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Dealing with Negative Reviews in a Good Way

Anyone who has been in business for a while has certainly had a bad review at some point or another. The review may have been warranted or may have been unfair. What really doesn’t matter is if the review is true, but how you handle it.

Here are two excellent articles to check out for two different ways to handle negative reviews:

The Startling Secret to Getting Positive Reviews for Your Business

Three Tips to Handle Online Negative Publicity

Both articles are easy and fast reading. Here are my tips to add to the topic:

  1. Don’t respond immediately to a review when you are upset or angry. This will do more harm than good.
  2. Think about if the review has some truth. Do you need to change what you are doing to be better?
  3. Decide if you have to respond at all. This is a hard one, sometimes to rise graciously above a bad review is the best path and in other cases to address it head-on is better. Chat with some other business owners you trust to help you decide based on your situation and the review.

Actively start working on a regular basis to get good reviews and post them on your website. You want to make sure that there is a balance of reviews about your business online. Posting good reviews on your website is a great way to start.

I never recommend creating fake reviews. This can get you in more trouble than you need. If you are having trouble getting reviews, try a third party service who will contact your customers for you and even help them write the review about your firm.

If you do get a negative review, address, deal with it, and put it behind you. It is important to realize that you will not be able to please or service every person to their own satisfaction over the years you are in business. Do the best you can, and keep a mind-set of excellence in all you do.

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Google AdWords Advertising Services – Local Start

Sometimes it is not practical for a business to hire a Google AdWords™ account manager. Let’s be real about it, sometimes the fees for account management are too high for a business who wants to just test Google AdWords™ or has a small initial budget.

For this very special type of customer my firm has developed a very special program called Local Start™.

These are the types of clients that would want to consider our Local Start™ Program:

  • Have a 30 day click budget from $100 to $300
  • Want to show their ads in a 15 mile radius from their business location
  • Do not have the skills to self manage and AdWords account
  • Are not interested in having regular account management
  • Are really looking for a turn-key automated option for Google AdWords
  • Wants to have their ads show in Google Maps searches

Our Local Start™ program is perfect for these scenarios. Building an AdWords Express™ account treed off of your Google Places™ account, we help you get the local exposure you need plus harness the massive power of Google to help get the word out about your local business.

Although Local Start™ is not a good match for all businesses, it may be the perfect solution for some that are just now considering Google AdWords™ as an option.

For businesses that really want to test Google AdWords™ at a higher monthly ad spend, need professional help and guidance, we recommend our Quick Start™, Fast Start™ or Power Start™ programs. To find out more about all these programs, please visit our Google AdWords™ advertising services page.

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Google AdWords and the New Auction Insights

Just this last week Google AdWords added an “auction insights” icon to AdWords control panels. On certain keywords (on the keyword tab or keyword rollup found on your campaign tab) you may see a small block graph icon. Tick the box next to the keyword and then click the button called “keyword details” and then select “auction insights”.

AdWords will return a list of your actual competitors and your position in the AdWords auction. The table will show the following data:

  • Impression Share
  • Average Position
  • Overlap Rate
  • Position Above Rate
  • Top of Page Rate

This information is very important and allows you to be much more strategic about your bidding and to understand more fully what is happening in your account. This additional transparency is welcome indeed and I would like to thank Google for providing it.

Here are a few things you can do with the data:

  • If your impression share is high and you are in the top position, you can lower your click cost to have a greater ROI (return on investment).
  • You can actually see the names of the businesses and sites you are competing against. You can harvest these names and do an additional ad group to try to take additional market share away from them. This is a short term approach, but as Google will most likely drive the quality score of these keywords down quickly, but you can bleed off a bit of traffic and boost CTR. It just depends on how competitive you want to be.
  • If your impression share is low and you are not in the top position as frequently as you would like, this may be a good time to optimize and possibly increase your bid.
  • If your impressions share is high, your ROI great, you may want to consider breaking out that keyword and variations of it into its own ad group to get an even higher quality score and even better return.

I have to say that I personally feel that the auction insights tool is a wonderful refinement to AdWords. Knowing who you are competing against and how you really stack up against them by keywords is excellent and a feature I will be using to strategically position my clients in their marketplaces.

For more on how my firm can help you with Google AdWords, please visit our Google AdWords services page for account management options.

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Why Use Go To My PC When You Can Use Live Mesh

On my last vacation, I decided to try Go To My PC as a way to keep on top of my email churn. It is not uncommon for me to have over 1,400 emails on my return from a week’s vacation. I ran www.GoToMyPC.com through its paces and actually liked the product. The problem was I could not rationalize spending $10 a month when I only needed several week’s access a year.

After research, I found that there was a way for me to access my PC at home when I travel that’s free! It’s called Windows Live Mesh. I already used Live Mesh to sync files on my laptop and other computers, but did not realize that Live Mesh also allows me to access my home computer while traveling.

Here’s how you set it up.

  1. Get Windows Live Mesh here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/essentials-home?SignedIn=1 You’ll get it as part of the Windows Live Essentials.
  2. Install Live Essentials on your desktop and your laptop.
  3. Following the instructions in Mesh, sync the two computers as you desire. For me, I simply sync one folder and sync my favorites in Internet Explorer.
  4. When you travel turn on remote access which is on the top of the page on the left on the computer you want to access remotely.
  5. When you travel access over the Internet your Live Mesh account and click to access your previously set up computer.

That’s it, you’ll log in as if you are in a remote desktop setting. Have full access to all programs on your home PC. You’ll just need to make sure that your home PC is on, that’s all.

Easy, simple to set up, and best of all it’s free!