Unlike the thousands of other website out there, this series of articles will give you a layman’s overview of traffic generating principals without getting too technical. Working with contractors, I try to encapsulate information regarding online marketing, simplifing it to easily understood discussions and checklists.

What are some of the sources for you website to gain new visitors?

By clicking on the image, it will open to a larger view that is easier to read. At the end of this brief article, you can download a copy in Adobe Acrobat’s pdf format.

In this example, the shaded area is what we are all used to when it comes to marketing our small businesses. If you continue to market your company with only these, you won’t be as successful. To survive in business today, one must embrace all of the tools in our online toolbox.

In the next article. Small Business Owner’s Overview of FaceBook, we will start introducing you to individual items shown in the chart above.  Real world examples and simple steps to increasing your online presence and gaining new customers.

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There are literally thousands of helpful, time saving tips. Any one of these tips could save you hours of time in a given year.

I’ll post these tips daily, so check back often

Contractor Marketing Tip #1 - Use military time to quickly enter hours in a website.

I’m constantly updating client’s directory listings on websites like YellowPages.com, InsiderPages, Yelp and others. Some allow you to enter your  business hours once and apply to all checked off days. And then there are others, where you must physically enter the hours for every day that you are opened.

So here’s the Quick Tip: Enter your time using the 24 hour standard(i.e., 500=5am, 1700=5pm, 1830=6:30pm, etc.). In most cases this will get you to the exact time without having to scroll through a long list.

And as a bonus…

Quick Tip #2 – Send a Text message with email.

Sometimes it’s helpful to send a text to a client via email. The reason you would do this is to keep a record of the text in your email box.

To send a text via email you need to know the phone number and the mobile phone service of your customer. And for that matter, you can also use this tip to send a text message out to your employees in the field.

In this case, the reviewer mistakenly gave a bad review to the customer because of a similarly spelled company. My customer, ABEL Garage Door, was mistaken for another contractor “ABLE Garage Door.” You might also be in a similar situation if you have a competitor in your market trying to piggy back your success. Or as in the majority of cases, we can’t please all of our customers all of the time. Especially when it comes to those “techie know it alls”, need I digress

All business owners have to take a proactive stance to make sure their reputation remains undamaged.

So the first question one has to ask is “How Do I Monitor How My Company Is Reviewed?” With the answer to this question, we can then discuss damage control.

The easy solution for monitoring your reviews on the internet is Google Alerts. With Google Alerts you can setup a notification that is sent directly to your email anytime anyone mentions your company.

Once notified of a problem, you can take steps at minimizing the damage. I found a great post in Google’s Help Center. While this advice is mainly targeting Google, it also works well with most user review type sites.

Hi Rick

I can understand your frustration. This is only my advice and it could work but no promises. First create some other accounts on review sites that Google pulls reviews from like
Yelp
Yellowbot
Tupalo
MojoPages
Judy’s Book
and ask your customers to give you some honest reviews about your business. Even if the false review still stays there it will push it down the list and people will see it is only once and not everybody.

Second have some other customers simply flag it as inappropriate with the reasons why and leave a good review on Google. Google would expect to have the business owner flag it as inappropriate and will give that little weight in the deletion on the listing but if you get a small group of people who can say this is false it will go a lot further.

It will take some time.

Let me know how it turns out.

Andy – LocalSEOInc

In particular, when it comes to a bad review on Yelp.com, as a business owner with a Yelp Business Owner’s Account, you have the ability to post a public response to a bad review. To capture your business owner’s account on Yelp go to biz.yelp.com

I hope you have found this information useful relating to damage control for handling a bad business review.

I never did explain Google Alerts. With that in mind, I will create a “Step by Step Guide to Setting Up Google Alerts” in another post.

Please feel free to leave your comments and questions below.

Thanks,

HomeBuildR