music
Posted by: | CommentsYes!
This is a band from Northpoint Church using some amazing creativity and apps to create this amazing iBand. Check out the iPad bongos, the iPhone guitar and the enthusiasm of this group…
Happy Holiday Season!
Here are the carols Northpoint’s band played, and the apps they used to play them: “Carol of the Bells” SoundGrid NLogFree Melody Bell Guitarist (Nylon String) iGog? (MoreVox Acoustic 1 sound) Bassist Guitarist (Electric) “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” iGog Bassist Guitarist Pocket Organ Saxophone Musicofx Percussions (Tambourine) “Feliz Navidad” Percussions iGog (Rock Kit 1 sound) Bassist Guitarist Bebot Pianist T-Pain.
Enjoy the great sounds and Happy Holidays!
3 Local SEO Tips that Give Results
Posted by: | CommentsDo you have a business that would benefit for local promotion? Well, that’s not a problem because all you need do is perform site optimization so you can capture that type of local traffic from search engines. It’s one of the easiest ways to get customers knocking on your door and enhancing your business. In this article we shall be looking into 3 simple local SEO tips that you can use right away to see results.
Local SEO processes are not rocket science, but there are some peculiarities that you have to know if you want to do it right. There is a particular approach used in local SEO, and basically it has to do with using content that is relevant to your business on other websites. There are aggregation services for local listings that search all over the web to find reviews, pictures and any related information about your company. One thing you can easily do is get listed, by URL submission, to infoUSA and Localeze.com. You have to make sure you are treating your customers right and not making the error of treating them wrong. It is unlikely that this is a new piece of information for you, but you will find it even more helpful and important now that there are many review sites and social media platforms where clients can post their thoughts and experiences. Irrespective of whether the news is great or terrible, it will spread fast. Thus, to reduce the likelihood of your customers badmouthing you, you need to make sure that you treat them well. If it is possible you should consider over-delivering so that your clients are very happy. You will be successful with this technique if you try to do the most you can. Local search relies on information about a business gathered from a variety of sites and the profile of the business. Thus, if a client has a problem with you offline they could choose to get in touch with you by posting a negative online review.
If you are trying to rank in the search engines for a particular location, it is often a good idea to have your site hosted by a server from the local area. You will gain more SEO points because the search engines will relate the location of the server to your site. This means that you should check the location of the server before you have your site hosted as this can have a big impact.
If you want to get high converting, localize traffic then local SEO is critical, which this article clearly shows. The biggest benefit local SEO has is that it is easy to rank because you aren’t competing against sites from all over the world.
Elements You Should Avoid During Web Design
Posted by: | CommentsAs a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use , the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if your website is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.
When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m not only talking about a good graphical design . A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design — accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design. Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across . Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!
1) Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed .
2) Extra large/small text size
As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics — user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything !
3) Pop-up windows
Pop-up windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of pop-up windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through my pop-up blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a pop-up window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor’s screen. Your website loses its function immediately!
In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!
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