Customer comments online help your business succeed and grow in several ways:

1. Reviews play a huge role in helping people decide if a business is a good business. 71% of US consumers look at online reviews to determine if a business is a good one, according to a Brightlocal.com survey.
2. Customer feedback is independent proof that your work has real value. This is very persuasive and convincing to people looking to buy.
3. Online reviews are highly trusted. When prospective customers see the good reports from others, it increases their interest in buying as much as a personal recommendation, says Brightlocal.com.
4. Reviews, especially in Google (Google Places, specifically), increase the visibility of your business in search results, according to search optimization experts. A review creates its own listing in a search result; the more places you’re reviewed, the more opportunity you have to show up in a results list.
5. Customer feedback that is genuine will be unique, making your business stand apart from your competition.

You don’t even need to have a website for customer reviews to help you build a reputation and reach more prospects. Google Places does not require a website for you to create a listing that puts you on the map. Google and other sites host reviews for all kinds of businesses, even those without websites of their own.

So, how do you get online reviews?

Important: First, make sure you’re listed! If you’re not listed in the top local business directories, now’s a great time to do it. Here are 3 leading local business listing services where you can enter your listing for free:

• Yahoo Local: Search for your business on their Local Listings home page. To add yourself, go to their signup page and create your free local listings account.
• Google Places: This service puts you on Google Maps. Your business listing can include photos, video and even coupons. Go to maps.google.com to sign up. Be sure to go through the process of claiming your listing so you own it.
• Yelp: This local business directory functions as a review-sharing center and a search engine. It is increasingly popular and people do use it when shopping for services and products. Check for comments at yelp.com. If you’re logged into Facebook, Yelp can use your profile to speed up the signup process on their signup page.

Getting a review involves asking directly and politely

Ask your customers for reviews. Also, make it very easy for your customers to get to the page where they enter a review.

Here is how to make it easy for your customer to give you a review:

1) Look at the email address you have for each customer. If the customer’s address shows @yahoo.com, this person already has a Yahoo account. Ask this person for a review in Yahoo — they will not have the extra step of setting up an account, which makes it more likely you’ll get a review. Likewise, customers with @gmail.com addresses are good ones to ask for a review in Google.

2) Send your request in writing. Use email. Include a link to your listing, so all your customer needs to do is click the link. If this is not easy for you, explain briefly how to look up your company name at yahoo.com or maps.google.com for an easy way to find your listing and add a review.

3) Writing is hard for just about everybody. It takes work. Make sure you give your customer an idea what you need them to write about. Don’t put words in their mouths — of course you don’t want to tell them what to say. But you can suggest they focus on what problem they were dealing with when they called you, and what you did to improve things.

You are likely to be very glad for the time you spend getting feedback and reviews from your customers. Comments of all kinds help you improve your business. Plus, research shows that online reviews from strangers count almost as much as recommendations from friends when people are looking to buy.

Reviews have a very strong influence on converting shoppers to buyers. They serve you best when undoctored and free of influence from favors or payments. Customer reviews build trust in your business like nothing else can.

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Coke wants you to pursue your happiness with their drink.  So they tie happy feelings to their soda by using the same words over and over.  The feeling is like the sugar that gets the message in.

The Danger of Going too Far with Your Favorite Phrase

When you launch your own product, you may want to accomplish the same thing. Say you have an information product on how to create banner ads.  You want people to feel confident they can create banner ads that sell, using your system.  Let’s call the hypothetical information product the Banner Ads Confidence System.

Then you describe your guide.  Every time you refer to your product, you call it the Confidence System.

What is wrong with that?

The danger is you risk making your web page much harder to find.  People search for help with an astounding variety of words.  There are probably hundreds of ways to phrase the question: “how do I make banner ads that people want to click on?”

If you rely on your catchphrase instead of a variety of terms, your page will rank poorly in search results for every search that uses other words.  People look for help using their own terms.

Choose Words to Help People Discover You First

Maybe you already know it’s important to use a variety of words in any page you want people to find by searching.

What you may not know is how wide a variety of terms people use to search.

People Use an Astounding Variety of Words for the Same Thing

Quick story.

I was helping a client create a first-time campaign using Google AdWords Express.  This is a super-simple version of AdWords.  You provide a budget, and a business area, and Google determines the words it will use to serve the ad.

The business area is floor refinishing.

So how many ways can you say: refinish hardwood floors?

I wrote down about 10 or 12.

When I looked at the report a week later, Google found and suggested dozens of possible terms.

And when I look at how people found this site online, which is optimized for installing and refinishing floors, I found 90 different search terms.  These are from real people who were searching for floor refinishing 90 different ways

Get Discovered, Sweeten with Familiar Words, Then Add Branding

Summary:  Of course you want to choose your own words to describe your work. Working in words with the right emotion, energy and tone is half the fun of writing about your offerings.

But don’t limit the help that plain words give you by replacing everyday terms with your preferred ones.

The first job your writing must do is lead people to your page. Second, they must spark the interest to read it.  After you’ve gotten eyeballs and interest, then you can start branding.

Hey, everybody.  GFXTown.com has a great example of how to use a star rating system to let your visitors sort out your best content in a list, automatically.

