Perhaps it’s more like, “Here, kitty kitty!”?  It very well may be just like herding cats.  There are a number of sites that offer up a “profile” or “listing” of your business that are like an online yellow page ad of sorts.  Many of these services will offer the capability for visitors/customers to post a review of your business.  It’s more than 1 person can manage at this point.

However, help can be found and my friend and Google Adwords expert, Tony Bielat of Front Range SEO and PPC, clued me into a free service from www.brightlocal.com.

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“Review Biz” from Bright Local is a free customer review tool.  Basically, it will (1) Help you find all your listings on sites that offer reviews and (2) Help you drive traffic from your website to those sites to help your customers give you review.  The sites it looks for your listing on are:

Bing, Citysearch, DexKnows, Foursquare, Google Places, Local.com, Merchant Circle, SuperPages, Yahoo! Local, Yellow Pages and Yelp.

Some of these services are commercial, i.e., you pay and some are free.  With a little sweat equity, you can improve your site’s chance of being found AND therefore potential improve your revenue/bottom line.  If you need help taking advantage of these listings and getting on even more, consider looking at this other service that my good friend, Tony Bielat, also clued me in on.  http://www.ubl.org Universal Business Listing

Starting at $30 per year and with packages that go up to $299 per year (which is still a deal–really!), they will list your site on many of the sites above and more.

So, to recap–there are 2 main points to this post:

  1. Manage the reviews and the review process for your biz online.  People will review you, take my word for it.  Make sure you manage your business’s online identity.  Keep on top of it, drive people to it.  Be in control of who is posting by being an advocate for yourself and encouraging your good customers (make it easy for them) to give you a review.
  2. Drive traffic back to your website that are new visitors, new potential customers.  People will search about you before calling you.  Make it easy to find you and easy for folks to find out the really great things about your biz and what your customers say.

Enjoy! and GET TO WORK… on your biz (yes, ON not IN).