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It is always a great feeling for an entrepreneur to receive positive feedback from his or her customers. What makes it good is the fact that businesses can take advantage of these recommendations to strengthen their brand’s credibility with other consumers.

Consider Your Assets

Apparently, you cannot generate good reviews unless you have happy customers to write about your products. Furthermore, asking for feedback won’t cover any bad first impression that your business already has. The best thing that you can do is to make sure that any issues bothering your customer must be resolved first.

Ask Politely

Don’t hesitate to ask your customers for a product review after every transaction. But don’t just get good reviews. You have to acquire both types of customer feedback. Ask politely and let them know that their opinions matter for your business.

Respond to Feedbacks Personally and Immediately

Things can get worse if you will fire back at the customer because of his or her negative feedback. The key here is to analyze the problem and resolve it. It would also be ideal if you directly respond to negative feedback rather than doing it online. Properly acknowledge warranted feedback and apologize for what happened, and reward any thoughtful or constructive feedback. Acting quickly and accordingly can turn a negative review into something positive.

Have User-friendly Customer Feedback Section

If you want to acquire product review from your customers, you have to make sure that it won’t be difficult for them to give their input. Take into account the process that each customer will undergo just to send his or her product review. Failure to do so can give a bad implication with your brand despite providing a superb service.

Establish Your Web Presence

Reviews can either make or break your brand online. You might miss a lot if your business doesn’t have a web presence. Establishing your business’ online presence can help you track what people are saying about your brand, since there are customers who always share their thoughts about your products even without prompting.

 

You should also remember that acquiring customer feedback is a numbers game. While your business can generate many product reviews, not all of them are a pat on your back. Even if you’re offering the best products or services, there will always be complainant. Therefore, you have to ensure that your business mostly generates positive feedback. Remember: It’s better to have ten reviews, seven positive ones and three negative ones, than just a single negative review.

While blogs are a great way to leverage your brand, it is also a great tool when it comes to networking. Other than interacting with your audience and content link building, there are other great ways that you can build links with your blog.

What is a Blog Carnival?

As Search Engine Journal’s Ann Smarty puts it, a blog carnival “is a regular topical event connecting multiple blogging based on a chosen theme.” This is an event wherein it includes a number of participants that gets credit most of the time in the form of links and new niche connections.

The Organizer

Of course, a blog carnival cannot take place if no one has the intentions of organizing it. This is usually done by established bloggers on a particular niche. By organizing such event, this could help your blog gain awareness.

Blog Host

This is someone who publishes the collection of links or posts that were chosen to take part in the blog carnival. It is done on the host’s own blog, providing inbound links to participants. In turn, those who were thankful in joining the event could also generate inbound links to the blog host.

Bloggers

These are basically blog owners who write posts related on the blog carnival theme and then submit it for inclusion. Once a particular content is published on the blog host, it will gain inbound links from the site.

Other Benefits of Blog Carnival

Other than generating links, Blog Carnivals is also good when you are looking for something that is worth reading. Such events highlight great posts that are relevant to the chosen theme, which can help improve your own blog in one way or another.

Moreover, this could help you connect with other bloggers in your niche. From there, you can build and establish relationship with them, which could lead to guest posting opportunities. Those who have been blogging for years now know that guest blogging could help them widen their audience reach and generate more links.

However, you have to make sure that you are joining a blog carnival that is well-organized and not something that looks like a link dump. Otherwise, it won’t help your content that much.

 

To sum it up, blogs are not just an online journal or a way to promote your brand. It can also generate links that are helpful for your search engine optimization efforts. All you need to do is know the proper way on how it could also turn into a powerful link building tool.

From Google Product Search, it will be renamed to Google Shopping. Other than the name, it will also impose a new business model wherein merchants have to pay in order to be listed.

Although the new Google Shopping can improve the user search experience, it is also likely to raise new worries that the search engine giant might also cut free listing from its other unit. Regardless, Vice President of Product Management for Google Shopping Sameer Samat, pointed out: “This is about delivering the best answers for people searching for products and helping connect merchants with the right customers.”

What Merchants Should Expect in Google Shopping

Google will run various experiments on its search engine, and they will start by merging Google Product Listing Ads and Google Product Search together. As of the moment, the traditional AdWords text is found above and at the right side of the search engine result page. This also includes the ads listings that show a product’s thumbnail image.

The SERP also provides “free” listing from websites that were crawled by search engine bots, as well as those from Google Product Search. But these listings will be combined on the new Google Shopping box. Thus, it is most likely that only one product thumbnail will appear on SERPs once the new business model rolls out.

What Google Shopping Means for Merchants

Google Product Search currently gets its listings from websites that were crawled by their search engine bots or by retailers submitting their data through Google Merchant Center. The search engine giant doesn’t charge a single cent from it, although that will come to its end soon.

However, merchants can still continue listing their products on the SERPs, although they need to shell out some cash if they want to appear on a dedicated shopping search result. By doing so, they are sure that their products will appear to the right customer.

By adding a paid inclusion program, it appears that Google is shifting towards the industry standard when it comes to online shopping. But this could also mean that other search engines must disclose the paid relationships that they have. It is not just the need to potentially raise a bar, the search engine giant is also trying to find the balance between delivering a comprehensive result and removing the junk that doesn’t give enough signal.

 

Google said that they are still experimenting on the Google Shopping as of the moment, but it will go full steam this summer. By fall of this year, the Google Product Search will be renamed entirely in the United States, and it will roll out to other parts of the world next year.