Jason+: A Blog about WordThink

Reviews on sites like Yelp, Google+ Local, Urban Spoon and even Amazon.com are incredibly important to many businesses. If you have a restaurant, you probably already get this. But even if you are a DUI attorney, a divorce attorney, a hair salon, or even a product that isn't local but sells on Amazon, reviews matter. More than ever. Every businessperson who needs reviews realizes that reviews are hard to get.   Why? Because, first and foremost, if you do nothing, the most likely people to review your product will be the angry consumer . For example, I have had a terrible customer service experience with Verizon, and I hate that company so much that during my copious spare time... I am thinking: angry blog post.  Contrast that with some very tasty local restaurants here in Fremont: I had dinner, it was excellent, I went home.  Little emotional energy to induce me to write a review. Angry people often write reviews.  Happy people not so much. As a business...

I am not an expert on picking stocks, though I do dabble in the stock market. One of my favorite ideas is that "Stocks climb a wall of worry ." As someone who teaches social media marketing , consults on it, and has many, many inside connections to real small business marketers "in the trenches" struggling with how to spend their ad dollars, I wanted to share some thoughts about my "wall of worry" about Twitter, Twitter Marketing, and the Twitter IPO. The Wall of Worry About Twitter and its IPO ROI. The ROI (return on investment) for nearly everyone I deal with is always the best for SEO. SEO, of course, is getting to the top of Google or Bing for free, and the reality is that generally speaking when people are ready to buy something they go to Google (or perhaps Amazon) but not Twitter. The ROI on time on Twitter marketing is weak, at best, for more companies. Wall of worry #2: A worrisome sign if there ever was one: who will advertise when the ROI ...

It's the 1st of the month, and time for monthly reports on SEO, AdWords, and Social Media for me and my clients. What is always incredibly striking is the bounce rate . Even a bounce rate of 50% is considered spectacular: which means half the people land and leave in one instant. Many sites run bounce rates in the 70%, 80% or even 90%. Is a high bounce rate necessarily bad? Not necessarily. Many sites are first optimized only on their branded searches - searches that include the company, product or service name. So they have a low bounce rate because they are speaking to friends, family, customers. Then, once they begin to SEO optimize, they get many "new" prospects and these "new" prospects often bounce. They say it takes ten touches to convert a customers; so you may have many customers that bounce ten times before they convert. Thinking Beyond the Bounce Rate Beyond the bounce rate, you want to think about the landing experience. I follow a CEA mo...