More credibility for your testimonials » newsletter

October Newsletter – Record new members, but why so few testimonials?

Martin Jarvis — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:37:00 +0000

A Bumper September

We’ve had a great month in terms of new members – almost 50 new members joined us during the month, and October looks like it will be better still. This is great and a sure sign that vouchforthis is gaining traction, but the next big challenge is to get as many members as possible to really start using the system in anger.

Vouchforthis a great tool, helping members to save time whilst improving their credibility, and plenty of other people back this up too, but the big question is…

‘How do we encourage people who already have incredibly busy schedules to spend their valuable time to set-up and use their account fully?‘.

We’re looking at ways of making the whole creating-a-widget process much easier in the future – such as giving you a range of pre-built widgets that you can choose yourself instead of having to build one from scratch. More about this in our next newsletter.

One initiative we are going to launch straight away is to start sending all our members regular tips on how to get the most out of their membership. Our thinking is that if we send you a quick tip that takes, say, 5 minutes to action and which would help you understand the system better, you would be more likely to engage more regularly and therefore increase the benefit that your membership brings.

Expect your first tip soon, but rest assured you can alter the frequency to ‘daily’ or ‘monthly’ (or ‘never’ – if you really don’t want them!).

In the news – Bogus Holiday Scams

You’ve probably read about the increasing number of people who are booking holidays online and then turning up to find that they have not, in fact, booked a holiday at all and have been conned out of their money. This is nothing new, but evidence does suggest that it is on the increase, and that it is not just affecting holidaymakers but all sorts of customers who purchase goods or services online.

Whilst there is unlikely ever to be a solution that protects 100% against this type of fraud we do think that website owners will increasingly need to think about the level of reassurance they can give to their site visitors that theirs is a genuine business. Clearly, there are a number of ways to achieve this – Testimonials are a good way of doing this, but getting those testimonials verified by Vouchforthis is even better!

Member Focus : Alan Cole of AJC Business Management adds over 20 testimonials

Alan joined Vouchforthis in September and has been active in getting his existing portfolio of testimonials onto the site. Alan runs AJC Business Management and provides business strategy expertise to SME business owners and managing directors all over the UK.

Alan has added his Vouchforthis widget to his Business-Scene profile, which you can see here, along with more details about Alan’s business if you would like to get in touch…

Alan Cole Business Profile

A different member is profiled in our newsletter every month. We’re always looking out for those of you who use Vouchforthis a lot, or who use it in an innovative way.

Tip : Let us know which websites you are displaying your Vouchforthis testimonials on and we will add you to our members directory, giving you increased profile and the possibility of additional traffic to your website.

Remember : If you don’t use vouchforthis (and don’t tell us how you use it) we cannot feature you here. So get adding those testimonials, build those widgets, and start deploying them around the web, and maybe you will be featured next month!

About DMJ

DMJ Computer Services own and operate the Vouchforthis website. We build and operate other websites too, and help website owners to deliver more traffic to their websites by using good SEO techniques.

WordPress is our current favourite platform, as it enables us to build good-looking, functional, robust websites for clients very quickly and at a fraction of the cost of a traditional website, whilst at the same time delivering a great solution for website owners to make future modifications to their website themselves without incurring further development expense.

If you would like to discuss a website project or want to explore ways of increasing your traffic or improving your conversion rates, pleasecontact us.

Until next time…

Martin Jarvis, WordPress Developer and SEO expert

Vouchforthis : Your May Newsletter

Martin Jarvis — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:29:26 +0000

Tell us how you are using Vouchforthis

Tell us how you are using Vouchforthis and we will add you to our Member Directory – generating more traffic for your website. You might also get to feature in our next Newsletter. If you have not already told us how you are using vouchforthis, and as a little additional incentive, let us know what page(s) you have installed your widgets on by the end of May and we will add 3 months to your subscription absolutely free!

We will also gift an additional 3 months membership to the person who adds the most testimonials to their account between now and the end of June – so if you have been meaning to dig out those old testimonials and add them to the site, now is the time to do it.

You can see the most recently added testimonials on our new Latest Member Testimonials page. We hope to further develop this so that it becomes a searchable directory of testimonials that allows visitors to look for testimonials for products / services and locations, helping more people to find YOU. More about this soon!

You are using Vouchforthis… aren’t you?

Many businesses register with us, but then don’t go on to use the full range of our services. Your vouchforthis account summary (see below) will tell you what stage you are at with your membership. If you are a little confused about vouchforthis and would like some help, please get in touch with us.

Member Focus – This Month : Business-Scene

With 25,000 businesses and 11,000 Events listed Business-Scene is a great resource for helping small businesses to get noticed and to find new customers.

Business-Scene gets lots of testimonials from members who have attended great events, or who have been happy with the bookings Business-Scene has generated for the events they have listed, or who have achieved positive results from listing their business in the Business-Scene directory.

Business-Scene uses vouchforthis in a number of innovative ways to ensure that relevant testimonials are shown on a number of different pages on the site…

New member sign-up highlighting the benefits existing members have gained

Testimonials received from members attending Business-Scene Connections Events

On their main Testimonials page

The way this has been achieved is to create multiple widgets, including only those relevant testimonials in each widget, and then displaying each widget on the appropriate page in the website. It’s actually easier than it sounds – really!

