In the old days (before the year 2000) one of the standard, tried-and-true tricks to increasing your sales was to add testimonials to your advertising…lots of them…detailing specific results.<\/p>\n
Then the Internet started to explode and with it we all got bombarded with an endless flood of advertisements.\u00a0 Testimonials started to lose their power, in part from poor use and believability issues.<\/p>\n
But then along came Amazon<\/strong>.\u00a0 They started listing customer reviews with their products.\u00a0 And the power of other people’s opinions was reborn.\u00a0 Sales started blooming too…so much so that now you can find customer review\/rating systems on nearly all major shopping sites.<\/p>\n It’s a format where people can leave their honest opinions about a purchase…good or bad…and sometimes even debate the pros and cons of a product with other users.<\/p>\n It’s also a format that potential customers pay attention to as part of their research into buying a product.\u00a0 Reading uncensored feedback from past users can go a lot further towards making a sale than cherry-picked, raving testimonials.\u00a0 In fact, one Internet retailer recently replaced their canned testimonials with user reviews (where some of the reviews were negative).\u00a0 They reported a 24% increase in sales…even with the negative reviews<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n The problem however, is that the technology to drive customer reviews (like on Amazon) has largely been available only to the big boys, leaving small business owners in the cold.<\/p>\n But that all changed with a company called PowerReviews<\/strong>.\u00a0 They make customer review software used by the big boys, like Drugstore.com<\/em>, Staples<\/em>, Toys-R-Us<\/em> and more.\u00a0 But they also provide customer review software for the little guys too, with a product called PowerReviews Express<\/strong>.<\/p>\n In a nutshell, it allows any web site selling products or services to include customer reviews on their site…and it starts at only $35 a month.<\/p>\n