This week will be short and sweet. I don't have to tell you how important these are for your business. Reviews and testimonies rarely just fall into your lap, you have to have a system for them.
If you are a local business
and maybe even if you're not, there is Yelp, Google Maps (Google+ Local) and probably some industry specific ones as well. On your Facebook page, if you put your street address in the address section, it will generate a "reviews" area for people to rate your business. Even though I am an online business, I put my street address in, got it going and then changed it to a more generic place. "Along the South Fork, Kooskia, ID."
If you do ecommerce:
I highly recommend Judge.me. You can use it for product reviews as I do, or you can use the "site review" feature where people just review your business in general. It just makes the whole process incredibly easy, which lowers the barrier to getting reviews.
Either way you go, you're going to have to flat out follow up with people and ask for them. Few people will take it upon themselves to write you something nice and say "Oh by the way, feel free to publish this on your site." Ask.
The best way to get reviews/testimonies is to come up with a plan, and have a system in place so that you are always generating new ones. This can be as simple as following up with people after a purchase. If they say they will write something, or better yet, video it, give them a couple weeks and set yourself a reminder to follow up. If they haven't sent something by then, send them a very sweet reminder along with anything nice they said, so they don't have to reinvent their own wheel or any results they told you they had gotten.
You may have to bribe them. If you work closely with them in a service type setting, they will probably grow to like you and want to help you out. In straight up ecommerce, they don't care. You gotta bribe them. A 15% off coupon works for me. 10 didn't really do it, but they hop to it for 15. You can experiment as to what all you need to do.
Writing is not everyone's forte, and many of them will have a hard time expressing what they need to and thinking of everything they want to say. You may have better results by having a questionnaire or survey that they fill out. This also allows them to express some things that you should take as constructive criticism. It also might feel a little better to you to ask for "feedback" rather than "please write me a glorious testimony."
Once you've collected the information from your survey or feedback form, you can then organize their statements, polish it up a bit and make a testimony from it. You'll want to submit your edits for their approval.
Affiliate Marketing
A slightly different take is to have affiliates who have had a good result from your business promoting you. In exchange, they get a commission on whatever sales they refer. They essentially become your paid advertising, which I am much happier with than paying Facebook, Amazon and Google. Most affiliate programs charge you a monthly fee and an additional fee based on the number of users you have. For this reason, you want to wait until the time is right before you set up an affiliate program, although Alice and I just checked out some free wordpress options.
I tried to run affiliate programs off and on before the current and successful one that I have now. It was always too early. The vast majority of affiliate you get will cost you money instead of making you money. It's just the way it is. They think it's a good idea, so they sign up as an affiliate and you pay the fee for them to do nothing in terms of promotion. So I kept shutting these programs down.
The only reason I have an affiliate program this round is Dave Hayes. He started promoting my stuff, and I began tracing thousands of dollars back to him. I started manually keeping track and sent him a check without him ever expecting anything. He was pretty happy about that. It became a regular thing, and so I set up an official account so I wouldn't have to manually track all this, because now that monthly fee was less than my time involved. At that point I approached a few other people who had also been reliably sharing and I knew were getting me sales, and got a core group of "influencers" so to speak.
My advice is to watch and wait unless the wordpress plugin option works for you. You can maybe track it manually, but most people who are in a position to make a difference for your company will expect something more ironclad and reliable.
When you get your program up and running, if you pay based on number of affiliates, I would suggest you write into the agreement that you can kick them out for inactivity. I'm an affiliate for a company where if you have no sales in 90 days, they tell you you have 90 more days to get a sale run through your account or you're out. So really, if someone doesn't have a sale in 6 months, you don't need to be paying for them to be there.
You might also be more picky about how they are going to promote. If this is some random person who thinks they can just drop a link on social media once and be an affiliate, that's a whole different thing than someone who is a blogger in your niche. They at least should have a website that's relevant to what you're doing. Depending on the stipulations of your program, you can decide how lenient you want to be on any of it.
Essential Homework:
Come up with a system for continuous testimony and review generation. Let us know what you came up with.
Optional Homework:
Feel free to write us (Supernatural Business) a glowing testimony below.
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