Visitors who want quick help finding a free image to use, or a specific Photoshop lesson will find useful, relevant help on this site.  That’s thanks to GFXTown’s use of the GD Star Rating System WordPress plugin. The sidebar of top content, rated by stars, is so helpful for showing what previous visitors found most useful on the site.

One of the biggest complaints I hear about people who  visit WordPress blogs:  the scope of the articles is hard to see at a glance.  One business colleague put it this way:

I don’t like just reading through the posts in order of appearance, I prefer to scan a list of topics and read articles that are most relevant to me.

And I had just looked at the GD Star Rating System plugin for a client.  I didn’t choose it.  That’s because the plugin page doesn’t really show at a glance how useful it can be.  Glad to see someone else figured it out.

Many plugin developers create wonderful tools, but then don’t do them justice with screenshots.  It is so important to show the simplest most obvious front-end benefit.

(Don’t get me started on marketing skills of WordPress Plugin developers.  Some of them have self-promotional energy to spare, and others seem to be completely in the dark about making it easy to see the benefit of using the plugin.)

Are there other ways to list top content?  Sure. I have used a highly-rated popular posts plugin myself.  But it didn’t really engage people like a 5-star rating system does.

There’s something about stars that tell you what’s hot at a glance.  If you are developing a lot of content, and you’d like to help people help themselves, consider a star rating system to showcase your most beloved posts.

Unless your readers actually dig into your content, even your best articles are dead on arrival.

What makes people read? An attention grabbing headline.

How important is the headline?

Without a hypnotic headline, your message will perish unread.

In the book Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy spells it out with numbers:

“on the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headlines sells your product, you have wasted 90 per cent of your money”.

Copyblogger’s Associate Editor, Jon Morrow’s recent post dramatically shows us how to see and make power words work to engage readers.

In Sex, Lies, and the Art of Commanding Attention Morrow urges us to use the power of words that trigger strong emotional reactions.  Power words, he explains, are “words that pop out at us and grab our attention” because they’re wired to emotional anchors.  “Sex” and “lies” are two such words.

Are you worried that throwing emotion-laden words into your headlines will cheapen your work?  Do you hesitate to deliberately trigger emotions before the intellect of your readers?

How to Use Power Words with Integrity

Here is Morrow’s argument for loading headlines with power words that rivet your readers’ attention:

You only have half a second to grab their attention…. All you have time to do is trigger an anchor that’s already in place.

Attention is an increasingly difficult asset to gain.  So, power words give writers who use them a vital advantage over those who don’t.  They tie reading the message with pursuing our best interests, without us even thinking about it.

Is it possible to find power words that agree with more modest aesthetics or appeal to an impulse other than “sex”?  Let’s look at Morrow’s examples and see if clean, noble power words can make for attention-grabbing headlines.

Here are his examples from Copyblogger’s own powerful posts, with emotion-triggering words marked by an asterisk:

The Most Dangerous* Threat* to Your Online Marketing Efforts:

Five Grammatical Errors* That Make You Look Dumb*

5 Crippling* Beliefs That Keep Writers Penniless* and Mired* in Mediocrity*

Here’s the power word list:

• Dangerous
• Threat
• Errors
• Dumb
• Crippling
• Penniless
• Mired
• Mediocrity

These words work because most of them trigger fear.  Scary things us prompt us to find protection with the nearest tool at hand – like the immediate solution in the words that follow.

And these are perfectly respectable words.  There is plenty of strong emotion to trigger without resorting to mention of sex, lies, or anything else you or your readers might find offensive.

The most convincing argument Morrow makes to urge us to consider power words are the retro-makeovers he gives the titles with the power words removed:

“5 Beliefs That Make It Harder to Write” is the triggerless version of:  5 Crippling Beliefs That Keep Writers Penniless and Mired in Mediocrity

I’m convinced that “check headline power” should be a permanent review point for my own writing going forward.  What about yours?

There are so many important factors – publishing mechanics, social media, blogging, Search Engine Optimization, creating landing pages, looking at visitor statistics, writing engaging content, developing a target market, strategy for Google Adwords, developing products….

Does your head spin?  I’ll admit it – all the dazzling facets of Internet marketing make me quite dizzy sometimes.

Here’s a free guide that simply blew me away as a source of sanity amid all the clamor.

It’s from a marketing advisor to the (growing) fringe – Tad Hargrave – who runs a great site called MarketingForHippies.com

If you want 195 pages of espresso-rich marketing advice (take it in small doses) — download his free e-book. You get it free as a bonus for subscribing to “emails from time to time.”

Among the top most helpful and inspiring bits in it

•  Hargrave’s vision of the Conscious economy – made of locally active, cooperative people who want to live a good life and give back — who value building relationships and sustainable profits
• The rationale (no — the plea) for  fair-minded ‘conscious’ entrepreneurs to succeed and build the new economy – and therefore to learn to market with integrity
• Lessons in creating marketing strategies that attract prospects and open conversations (as opposed to manipulating people and closing sales)
• 2 Self-assessments at the end, where you score yourself on a dozen “marketing horrors” and the health of your core relationships, and find out how to fix things yourself.

It speaks to a lot of problems we all struggle with in trying to understand the people we want to help with our business.

Go get your copy and share what you think.