I highly recommend this for all my friends and clients while the FREE offer remains.

Go ahead and take advantage of this limited time offer.

The importance of online reviews, can not be emphasized enough! If you perform a local search in Google, you will find numerous examples of top performing companies in competitive markets ranking highly on the maps because of reviews.

Some of the social review sites don’t want companies to solicit reviews through bribes or other incitements. But let’s get real! There is one that I know of, begins with “Y” that will hang on to bad reviews for months, and the good reviews disappear after a month. Fair is fair. It’s hard enough to get reviews from your customers.

So, I have created a little form in which you can download and customize it for your use. I suggest if you are a one time company, like a pool builder, that you offer an incentive such as a gift card. And for those of you with ongoing relationships, like a housecleaning service, offering a 10% off your next visit is one of many good ideas.

I know this will help!

One of the biggest hurdles that general contractors have to get past is the trust factor. Are we who we say we are? Will we do what we say we will do? Can we produce what we say we can produce? As a contractor we expect a total stranger to call us, schedule to meet, enter their home or business, tear something apart, then rebuild it to look awesome. That’s asking a lot from someone we just met or talked to on the phone.

That’s what it is all about in the service business – trust.

Today the property owner has ways of getting to know the contractor before ever meeting them face-to-face.

Thanks to social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter, the general contractor can be “checked out” long before ever meeting him. Before the internet boom, you had a square box in the yellow pages, or a flyer shoved into your door as a first impression to the contractor.

Today we can look at companies and people in a different way. We can see the contractors work, comments they have posted, who they associate with – and maybe that trust can be increased a little by getting to know them better. And there is more that we can do.

In searching for the right contractor that you can trust you probably want someone near you. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way that we could finding someone that we could trust nearby. There are ways to look up general contractors in your area. Here are a few popular sites.

Google , Yahoo, and Bing all have local search directories. Yelp is another. These local searches may help pinpoint contractors near you to help get started on your quest for the trusted contractor. Are there any other ways to finding a service business? Many more. How about the most trusted source of finding a contractor ever – Word-Of-Mouth.

That’s right, people are most comfortable getting a referral based on what their friends and family have experienced. Someone they know has already tried using the contractor and was happy with the results. Don’t have friends and family that have used a general contractor?

Example: Customer Testimonials

Maybe the contractor has a list of past customers for you to contact. Don’t be afraid to make contact with the past customers, it may help you build that trust. And in this business, trust is very important to both you and the general contractor.

What is Social Media?

Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.

It’s more of a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way broadcast like traditional media. Another unique aspect of social media is the idea of staying connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people. – Ron Jones, SearchEngineWatch.com

Why do you care?

FaceBook is the internet’s number one most visited website, exceeding Google Search. It’s rapid growth is explosive. Started in 2004 in a dorm room at Harvard, it was a way for a group of college kids to interact. Today, FaceBook is the definition of how customers are interacting with companies. It’s real time, and social. Companies can no longer dismiss it as just another time suck! Yes, I did say that Let’s face it, we all want results without wasting our time. How would you like to grow your business like this?

FaceBook allows people to connect with friends and associates on a professional and personal level.
On a personal level, you create a profile for all to see for the purposes of:

• sharing with family and friends*
• with members of special interest groups
  (small business owners, religious, hobby, sports, political, etc.)

This information can be shared with a select group of friends or everyone who stumbles upon your profile.
On a professional level, FaceBook is used to promote your company. Through advertisements, company updates, photos of your work and ongoing conversations to your connected fans.** Most importantly, it’s a tool to drive visitors to your company’s website.

3 Major Componets of FaceBook

Personal Profile – Your FaceBook Account
Groups - Network of like minded individuals sharing a common interest
Pages – Your company’s profile.

Implementation

1. Setup a FaceBook account
   • Personal email and password
   • Add a photo of yourself
   • A brief bio
   • Add info about where you went to school, your work, hobbies, etc.
   • Do you want to share this information publically or privately?
   • Do you want to be updated via email, text messaging, or when you are online?
   • Send out invites to people in your address book.
2. Setup a FaceBook Page
   • Create a business profile complete with logos, photos, contact information, etc.
   • Invite all who will help you to spread the word about your company.
   • Invite customers and associates to interact with your company by offering special discounts, event invitations, cross promotions, etc.
     Cross promotions – is a non traditional approach to expanding your company’s reach. As an example, let’s say you have a favorite hair salon or barber you frequent. Tell your friends and colleagues about their wonderful service. In turn, they will do the same.
3. Connect with Groups
   • Join other groups, this can be both professional and personal.
Note: This is not necessary to get started.

