Today, a Web-savvy prospect who is ready to do business with you is very likely to look for relevant reviews of your company and its products and services before making a decision to do business. So it’s crucial that you pay attention to reviews and take action so that you have good reviews.

Writing Your Own Reviews

There are a couple of ways to write your own reviews. You can set up review sites that appear to be neutral sites for reviews about a product category, neutral and then seed them with lots of reviews that are favorable to you. Or you can log on to review sites from different computers, even use an Internet cafe to get more computers, and write reviews that are favorable to your own business.
But be aware that savvy Web prospects are good at identifying fake reviews. Many prospects today look for the negative reviews rather than the positive ones: what sorts of complaints are made? Are they devastating or minor? So your positive reviews of yourself may be ignored. Even worse, every site that hosts reviews has a strong business interest in posting honest reviews, so every day they get better at finding phony reviews.

Why Not Write Your Own Reviews?

The most important reason to not write your own reviews is because it’s wasted time, it’s time that’s not put into building and running a quality business that treats its customers properly. The time and attention that goes into a campaign to get ever more fake reviews can be used instead to make your customers happier. If you make them happy, then you can ask them for reviews, and you’ll get lots of good reviews that will be apparent to anyone reading them that they’re genuine.

How do you get good reviews?

There are two ingredients:

Make your customers happy. Of course this is your focus anyway. You want them to like your products and services, and you want their repeat business. Remind your employees who deal with your customers that they are talking to reviewers, that the success of the company–and their job–will stand or fall based on those reviews.
Ask for reviews. Be in touch with your customers, and as you’re in touch, provide them a button to click to, say, Like you on Facebook or write a review. Or put a review button into your newsletter, asking your customers to review your offerings.

If you run a hotel, after each stay, send your guest an email thanking them for their business. And in that email, include just one button to provide some sort of review, and ask them to please click it. They’ll be pleased to get the email of thanks, and many will them make that click and give you a review.

What About Bad Reviews?

You will get a bad review. Take a look at any product reviews at Amazon–you’ll see that they even provide a graph of the number of stars and how many reviews have assigned how many stars. It’s common, for a good product, to have mostly good reviews and a few bad ones.
You should pay attention to reviews that you get, and if you can identify a person who wrote a bad review, get in touch with them and try to fix the situation. And then ask for a new, favorable review, or a change, if the site allows it. You’ll have created a happy customer who, in addition to the good review, will also now be recommending you to their friends.
Approach a bad review or any customer complaint as an opportunity to create a happy customer who will help the business. Treat the complaining customer as someone who has done you a favor by helping you improve–really, they have done you a favor–thank them for getting in touch with you and do a great job of solving the problem. Remember that there is no greater friend than a former enemy.