Three Things You Can Do For Online Reputation Management
I’ve worked with a guy who is pretty good at online reputation management.
In this article, I’ll talk about three things that this guy does to protect the online reputation of his business. None of the steps are particularly difficult and none of them resort to using scammy blackhat marketing techniques or anything.
They’re mostly to do with structuring your site and writing strong material, which is what this site is all about.
Background On The Site
The site in question is in the health niche. There’s a single product, which sells for $99 a month.
Anyone who has worked in the health niche knows that there are a million scammers and a billion people willing to yell, “Scammer!” at anything. Literally anything. Even if you say, “Eat a diet consisting of fresh fruits and vegetables with organic meat,” you’re going to get nutjob vegans telling you that you’ll die and people who’ll tell you that eating fruit will kill you too.
Anyway, the business in question is pretty reliable, as things go. Hundreds of reviews across multiple platforms suggest it’s a good product and not a super-duper miracle cure.
The guy who runs it does a lot of things right. He uses his Swipe file of facts which he collected from Google Scholar. (You’re welcome, by the way.)
Most of the information you’d need to change your life is available for free and he uses a simple funnel system to give you a basic introduction to the science and solution. After the basics are delivered, the single product is suggested as an upsell.
The branding is generic health guru but not overly so: a lot of “Big Science Profiteering” and the like, along with “You can fix your own life!” meme messages.
I bring this up for context: Here you have a business that’s doing the product and general branding correctly, but is in a niche that’s a target for brand damage and fraud accusations.
So, what does our company do in this scenario?
First Stop: Master The Call-To-Action Game
The most obvious thing that you should start with so far as online reputation management is to master your call to action game.
Let’s say you have a recurring product like the example I gave above. You might have 100 subscribers. That doesn’t seem like a lot, although income-wise you’re doing great.
It’s also enough that you can overcome most online reputation issues quite easily just by changing your calls to action.
Instead of having all those subscribers get the same call to action as new folks, have them do something else. In its simplest form, you can even say this.
“Join my mailing list. If you’re already a member, why not consider letting me know how you feel in the comments!”
Ultimately, a big problem that websites at the moment have is that they’re too static. There’s no point in asking most of your recurring visitors to join your list, because they’re either already on it or don’t want to be on it.
Regardless, you might change up your calls to action (You could use something like Thrive Leads for this) in your after post sections. Examples:
- Join our mailing list (default)
- Join the FB community/like our page
- Leave a review on Yelp!
- Let us know about the product in the comments section
The business I mentioned above does this. Every so often, there’ll be a case studies post (and I’ll get to that in the next section.) In the case studies, the after-post widget will often be, “Hey… this is a great story about how our product is awesome. If you’ve got a story, let us know on [X review site.]”
If you have 50 positive reviews on most sites, you’re fine.
Reviews And Case Studies
When people want to know if your product is fake or not, they’ll look up reviews of your product. Now, in an ideal world, everyone would be fair, impartial and you wouldn’t have to worry about this.
In reality, it’s best to pre-emptively strike. Online, you do this by securing testimonials and writing case studies.
Of course, the little SEO trick of creating a category called “[Your Product] Reviews” and alt-tagging all the testimonials as images will help you control the Search Engine Results, but the important thing is that your case studies become part of the marketing strategy you employ.
If you’ve followed the advice above, then you will have plenty of testimonials.
The reason that people don’t get testimonials is largely because they don’t ask for them. In a lot of cases, I’ve started writing sales letters for clients, asked for testimonials.
“We don’t have any!”
I ask them to get some, and they almost always get some.
If you have testimonials, then there are plenty of uses for them in every stage of your marketing campaign. Online Reputation Management is one of them. They should be visible and what your potential customers see when they’re sceptical of your business.
Of course, this all works best if you sprinkle in a little magic ingredient with your case studies.
The magic ingredient for the example business is SEO disguised as humour.
Add A Little Humour
The biggest thing that our example business does – and the one you should steal – is that the owner takes criticism and makes a point of addressing it.
When people have a great question, it becomes a new blog post. For instance, “Your product doesn’t work for diabetics!” as a criticism will be answered with, “Here’s how to use our product if you’re diabetic.”
But what does this have to do with humour?
Well, if you think about the negative SEO keywords that a person could use to damage your business:
- Is X A Scam?
- Is X Fraud?
- Are X A Liar?
- Does X Work?
- X Doesn’t Work?
- X Refund
You can spice your case studies up using those terms, and rank for them. This not only helps you should anyone ever look up the term, but it also helps make the case studies interesting and less obvious in their bragging rights way.
So instead of, “Here’s how Cassie lost 15lbs” and a straight review… you could write, “Is Our Product A Scam? If So, Then How Did Cassie Do THIS?”
Write the article as incredulous, while using her testimonial as social proof.
When it comes to online reputation, it’s like any other reputation: It’s emotionally, tribally based as opposed to logical.
If you use plenty of testimonials, then you have the logical side down. The emotional response is dealt with by you light-heartedly pointing out how your product obviously works and moving on from that.
Final Thoughts
The above are three interconnected ways to improve the digital profile of your business without really doing a lot;
- Collect testimonials from happy customers
- Create a site structure to make reviews/case studies prominent
- Write light-hearted takedowns of any unfair criticism using humour and your testimonials as proof that the naysayers are incorrect
Throw in some basic SEO knowledge, and you’ll be able to create a powerful library of content that’ll increase confidence, push troublesome pages out of site and increase conversions.
All without doing anything stupid or hiring a spammer.