Attention Hair Salons & Stylists in Richmond VA: If You’ve Been Following These Posts & Taking Action…
- You are searchable
- You’ve started to build your online reputation
- You’re keeping in touch with your clients and prospects with Mobile Marketing
Now What?
What else can you do online to simply and quickly grow your clientele?
9 Ways to Leverage Your Online Reputation
1. For Visibility and Credibility – Get Reviews!
The most important thing you can do to leverage your online presence is to ask satisfied clients for reviews.
I can’t emphasize the importance of this. With customer reviews, search engines will give you more visibility and rank you higher.
AND you gain something totally valuable – if you say you’re great at what you do carries far less believability than when your CLIENTS say something positive about your abilities. Reviews make you stand out and give you credibility.
You can incentivize clients to take the time to write a review wherever your salon appears online by offering a gift, a free service, or by having a drawing for something they’d really like to have. By whatever means you choose – ask for online reviews!
Where can you list your salon and get reviews? Here are several places to consider:
2. List Your Salon with the Search Engines
Check your listings in the most popular search engines like Google, Bing – make sure they have all of your correct information. Fill out all of the spaces and get FREE visibility.
3. List Your Salon with Directories, Local Listings & Yellow Pages
Develop your local online presence by submitting your website to directories like Google Places, Yahoo Local, and Yellow Pages. Carefully select the categories for submission.
Here’s a highly effective strategy – set up Google Places with a link to your website. Next, when you set up all of your other directories, give the link to your Google Places listing (instead of your website). This linking strategy will build up your Google Places listing – overtime, you’ll rise to the top in the Google Maps!
Don’t spend your money for paid listings. You’ll get better results by staying with the free directories.
4. Turn Blog Posts into Articles for Submission
In the previous post about building your reputation online, we suggested that you start a blog. Your next step is to submit your blog articles to sites like Ezine and Go Articles. Be sure to give the link to your website.
5. Promote Your Salon with Press Releases
Now take those articles and upload them to press release websites like 1888pressrelease, Open PR, and PR Leap. This can give you visibility in Google News. Remember to focus on a problem you solve and the solution you provide rather than on yourself. People want ideas that are relevant to them – remember…
WIIFM – “What’s In It For Me?”. This is natural.
6. Improve Link Visibility with Social Bookmarking
Another powerful way to promote your salon is with social bookmarking. Give a link your blog posts in popular bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon. Add your Keywords to the tags to make sure the people searching for you can find your bookmarked links.
7. Showcase Your Salon with Videos
Just like with sharing photos, you can take videos of your work and make them public in YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion. Try before and after videos. Or the steps as you work. Or a happy client talking about a special event they are getting ready for. Just like with blog posts and articles, post a link to your videos in bookmarking sites and tweet about them.
8. Use Classified Ads Online
Write classifieds ads for your services and submit them for free. Try Craigslist and Myspace for starters.
9. Participate in Ask.com and Answers.com
Another way to leverage your online reputation is to get involved with Ask.com and Answers.com. Log on and search for questions about hair care and give an answer. You can ask questions, too. As always, be sure to include a live link to your website, such as http://yourwebsite.com
Want More Tips Like These?
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