Conclusion

It’s time to embrace social media as a means to gain credibility and authority for you and your business. With active participation, you will be able to promote your company and gain new customers. Additionally, you will be able to increase your sales to existing customers by offering additional products and services that they might be aware you offer. Lastly, you will be able to expand your network to industries and other companies who’s customers would benefit from your products and services.

WARNING: Don’t let this scare you, by thinking it will take time away from your busy schedule. There are tools available to integrate with your company’s website and cell phone to make this as painless and non-techie as possible.

FaceBook is a necessary ingredient to business survival. Having a business website will not get you customers without promotion.

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Download your FREE copy of 3 Components of FaceBook mind map (Adobe pdf).

The combination of various factors attribute to your website’s decreased visibility.

• Fresh content
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Saturation

While these terms may seem “Greek” to most small business owners, once explained they are really quite simple to comprehend.

To understand, you must first have an idea of the basic concept of how customers find your company on the internet. One of these methods is called Direct Traffic. This is where one of your customers enters your website into the address bar of their browser.

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources. Wikipedia
Common Browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Blackberry

A second method of web site traffic is Referring Sites. A good example, is any internet Yellow Page site. A customer will search for your company and will be directed back to your website via a link.
And the third most common way is via the search engines, Organic. This method by far has the greatest potential for new clients. The 5 biggest search engines are (listed by percentage of users): Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, & AOL.

To rank highly on these sites, a website must be optimized. Optimization in a nutshell, is the process of catering your web pages’s information for it to be found vial the search terms commonly used by your audience (clients).
Books are written on just this topic alone. Let me give you a quick example. If you were selling “spark plugs”, a web page devoted to spark plugs would have to compete with all the major brands – Bosch, Champion, AC Delco, etc. That is only the beginning! Add to that, all of the major auto parts stores – Napa, Kraegen, Pep Boys, etc. The likelihood that your website will be on page one of the search engines is ZERO!
On the other hand, if you had a page that discussed the benefits of “Bosch BMW Spark Plugs” your chances of ranking increase. Taken one step further, what if you had a page listing all of your brands and wrote specifically about “Spark Plugs in Reno Nevada”? A number one page ranking for consumers looking to purchase a spark plug in Reno, NV would now be within reach. (This practice of targeting longer phrases to drive traffic is commonly referred to Longtail Marketing)

Search Engine Optimization allows your potential clients to find you.

Another factor that has been responsible for decreased traffic to your website is saturation. The percentage of your competitors with websites has been exponentially increasing. Added to this is the number of competitors who were once called associates. Many companies struggling to survive have added services and products that were once outsourced to companies like your own.

Critical Things You Must Do To Generate Traffic To Your Website

1. Provide Fresh Content - Every time you update your website, the search engines have a reason to come back and visit. With increased visits, you will have more pages from your website listed on the search engines. Quick question, how likely will your website be found if you are only listed once for a given search term? Versus, having 10 or more pages for an equivalent search?
   Contractors and other small businesses that work with a consistent flow of new clients have an easy means of adding multiple pages for a given search. This is accomplished by blogging or discussing a completed job in one or two paragraphs. You can read more about this tactic in the article WordPress Revolution for Small Business Owners.
   To emphasize my point, let’s just say you bought a brand new home. You move in and do nothing! The landscape quickly overgrows, the dirt and debris accumulate and very quickly your new home looks like manure.
   Are you expecting different results with your website?
2. Authority - To gain the status of an authority in any market, there must be others willing to recommend and promote your products and services. Newspaper articles, television appearances, referrals and the likes, help establish you and/or your company as an authority.
In today’s market we can not overlook the authority given by user review (Yelp, Angies List, Google reviews, etc.) and social media site (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Take a moment to look at any local search business listing on Google. Those companies with the most user reviews, consistently rank the highest (are displayed at the top of the list.)
3. Get your site listed!

