HOW TO: Build Your Business with Testimonials

If you look through websites selling products and services, it’s not surprising to see testimonials that boast how good their service is. Testimonials have the potential to influence any potential buyer into reaching a decision to buy what you offer. The right use of testimonials both have positive and negative effects in your business and could be long term or short term and have the tendency to make or break it depending on its use.

But, hey, almost everyone has testimonials on their pages so its use has led to consumers casting a shadow of doubt towards their authenticity. But who wouldn’t because we’ve seen how others are using fake testimonials to make their business look respectable in the eyes of the public. Given this fact that not everyone trusts what they read online, how can you assure potentials customers that read the testimonials believe what the testimonials say.

Get Real. Don’t Fake It

Truth shall and will always prevail. Honesty and transparency should be a mantra to everything you do as a web entrepreneur and this starts from making sure that the testimonials you feature on your site come from real people whether in the same industry or those who have personally tried any of your products or services.

Make it Believable

One of the biggest mistakes of entrepreneurs is not the act of featuring neither too many nor too little testimonials but featuring the most absurd and outrageously looking ones. People love seeing testimonials as they give them an idea about what people tell about a certain commodity. As social media increases in popularity and influence in our daily lives, opinions of people have become a powerful way to reveal how useful and life-changing a product or service would be if you decide to purchase it.

You can avoid this by featuring testimonials from people who have an active presence on the web and whose profile has nearly a complete description of what he or she does on a daily basis. Those with blogs, microblogging account such as Twitter, business, or just those who are well known in your niche are all great candidates to produce a trusted testimonial.

Where Exactly Shall I Put it?

For most people, the homepage is the preferred location  to put your testimonials. It can be effective if done in the right way. But people nowadays just hate hard-selling so make sure that you follow your instinct and evaluate by putting yourself in the shoes of people who visit your website. You can also try asking yourself the following questions as your personal checklist for the appropriateness of the location of your testimonials:

• Does it look annoying?
• Is it really necessary?
• Can I put it somewhere else?
• Is it cluttering my site?
• Does it make my site look cheap?

You could do some testing by placing it either on the front or on several pages of your site to impact your project’s bottom line. For others, they put it on a page where they deliberately sell their products. In any case, you yourself could identify where exactly is the right place for the testimonials to be added based on where you think it will have the most impact

Truthful and meaningful testimonials speak about you, your product and services. But more than featuring testimonials, a truly useful product or service will make all the difference. And if your product satisfies a lot of people, great-looking testimonials will never be hard to come by.

Related articles

• Why You Should Use Online Video Advertising for Business (famousbloggers.net)
• Creative Ways to Get Links from a Reluctant Target – Whiteboard Friday (seomoz.org)

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