A Great February so far!

We have had lots of new members join during February, and we’re glad to see so many website owners making great use of the site to add, manage and verify their testimonials.

Website Testimonials are great ways to show the World that other people appreciate your work! …and they are even more effective when they have been “vouched-for”…

So don’t be shy - if you have received any testimonials recently, why not get them onto Vouchforthis and get them verified? Have you recently completed work for customers that you thought was worthy of a great testimonial? Why not use Vouchforthis to ask them for one?

Want to look back at previous newsletters?

Take a look at our blog pages - there’s a section for Newsletter Archives as well as ’Recent Changes’ and ‘Known Bugs’ sections.

What’s new this month?

Earn some useful referral income by recommending Vouchforthis

All members are now able to earn referral income by recommending us to the people they know. This helps us to recruit new members, it helps you to earn a little extra, and it helps your contacts to do more with their website testimonials. What’s more, you can do it passively…  Find out more here

Get your website visitors to leave you a ‘vouched-for’ testimonial

You can now place buttons on your web pages inviting website visitors to leave you a testimonial. Any testimonials added in this way will be automatically “vouched-for”, and all you will need to do to display them on your website will be to log in to your vouchforthis account and activate the testimonials… Find out more

We think that these new features will really help you, and hope that you will see the benefit and start using them straight away.

Are you making the most of your Vouchforthis membership?

If you haven’t used Vouchforthis for a while, it’s worth having a quick recap…

As a member of Vouchforthis you can add as many testimonials as you like. We send your testimonials to the people that provided them for you to get them verified. When your testimonial has been verified it will appear with a nice green tick badge to show your website visitors it has been authenticated, but regardless of whether your testimonials get verified or not you can still show them on your website. To add more testimonials, just log in with your username and password and go to “My Testimonials”.

You put your testimonials onto your web pages and blogs by creating one or more of widgets, and then place these widgets into your web pages at the place you want your testimonials to appear.

Each widget can group together one or more of your testimonials, for example to group your testimonials by product or by company, and each can be styled to suit the web page(s) it will be used on. To add your widgets, just log in with your username and password and go to “My Widgets”.

You can preview your widget before you add it to your website making it even easier to get just right before you deploy!

You can use the Vouchforthis to ask your existing and past customers for a testimonial too, and you can now put our graphics onto your web pages to encourage your website visitors to click through to add a testimonial for you.

Hint 1 : When adding testimonials, don’t surround them with quotes or include the name and company of your customer, as we do that for you

Hint 2 : If you want to link to your clients website from their testimonial you only need to enter the url into the field provided when adding the testimonial. We will then automatically convert their name and company into a link for you. This is a good way to “give a little back” to your testimonial giver.

Hint 3 : Don’t be shy about asking former customers for a testimonial. It’s a great way to re-engage with someone you worked with some time ago, and could really boost your credibility. Offer them a link back to their website from the testimonial (see above).

Member Focus

In every newsletter we will feature one of our members who have se testimonial and Vouchforthis website usage.

If you don’t use the website we cannot feature you here, so get adding those testimonials, build those widgets, and start deploying them around the web.

Don’t forget to let us know how you have used your Vouchforthis widgets so that we can add them to our Member Directory. Getting into the directory should increase traffic to your website as our visitors come across your entry and follow the links. Building good quality inbound links to your site is an important SEO activity, so why not make the most of the opportunity?

Chris Rowell - Positive Property Investment

Positive Property Investment is run by a team of experienced Investors who will show you how you can invest in property using little or none of your own money. Vouchforthis testimonials are used by Positive property Investment in their “Testimonials” page, and on their Business-Scene profile pages.

If you think that Chris could be helpful to your business or to you personally, why not get in touch? His company does have quite a few testimonials (most verified by Vouchforthis) and so he must be good!

A Bit About Us (Well, about me at least)

DMJ Computer Services own and operate the Vouchforthis website. I have been in the business of developing software since the late 1970′s – yes, really! and have been running DMJ Computer Services since the mid-1980′s. That’s quite some time given modern standards, and whilst I don’t profess to be as sharp as I was a couple of decades ago, what I lack in agility I more than make up for in common sense and realism.

I now spend nearly as much time discouraging potential and existing clients from developing new websites as I do actually building them. This might sound a little odd, but I have always tended to act as devils advocate, arguing against the business owners who think there website idea is the next big thing. This usually has positive effects – it shows the business owner that I don’t just take on any project because it pays to do so, and means that I am really committed to those projects that I do take on.

So, if you want to be talked out of a software or website project, you know who to talk to!

Seriously – if you want to discuss a website project or want to explore ways of increasing your traffic or improving your conversion rates, please contact us. ]]> http://vouchforthis.com/vouchforthis-new-features-more-members-better-news-for-your-testimonials/feed/ 0 http://vouchforthis.com/let-your-website-visitors-add-a-testimonial-for-you/ http://vouchforthis.com/let-your-website-visitors-add-a-testimonial-for-you/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:33:57 +0000 Martin Jarvis http://www.vouchforthis.com/?p=461 So far, you have been able to use vouchforthis to add and verify testimonials that have already been given to you, and also to prompt your customers to add a testimonial for you. It’s up to you to manage this, and whilst I’m sure most members are pro-active in asking for testimonials where they think they have done a good job, there are lots of situations where this might not be practical. So we have added yet another feature to the website to enable you to passively ask for testimonials from people who visit your website, blog or social media profiles.

You can find out all about the new feature here, but in a nutshell :

1. We provide you with a choice of graphics
2. You paste the graphic into your web pages
3. Your website visitors can then click on the graphic and be brought directly to Vouchforthis where they can leave a testimonial for you
4. The testimonial will be automatically verified, and all you need to do is log in to your vouchforthis account and activate the testimonial if you are happy with it

Why not try it out by clicking one of the sample graphics on the right of this post?

A simple, and we hope, effective tool to help you get more testimonials. As well as receiving testimonials from “casual” browsers of your website for whom you may have previously worked, you can also point your existing customers to your website page and ask them to click the link if they would like to leave you a testimonial. This greatly reduces your own involvement – and you end up with a testimonial that is already “vouched-for”.

Don’t see a graphic that you like? Want something a little more customised for your website? Why not ask us to build one for you?