When working with clients, I have found many to have a pretty website that is showing up on one of the major search engines, but not the others. What about all of those other potential clients that aren’t using the search engine that your website is listed?

And that is just a start! You need to have your company listed in not just the search engines, but social media sites, internet yellow directories, business directories, and with mobile search GPS and local directories.

Why is this important? Imagine for a moment, you have a stunning billboard offering a $100 dollars to anyone that calls. You’d be overwhelmed with phone calls! But is that really true? What if your billboard was on some dusty one lane road in the middle of the Arizona desert?

Same scenario, you now have 50 of the same billboards in all 50 of the top cities in the US (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, …) What do you think your phone traffic will be like now?

Listing your company and website in multiple locations in the internet is like having those 50 billboards!
The downside, is this can be time consuming and expensive to accomplish. I know too well the time it takes to just list in one directory. For me, it takes about 5 minutes per site. And I have all the tools to get it done quickly via copy and paste, etc.

Good news, you can accomplish this yourself with patience and time. Or you can have our construction marketing agency do the work for you for an incredibly low price.
Enough of the self promotion…

Let’s recap: Your website’s traffic is constantly being eroded by increased number of competitors (Saturation)
More importantly, smarter competitors who understand the value and necessity of a holistic approach to on and off line marketing.

3 of the most important things you can do to ensure your website is being found by your potential clients

• Update your site often
• Capture reviews from your clients
• List your website in as many quality locations as possible
  WARNING: If you are selling water heaters, listing your site on a kitchen gadget sales page, won’t get you noticed BUT it will hurt you.

Be sure to visit us often for great free tips and advice on marketing your company on and offline. Sign up for FREE for our newsletter with other great tips and advice.
We are always welcome to your comments, questions and feedback. You may comment by clicking the link below.

There has been a recent trend with all of the major search engines, that you need to take advantage of now. That trend is local search. Going back as recently as 8 months ago, when searching for your company on the internet, a person would have to enter your company’s name and city in the search box. What if the customer knew you were a general contractor, but forgot your company’s name. The same sort of search would be made “general contractor sacramento”.

Local search has changed!

Today, search engines have gotten smarter. To find a roofer in your locality, all one would have to do is enter the term “roofer” and depending where the client was located Google will display a map with 10 options. That too has changed, Google has upped the ante to include just 7 possible choices. This has made it critical to for you to ensure your presence, otherwise you’ll get lost.

I’ve written before about local search, social media and website optimization as sorely needed tools for any business looking to get found on the internet.

Well today, I have good news! You don’t have to spend a fortune to accomplish high rankings in local search. Frankly, most company’s offering similar services are newbies in local search and charge “big bucks” for their website optimization services. That would be great, if you are looking for top rankings in a broad market. What I mean by that, is getting ranked highly for the term electrical contractor means you would have to compete with all of the contractor directories and national organizations.

What’s missing is a laser targeted placement in your local hometown, listing your company and your specialty. And come to think of it, wouldn’t it be nice if you were a dentist, let’s say, and you were listed in the top spot for “emergency tooth replacement”. We all know not many people are searching for that particular service, but when they do, they are willing to pay a premium if your comapny could be found. The same analogy could be used with a roofer, “emergency roof replacement”.  This is where a targeted local search campaign can reward your company with bushels of money!

Until now, if you wanted to take the time to list your company with 40 or more website directories and yellow page sites, you would have to spend a minimum of 10 hours! I know this to be true, because this is one of the most important ways to get your company listed and ranked highly with search engines. Using this strategy alone has quadrupled or more the number of visitors to my clients’ websites. The downside has always been the time it took to get listed.

The good news is, after spending numerous hours of submitting and systematizing my work for my clients, I have been able to offer an affordable option. Starting today, for an annual fee of just $199 I can have your company listed in all of the major search engines and over 40 internet directory and mobile search sites.

So where will my company get listed?

LOCAL SEARCH / MOBILE

Yahoo! • MSN / Live.com • Google • AOL • Citysearch • YellowPages.com • SuperPages • WhitePages • Yelp • Local.com • Quebecor/canoe inc. • InfoSpace/Idearc • Ask • BlackBerry/RIM • infoUSA • Express Update • Acxiom • Dex • iBegin • Insider Pages • OpenList • Yellow Book • Yellow Page City • Yelp • Disney • Topix • VP.com • Zingy • Deep Data • AllPages • LocalMatters • BeanPool • HelloMetro • OneCallNow • Search Iniatives • Switchboard.com • Electronic Directories (Yellow Pages, Inc.)

