TinyURL and customer reviews
Many of you know besides being the founder and CEO of Advice Network I am a professional photographer.
I started doing professional photography in 2000, and at the time I lived in the Bay Area. For the entire course of my business, online marketing has been one of my biggest drivers of business. I’ve had a website since day one. I’ve bought qualified leads online since my first year. Every year more an more of my business comes from client referrals, but still most of my business comes from people finding me online.
Well, for the past few years, I’ve been putting those things together by inviting my clients to write reviews for me online. All those nice things they say about me, they can write it once, post it a few places, and people can read the reviews for years to come.
If you run a business and you are not already doing this, I recommend it strongly. There is a growing number of people who really trust and look to online reviews.
So where does this “tinyURL” come in? I wanted to email a link to review me on Google Local, but the link looked like this:
Yikes! And you know what the email program would do. It would break the URL into multiple lines, so they would end up clicking:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=l&hl=en&geocode=&q=scho
and the rest would be below in a separate line (or 3) like this:
enfeldt+photography&near=94117&jsv=111&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&
sspn=37.735377,69.257812&ie=UTF8&latlng=37775034,-122430085,
13992495282375185261&ei=UOcpSLuqNYq6jgPc1qyWCQ&sig2=slt5vvWo5UNHlL6zTz5I7w&cd=1
And when they clicked, they would get a “file not found.” and the review would not get written, and I’d have missed a great opportunity.
But at “TinyURL” you enter in the big long monster link, and it gives you: http://tinyurl.com/5zle86. Simple, safe, and email friendly.
And best of all, TinyURL is free (they do have a “donate” button.)
So go ahead and ask the clients who love you to write a review.
Alex
