All Entries in the "Reputation Management" Category

Is It Really Possible To Increase Sales By Talking Down To Your Audience?

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As sellers, we always have to walk a fine-line when we are talking to our prospective customers.

If we did not know more about a topic than our customers, most of our customers would not be using our services.

Yet, there is a right way and a wrong way to show your prospects and customers how much more you know than they do.

That is a lesson that is lost on some people.

There is a fellow by the name of Dr. Harlan D. Kilstein Ed.D., who is one such person.

His attitude towards the less informed seem to be just dripping with condescension. Even when he tries to make right with his audience, his words are delivered with an air of superiority. (If you have a few hours to spend, you might want to read this thread in a forum. If you only read the first post, you will miss the point, so if you start reading, I recommend you keep reading.)

While I might be better informed than you are on some topics, that gives me no right to talk to you as if you were a child. And the same principle should apply to Doctor Kilstein.

He is a professional copy writer, so some people have suggested that his attempts in this thread were merely aimed at evoking an emotion in the reader that would lead the reader to hang on his every word.

And while that may have been possible in the beginning, at a certain point in the process, the average reader needs something more than patronization to take something positive from the conversation.

When you have such contempt for your audience as to insult them and their intelligence at every opportunity, you end up burning more bridges than you could ever build. And many of those bridges will be forever burned to the ground.

The challenge is to teach our audience something they do not know, without resorting to making them take offense at your delivery of the information.

You would think that I would not need to demonstrate this idea by talking about a man with a doctorate in education, but the good doctor seems to have let his ego get in front of his mission.

There are only two things to avoid in your writing to avoid coming across as an equal to the arrogant Dr. Kilstein:

• Don’t talk about how wonderful you are; and
• Don’t remind people of how little they actually know.

So, is it really possible to increase your sales by talking down to your audience? I doubt it, because hell will freeze over before I every buy anything from that man. You may see things a bit different than I, and that is fine… You are entitled to decide these things for yourself.

Bill Platt

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Why You Should Use HubPages For Article Marketing

HubPages is a great way to market your business through articles. Unlike traditional article directories, when you publish an article at HubPages you are given a ranking based on several criteria that are important to the HubPages team. They look at traffic of your article, the traffic sources for your articles, the length of your article and uniqueness of the content, the number of thumbs up received from other Hubbers, and the overall HubScore of the author. Take a look at my HubPages profile page and you’ll see that I’ve earned the reputation of “Prodigy” with just three articles.

These are important criteria because they determine your reputation and trust factor at HubPages.

There are plenty of reasons to use HubPages for your article marketing. Besides building a reputation for yourself, HubPages articles are viewed by a lot of traffic. Because a lot of other people are using HubPages, you can build a solid reputation by networking with other Hubbers. But you’ll also build link popularity and inbound links to your website from your articles. Unlike traditional article directories, HubPages does provide link juice and every article is a potential inbound link for your website. And another reason to add to these is the ability to earn income through AdSense from your articles as HubPages has a revenue sharing program with its authors. You can also earn affiliate income through Kontera, Amazon.com, and eBay using HubPages articles.

So how many reasons is that to publish your articles at HubPages? Let’s count them:

1. Build author reputation
2. Increase your link popularity through inbound links
3. Drive additional traffic to your website
4. Earn AdSense income
5. Earn eBay affiliate income
6. Make affiliate income with Amazon.com
7. Use Kontera for additional income opportunities
8. Networking opportunities

If you decide to use HubPages for article marketing, be sure to upload original articles. That will increase your author reputation tremendously. In fact, if you upload the same articles that you send out to article directories, HubPages will penalize you so make sure you are publishing original content.

I would recommend uploading your articles to HubPages first then sending them out to article directories if that is your plan. Though I haven’t tested this, I suspect that you may get a penalty after HubPages discovers your articles later. It may not be as big a penalty, but I think it’s possible that it will happen so you are much better off publishing original content always. But HubPages is a great article marketing opportunity.