GPS Navigation / Mapping

MapQuest • OnStar • tomtom • Lowarnce • TeleAtlas • DigiWalker • ALK • ViaMichelin • Zenrin

411

LSSI • INFONXX • V-enable • TellMe

Some list, eh?

I don’t want to turn this blog into a sales page, if you would like to do this yourself, I just provided a great list of websites to go to and sign up and submit your company. If you would like to have our company submit for you, then you’ll have to visit our client services website by clicking here!

In the meantime, I hope this helps to understanding how you can get your business found on the internet. Please feel free to leave us your comments. If you would like to speak to me personally, click the “Call Me Now” button on the right hand side of the page and I will be happy to speak with you.

Did you know that your business is listed on Google Maps?

Did you know that unscrupulous people can hijack you map listing and Steal your customers if you don’t protect your listing? Practically every small business is listed on Google Maps. This is great. Millions of people use Google everyday and they can now use it to search for local businesses. Google has become the digital answer to the printed yellow pages for many consumers. It’s easier, faster, and can provide more information for the consumer and it also offers the merchant a very inexpensive way to promote their business. Among other things, merchants can add photos and videos. It’s almost like getting a free full page ad in the telephone book or a free commercial on TV. Sounds great! The only problem is that it is possible for anybody to hijack your Google Map Business listing if you don’t take the necessary steps to protect it. Look How Easy it is to steal your Google Map Listing For those not familiar with Google Maps, navigate to Google. (You will need to be logged into a Google account to do this) Then pick a business type and city, for example “dog grooming + your city”. Click search and the top ten listings will appear beside a Google Map at the top of the page.  If you are one of these businesses in the top ten search results you are in a very enviable position. These are the businesses that will get the most attention from potential customers. These are the businesses that customers are going to call first or investigate further to learn more about the merchant. And since these businesses are in such an enviable position, these businesses are key targets for sabotage, hijacking, or both. Here’s how the bad guys do it

Go back to your results for the above search “dog grooming + your city”. Pick a listing toward the bottom of the list that doesn’t have an associated website and click on it. To make sure you pick an appropriate listing for this demonstration click on listing that has maps.google.com to the right of it instead of a web url. When you click on the business listing, an info page for the business will launch, if not click on more info. On this info page, right beneath the phone numbers are some links. One of the links says Edit. If you click on the Edit link a new page launches and there is a white balloon with another menu for the type of edits. They are:·          Move marker·          Edit Details·          Remove place·          Flag as inappropriate The malicious editing of any one of these details could severely harm your business. If somebody moved your map place marker customers might not be able to find you. If somebody flagged your listing as inappropriate it could turn into a real nuisance. And if somebody edited your details and changed your phone number or completely remove your business listing from the map, that could be catastrophic. Stealing Your Customers

Let’s say you have a local flower shop. You have an optimized business listing and you are in the top ten search results. Now let’s assume that there is an unscrupulous florist on page 2 of the Google Map listings and nobody is calling him. All he would have to do is click on the Edit Details of your Google Map listing and change your telephone number to his. Customers would think they are calling you, but they would be calling your competition and you would be losing business.  Or a malicious competitor could just remove your listing from the map. To do this, all they would have to do is click on Remove Place and have your listing removed from the map. One might think that nobody would do this because it would be so easy to catch the culprit. After all, if they hijack a listing, there information is now on the listing and they would be easy to catch. But this isn’t the case. Peruse the Google Maps Support Group forum and you will see that this kind of behavior is rampant. So What Can You Do to Protect Yourself

Before answering that question, another question might be why does Google allows this? I can’t really speak for Google but it is my guess that Google allows this to help the public at large. Maybe there is a school or store that is closed or has moved or changed phone numbers. A good person could edit the listing and update the information for to make the map more accurate. Google probably hopes there are more good people than bad people. Google might also permit this editing because it is relatively easy to prevent the problem. All you have to do to prevent somebody from tampering with your business listing on Google Maps is claim your business. Follow the same steps described above to edit your business listing, but instead of editing, click on Claim your Business and follow the steps.  When a business map listing has been claimed, if somebody tries to hijack it they will get a message: “This listing has been claimed in Local Business Center and can only be edited by the owner”. This should prevent most hijackings and other digital vandalism. So if you haven’t claimed your business do it now. Don’t delay. Do it before somebody else claims your business listing and prevents you from claiming it. The consequences of failing to act could be dire. Also, if you claim your business you can take the steps to optimize your Google Map listing so that it appears in the top ten Google Map search results, if it isn’t already there. More information on do this can be found at my website.

