More credibility for your testimonials » testimonial

Are you adding all your testimonials?

Martin Jarvis — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:07:16 +0000

Having decided that you want to manage all of your testimonials in one place and to get them verified by the people that gave them to you, you really need to make sure that you add all of your testimonials to your Vouchforthis account.

Why?

Each testimonial represents a happy customer who is willing to provide a free endorsement of your product or service – so don’t waste it;
Testimonials generally contain a number of key words and phrases relevant to the content on your website. This can be picked up by search engines to bring additional visitors to your site, and so the more you can get the better;
Seeing testimonials that they have provided in the past can remind your customers just how good you are – and prompt them to contact you again;
Vouchforthis will help you to distribute your testimonials to the places you want them to appear – on your website, in your blog, and on websites such as Business-Scene;
When you add new testimonials they will automatically appear on whichever web pages you have installed our widget, saving you time and making sure that your new testimonial starts working for you straight away;

How?

Adding a testimonial is easy and should take no more than 2 or 3 minutes to complete!

Just log in to your vouchforthis account here… http://www.vouchforthis.com/login/ and follow the links to My Testimonials / Add a Testimonial

Then fill in the details and let us do the rest…. and don’t forget to add new testimonials as soon as your customers give them to you!

November 2010 Newsletter

Martin Jarvis — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:51:32 +0000

200 Members, 450 testimonials and growing!

Since our last newsletter at the beginning of October things have moved on a pace for us. We now have a steady stream of new members arriving daily, and plenty of new testimonials getting added and verified. We have also launched our regular hints and tips service, and we’re pleased to see so many members following the advice to make the most of their membership.

As you can see from the headline we broke through the 200 members barrier during the month and are well on the way to achieving 400 members in our first year.

Are Verified Testimonials really more credible than normal ones?

We have always thought they were – that’s why we built the site, but we thought we should check what people really think.

During the past few months we have been asking your testimonial givers to tell us what they think. A few days after you ask a customer to verify a testimonial we send them an email thanking them for helping you out (and reminding them to verify your testimonial if they haven’t done so) and we also ask them to tell us what they think of the service. One of the questions we ask them is…

“Are verified testimonials more credible than normal testimonials?”

67% of respondents said ‘Yes’, 23% said they weren’t sure, and only 10% said that they didn’t think verified testimonials were more credible. So we know we’re on the right track – and so should you!

Member Focus : Kenneth Tan of Infocus-Group adds over 100 testimonials

Kenneth joined Vouchforthis in early October and has been active in getting his existing portfolio of testimonials onto the site. In fact, Kenneth has already added more testimonials than anyone else. InFocus Group are based in Singapore and provide market research participants to companies in a wide variety of sectors.

We’re really pleased to see Kenneth approach Vouchforthis with an enthusiastic and methodical manner, adding many, many testimonials, nudging his testimonial givers after a week or so if they have not responded, and then displaying a selected number of the testimonials on his site. Kenneth adds new testimonials on a regular basis too. Great use of the site Kenneth – thank you!

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!

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

Until next time…

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Displaying all testimonials on the site

Martin Jarvis — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:23:24 +0000

Whilst vouchforthis is essentially a tool for building a portfolio of testimonials to display on your own web pages and blogs, we think it is important for members and visitors alike to see that other testimonials are being added to see what sort of testimonials are being created.

So we have added a new page… Latest Member Testimonials to display in reverse chronological order the latest active testimonials.

Hopefully, this will attract a little more search traffic to the site as well as showing visitors that the site is active. We’ll update it over the next few days to include upload dates, and hope to extend it further over the next couple of months so that it becomes a full-blown, searchable directory of testimonials helping visitors to search for companies (YOU) that can demonstrate verified testimonials for products and services that they are looking for.

Ultimately, we believe that this will greatly increase the value of vouchforthis to your business.

Even more credibility from Vouchforthis

Martin Jarvis — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:18:45 +0000

A few weeks ago I was trying to persuade a community of website users that getting their website testimonials verified was a good idea (and that they should join vouchforthis to do so!). One of the group raised the point that an unscrupulous website owner could copy the style of a vouchforthis website widget and place it onto his own website, thereby making it look like his testimonials had been vouched-for when in fact they weren’t.

So in order to make it just a little harder to ‘forge’ a vouchforthis widget we have changed the link at the foot of each widget so that instead of giving a link just to the vouchforthis home page we now link to a vouchforthis page which verifies that the person using the widget is actually a vouchforthis member. It even names the member in case the forger tries using a link belonging to somebody else. If a link does happen to point to an invalid member then we are sent an email alering us to this fact so that we can investigate and ask the offending website owner to take the widget down.

Passing products off as authentic when they are not is a problem affecting all walks of business life, from handbags to music to software. At the end of the day we are delighted when website owners try to mimic our widgets, as it shows that they have appreciated the value of our system of verifying testimonials. What they should also be appreciating is that at just £9.99 per year it is far better to own the real thing.

A new order for your testimonials

Martin Jarvis — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:16:00 +0000

We have changed the order in which testimonials are displayed in your widgets. Previously, testimonials were displayed in the order they were uploaded. This means that your newest testimonials appeared at the bottom when displayed on your website. Ideally, we would have wanted to allow you to determine the order in which they are listed, as you might prefer to show one particular testimonial at the top of the list. However, this is too big a change for us to consider right now and so what we have done is to change the system so that when widgets are added or rebuilt (e.g. when a new testimonial is added or when you change the size or colour of your widgets) your testimonials will be listed in reverse chronological sequence. This should have a positive effect on your testimonial display as the most recent testimonials are probably the most significant for your potential new customers.

We think that this is the best default for testimonials displayed on your website, with the newest testimonials being displayed in a more visible part of the browser window.

Please note : you will need to rebuild your widgets manually if you want this to take effect on your websites straight away. To do this, simply go to your My Widgets page and click Edit , Preview and Save against each of your widgets in turn. This will fool the system into thinking you have changed your widget and so it will rebuild them, changing the order of your testimonials as it does so.

Let your website visitors add a testimonial for you

Martin Jarvis — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:33:57 +0000

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 :

We provide you with a choice of graphics
You paste the graphic into your web pages
Your website visitors can then click on the graphic and be brought directly to Vouchforthis where they can leave a testimonial for you
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?

Rewarding you for spreading the word

Martin Jarvis — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:07:31 +0000

We have decided to create a referral scheme to help build our client database. All members of Vouchforthis can participate, and a generous referral commission of £5 is payable for each new paying member that you introduce.

As awareness of the vouchforthis website increases so should the credibility of the testimonials we display – and that means yours too! So please help us to spread the word (and earn some valuable commission in the process) by encouraging your contacts to join by passing your referral code on to them verbally or through emails. Increase your earning ability even further by displaying our adverts on your website.

We think this is a great way of spreading the word about our product, and we hope that as many of you as possible embrace this opportunity to introduce your contacts / friends / colleagues to vouchforthis.

To find out more about the scheme, please visit our Referrer Information page.