How To Use Articles For Reputation Management

Reputation management is one of the up-and-coming niche marketing areas for online marketing. The necessity of it is growing and already important. If you have not put together a reputation management plan then you should seriously consider doing so. It should consist of more than just article marketing, however, article marketing should be a part of your reputation management strategy. Here are your important action steps:

• Set up accounts at as many article directories as you can, including distribution services like iSnare
• Write as many articles as you can and distribute them to the article directories (this should be an ongoing activity)
• Establish a Squidoo account on a particular niche and include information related to that niche; be sure to link to your website and blog from your Squidoo page
• Write original HubPage articles and publish them at HubPages
• Write original articles and submit them to other websites in your niche
• Use Google Knol to establish yourself as an authority on your subject
• Publish your articles on your own blog
• At popular social networking sites where you have an account, publish your articles wherever possible; for instance, Ryze allows you to publish articles and Facebook allows you to set up Facebook Pages

The key to reputation management is to start before you need it. Don’t wait until you have negative information about you online. Constant reputation monitoring and management is key to maintaining a positive image online. Articles can very helpful.

Where Should You Send
Article Marketing Traffic?

Article marketing is about building links, traffic, and reputation. If you do those three things well then you’ve got it down pretty good. But what pages on your website should you focus on for links and traffic?

One rule of thumb I like to keep in mind is to send people to the nearest page to where they will actually make a purchase. In other words, get them straight to your landing page with a “Buy Now” button if you can. That takes care of three things:

• It kills buyer frustration before it begins. No one wants to look for the “Buy Now” button. If you send traffic right to where you want it to go without anything in the middle then you are more likely to close sales.
• You build links to your most important pages and that increases their PageRank. Build those inbound links to your most valuable pages because that will make them rise higher in the search engine rankings and you’ll end up getting more organic traffic.
• Builds your credibility. When you make it easier for your customers to buy from you then they will trust you more. They will know that you know how to market your product and will be more likely to trust you and make a purchase.

Article marketing is pretty simple. Build links, trust and credibility, and traffic with carefully places anchor text links in your resource box.

Reputation Management: The Importance
Of A Multi-Tiered Approach

If you Google my name, you’ll find that there are more than 2 million search results for Allen Taylor. In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I’d like to say that not all of them are me. There are thousands of people in the U.S. with my name. I’m just one of them.

But the interesting thing is that out of 10 page 1 results on Google, four of them are me. The No. 1 listing is my personal poetry blog. As a published poet who has been blogging daily for 11 1/2 months, I’ve got quite a following on this blog and I’ve managed to move it up to No. 1 for my name. Given that my name is a very common name, that’s a pretty good achievement.

In position No. 4 you’ll see our sister site, Blog Content Provider. No surprise since I am the manager of that side of our business.

Two steps down is my profile at EzineArticles, where I am an expert author. Though I do not have as many articles published at EA as I’d like, I’ve got enough there it seems that just by Googling my name you’ll find me there.

Fourthly, all the way down at the bottom of the line, is a link to an Internet radio show where I was interviewed by Belinda Subraman for creating my poetry toolbar.

On the next page you’ll find my StumbleUpon profile.

The Importance Of Reputation Management
I share all of this not to boast of my accomplishments, but to illustrate how important it is to do some reputation management on your name (as well as your corporate brand or small business identity) and to use social networking, article marketing, and blogging as search marketing tools. I use them all every day and you can see the results I get.

Now, will people search for my name? I think maybe some of them will. It depends on what they want to know.

As a published author and poet, potential publishers may want to know a little more about me. They’ll be able to find it easily. If I’m ever unemployed (God forbid) then future employers will want to do a background check on me. Employers are now Googling applicants’ names to see what they can find. Potential clients, too, might have an interest. They’ll want to know just who they are doing business with and if they find something they don’t like, it could be a deal killer. Or how about potential creditors? Hmmm?

All of this is to say that if you have not started your reputation management strategy yet, now is the time. Don’t just approach it from a single mindset. Articles are good; I recommend them. But don’t rely on them alone. Use a multi-tiered approach to SEM and reputation management and monitoring to move your personal name and your company brand to the top of the search results so that you promote yourself in a positive light and keep the reputation killers out of your field. You want to be in control of your own image – no matter what business you are in.