Is your Google Map Listing in the top ten search results?It could be. We can help.

Al Remetch
website: http://www.MyMapInfo.com
blog: http://www.MyMapInfo.wordpress.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Al_Remetch
http://EzineArticles.com/?Small-Business-Owners—Is-Somebody-Stealing-Your-Customers?&id=2147798

74.1% of all consumers in the United States use the internet to find and locate companies – Nielsen Online

In today’s economy, if you aren’t marketing your company on the internet you are losing business to your competitors who are.

How To Get Listed, Updated or Delete Bogus Listings.

There are three main types of internet web sites

• Local Search Engines
• Online Yellow Pages
• Local Social Media

So what are these and why are they important.

Local Search Engines - Over the past year or so, all of the major search engines have made changes in the way they display the results for local businesses. They all have gotten smarter. What do I mean by smarter? When a user types in a search, for example “roofing contractor”. The search engines will not only display the top “Roofing Contractor” sites, BUT they will also provide a local listing of companies based on the searcher’s location. They are able to do this because every computer connected to the internet has an unique address or IP address. Here are some examples.

What you notice, is the IP address identifies the Country, Region, City and Zip Code (if in the USA) for any computer connected to the internet. What I haven’t shown you in the above table, is it also indicates the Longitude/Latitude. See sidebar for more information.
Here are a couple of examples from the major Search Engines.
GOOGLE – local search is combined with the rest of the internet results.

BING (formerly MSN) – does combine local search with the rest of the web like Google, but in Bing’s case, it is the first result.

YAHOO – unlike Google and Bing, does require a location keyword. This example if for the search “roofing contractor roseville ca”

Online Yellow Pages - Sites like YellowPages.com and SuperPages.com offer a typical yellow page style ad. Those listings with logos are paid listings

Lastly, Local Social Media - These sites include user submitted ratings and reviews with the listings. It is important to note, you could have bad reviews which will affect your company’s reputation. It is important to monitor your company’s online reputation! In another article, I will take you through the steps to monitoring your company’s reputation using the service Google Alerts.
For the most part, these sites all have an online submission form. Typically this takes approximately 10 to 15 minutes each to submit. Below you will find a listing of some of the top websites to list, update or delete your listings:

LOCAL SEARCH ENGINES
	Get listed on Yahoo!
GOOGLE LOCAL	Google Local Get your copy of a free report with step by step guide.
	To add a free listing on Local.com
	To add or update your listing, you need to submit to infoUSA which provides the data for MapQuest

INTERNET YELLOW PAGES
	Get a free listing.
	Add or edit your listing
	Add or edit your listing
	Claim your listing

LOCAL SOCIAL MEDIA
	To add or edit your listing
	Sign up for a free account
	Sign up for a free account
	Sign up and get listed

These are just a few of the popular sites to list your company.

In today’s economy, it is more important than ever to expand your company’s online presence. With a little bit of time on your part, you can harness the power of the internet to drive more customers to your company.

Be sure to check out our complimentary 30 page guide to getting your company listed with Google Local Business.

If you would like to have our experts list your company to all three of the top internet search engines and 7 other internet directories and local social media sites visit SiteDesign.HomeBuildR.net We provide a very affordable service to help expand your company’s presence on the internet, with or without a website.

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

Try as you may, the leads are simply not ring in on your phone or banging on your door!

I created a special report to take advantage of Google, with or without a website. You’re going to want to read this complimentary new report right away. It’s hot off the press today!

This special 30 page e-book includes step by step instructions for you to utilize the resources of Google to get your business noticed.

No business can expect to survive without embracing the internet. With this special report, you can start today.

If you would like to have your free copy of this special report, please fill out the form below.