In addition, Business-Scene members can enter their vouchforthis widget id when editing their business-scene profile, which results in their widget getting automatically displayed as part of their business profile… See my own profile as an example here.

About DMJ

We think of ourselves more as “web-presence” builders these days rather than pure web designers / developers, preferring to use existing technologies to deliver cost-effective results in a timely manner rather than re-inventing the wheel by building websites from scratch. WordPress is our current favourite platform, as it enables us to build good-looking, functional, robust websites for clients very quickly and at a fraction of the cost of a traditional website, whilst at the same time delivering a great solution for website owners to make future modifications to their website themselves without incurring further development expense.

If you would like to discuss a website project or want to explore ways of increasing your traffic or improving your conversion rates, please contact us.

Vouchforthis : How are you using the website?

Martin Jarvis — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:51:16 +0000

It’s been a good March for Vouchforthis

Here we are at the end of March already. Have you had a good first quarter of 2010? Whilst we have been very pleased with the number of new members that have joined during the past few months (62 members and around 100 testimonials added since January) we are a little concerned that after an initial burst of enthusiasm many members fail to come back and regularly manage their Vouchforthis accounts.

What’s wrong with that I hear you ask?

Vouchforthis is a powerful marketing tool for your business, and if you don’t use it to its full potential, for example by regularly adding new testimonials or asking recent customers to add a testimonial for you, then you could be missing out.

To help you see what position your Vouchforthis account is in we have introduced a personalised account manager which shows you just where you are with Vouchforthis (see right). Over the next few months this tool will be developed further so that it automatically generates personalised suggestions for improving your account to help you make the most of your Vouchforthis experience.

This months top tips

Earn £5 for persuading your friends to join Vouchforthis – find out how

Tell us where you are using Vouchforthis and we will add you to our Member Directory - and you could feature in our Newsletter

Member Focus

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.

Katherine Davison – Epiphany Training

Epithany Training offer classroom and workplace software training to small businesses. Katherine has implemented her Vouchforthis widget on the Epiphany home page, and has perfectly matched the colour scheme of the widget to the Epiphany Website, and also displays her testimonials on her Business-Scene profile.

If you think that Katherine and Epiphany could be helpful to your business or to you personally, why not get in touch? They do have verified Vouchforthis testimonials and so must be good!

A Bit About DMJ

We are great fans of WordPress, the well-known blogging platform, and are using it to build real websites (not just blogs) for clients who want a quick, cost-effective, visually attractive solution to their website needs. These days we see ourselves less as IT developers and more as Web Presence Enablers, helping clients to use technology that already exists to deliver their requirements in an efficient manner – why re-invent the wheel?

Here are a few of our recent WordPress projects :

Crowdwise – A question and answer site with an extensive polling solution

French Interest Website for English Speakers

If you would like to discuss a website project or want to explore ways of increasing your traffic or improving your conversion rates, please contact us.

We wish all of our members and subscribers a Happy Easter!

Vouchforthis : New features, more members – better news for your testimonials

Martin Jarvis — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:14:00 +0000

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.

Version 2.0 is here

Martin Jarvis — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:21:53 +0000

Introducing Version 2.0

It’s been a busy start to 2010 for us, and we hope it has been equally successful for you and your own businesses. We have put the new version of the Vouchforthis website live over the past week and are acting like proud parents wanting to show our new offspring off to you all.

What’s New in this release?

The move to release 2.0 was prompted more by a desire to come up with a look-and-feel that was easier on the eye than it was to improve on the functionality. Our launch release needed to prove that the site worked – which it did – so we wanted to make the site look better (which I think it does) and to move to a framework that made future enhancements easier. That said, there are some new features that you might want to take a look at…

We have a nifty new slider control on the home page to get the benefits across a little better than before
We have integrated a blog into the main site so that we can start to build a good repository of useful information, let you know what we are working on, and what issues there are with the site, as well as using it to announce new functionality as it happens
Once you have added your testimonials and created your widget you can now preview your entire widget BEFORE adding it to your own website. This will help you to fine tune things like the size and colours without risking it on your own web page before it is ready
You can now use the website to ask a former customer to provide a testimonial for you. When your customer responds the testimonial they provide will already have been verified.

We have lots of new functionality on the way, and will let you know about this shortly.

Are you making the most of your 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 to the site. We will then 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”.

The method for getting your Vouchforthis testimonials onto your web pages and blogs is to create one or more of our widgets, and then to place these widgets into your web pages. Each widget can be used to 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”. As mentioned above, you can now preview your widget before you add it to your website making it even easier to get just right before you deploy!

Hint 1 : When adding your testimonials, you don’t need to surround them with quotes, as we do that for you

Member Focus

In every newsletter we are going to feature one of our members whose 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?

Lynn Tulip – Assessment4potential

Lynn runs a Recruitment and Career Support website, helping people to develop professional and life skills to achieve the best outcomes for themselves. Vouchforthis testimonials are used by Assessment4potential in their “What our clients say about us” page, and on their Business-Scene profile page.

If you think that Lynn could be helpful to your business or to you personally, why not get in touch with her? Her company does have quite a few testimonials (many verified by Vouchforthis) and so she must be good!

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

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 their 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.