Blog – Page 85

Too Busy to Advertise Online?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Some customers tell us that they WANT to sign up, but they just don’t have time to do it. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to take an active role in the promotion of their own business.
We understand that you’re busy, and that being a small business owner often entails a hectic schedule, but if you don’t take the time to actively participate in promoting your business as accurately as possible, the consequences can be disastrous!
No matter how many jobs you have lined up or how complicated your schedule has become, it’s critical that you take an active interest in the information circulated on the Internet regarding your company. So shuffle your calendar or take a quick break, and spend a little while focusing on how your company is being promoted on the web. Remember, the content generated and distributed by an online advertiser on your behalf DIRECTLY reflects on your company and represents your brand.
If you allow inaccurate, low-quality, or just plain wrong information to spread out all over the Internet, the message you send to potential customers is that your reputation and professional image are not important to you in the slightest. Customers will assume automatically that these errors and inaccuracies are an indication of how you conduct yourself as a general rule, seeing them as symptoms of an overall lack of professionalism and customer service.

Web Advertising: How Much Time Should You Spend?

So, if taking a little time to sign up for a program that promises to create a web presence for you (in the form of a website, advertisements, etc.) is to the benefit of your company, how long will it take? The answer varies from business to business, but you can be certain it’s more than two minutes!
Consider it this way: Could you walk up to a stranger on the street and describe each and every service you offer in just two minutes? Probably not! So why is it fair to expect a third-party advertiser to understand all the nuances of your business in that short an amount of time?
Here at Prospect Genius, it doesn’t take long to sign up, but we do make sure we learn all about your business. The time you invest at this stage gives our team more ammunition to promote your business online, in the end helping drive maximum traffic back to you.
Just how long does it take? Well, in our experience, when a new client signs up with PG, the initial interview typically takes between 20 and 30 minutes. The follow-up interview usually lasts another 10 or 15 minutes. If you’re a chatty person, or your company offers a number of different services, you could spend up to 90 minutes on the phone with us going over the type of work your business does and what makes your company unique.
Everything that you tell us about your company is the fuel we need to make sure your business is represented accurately and promoted efficiently on the web, ensuring you get the most out of your new online presence.

Food for Thought

If a web advertiser says the signup process will only take 30 seconds, or even just 5 minutes, shouldn’t you be concerned? How will they learn anything about your company in that period of time? Especially if all they want is your billing address and credit card number, the red flags should go up.
At Prospect Genius, we take the approach of using in-depth interviews with a number of different goals in mind:

To make certain you get the types of calls you want (for example, calls for repairing large appliances rather than small appliance repairs)
To ensure we promote your business in the correct location and service areas
To identify the details that make your company special, unique, and different from your competitors

All of these goals are for your direct benefit!
If another online advertising company does NOT invest time in getting to know your business when signing you up (by asking for specific, detailed info about your services, etc.), you may find yourself facing several problems:

They may not be planning on doing a whole lot of work for you, so detailed information would be irrelevant.
They may be planning to send you every and ANY call out there, including junk calls. This can be an especially major issue with a pay-per-lead or pay-per-call system.
They may just be planning to copy and paste from your existing website, duplicating content and potentially earning penalties from Google.
They may be planning to spam Google Maps by posting a slew of phony addresses on your company’s map listings page. This may give your company a quick boost in Google rankings, but any unverifiable addresses will be blacklisted by Google. Since your website will be connected to one of those map listings, you’ll also be risking a penalty on Google’s results pages. In extreme cases, Google may even penalize your business name and phone number across the board.

Why It Really Matters

So what? What’s the worst that can happen if you choose to use a web advertising company that doesn’t take the time to learn about you and your business? That’s a really good question because one answer is that you could even go to JAIL!
Sounds extreme, right? Never gonna happen, right? Actually, we’re not kidding. Imagine you sign up with “Advertiser X” and spend just one minute giving them your credit card info and business name, but almost nothing else in terms of information. Then, if Advertiser X puts content on your website that includes false claims of certifications, memberships, or licenses you don’t actually have, you could easily end up on the wrong end of a sting operation.
Several states, including California, are seriously cracking down on these types of violations because the resulting fines are a source of revenue for their cash-strapped coffers. In fact, some of our clients have endured similar situations because they failed to comply with some aspect of state law regarding exactly how you can advertise your services.
Of course, these are the most extreme examples, but the threat of fines and penalties is REAL. In the end, it’s up to you as the business owner to verify that the content on the Internet regarding your company is 100% accurate.

Vet Advertisers Carefully

With all that can go wrong through cutting-corners or just plain sketchy online advertising, it’s vital that you be careful when choosing who will represent your company’s interests on the Internet. In the same way you wouldn’t hire just anyone to answer your phone, you’re better off not hiring just anyone for online advertising.
What an advertiser puts out there about your company invariably becomes the basis for first impressions for many potential customers. If there’s information on the web that’s untrue, misleading, or even misspelled, it could end up costing you a whole lot more than the 30 minutes it would have taken to do it right in the first place!

Voice Mail: Solution or Danger

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

At Prospect Genius, we work with a broad spectrum of small, local companies, and that puts us in a unique position to observe trends in the ways small businesses handle their operations. Recently, we’ve noticed that some of our clients, especially the one-person outfits, are too busy to answer their phone during the day. Instead, they let the calls go through to their voice mail and return the messages once they have time.
On one hand, this is great news: We’re excited that so many folks are getting enough work to keep them this busy. On the other hand, this may end up being a major problem for your company: That’s because when you let your calls ring through to voice mail, you may actually end up missing out on phone calls that could lead to additional customers and additional profits.

The Issue With Voice Mail

With online advertising, we’ve observed that the majority of customers will pick up the phone and call you within a minute or two of landing on your website. Unfortunately, we’ve also noticed that if a real person doesn’t answer the call, these prospective clients will likely hang up without leaving a message. In fact, only a very small percentage of callers will actually leave a message on your voice mail. Worse, most will just click the “back” on their web browser, return to the search results page, and call the next company on the list—likely a direct competitor!
The biggest problem with this scenario is that not answering your calls means that you lose the ability to capture what could be extremely profitable jobs. Think about it this way: It’s great that your business is keeping busy with multiple jobs, but in an ideal world, you’d be able to hand pick the closest, most profitable jobs instead of working yourself to the bone on projects that are farther away or have a lower profit margin.

Option #1

The good news is that there are ways to balance the issue of a ringing phone with the project on hand. Perhaps the easiest solution, yet one many folks don’t even think of, is an answering service. This option is surprisingly affordable, and in many cases, there are even companies that employ only native English speakers if customer service and communication skills are a concern for you. With an answering service, calls will be answered on your behalf, with messages being relayed to you as if you just stepped away from the phone for a moment.
Some answering services immediately send you an e-mail or text message explaining the nature and priority level of the call. Others may even provide you with an option for specifying which calls you would like forwarded to you without delay and which calls you would like to receive a message about.
With an answering service, your customers get the benefit of talking to a real person and you get the benefit of uninterrupted time to work on your current job without missing out on potentially profitable work for the future.

Option #2

If hiring an answering service isn’t in the cards, and your budget doesn’t allow bringing in a receptionist or assistant to answer the phone, your best bet is to simply make the most out of your voice mail recording.
Start by making certain your voice mail sounds as professional as possible. Assure your clients that their call is important to you, and that their message will be returned as soon as possible. Here’s a great example:
“Hi. You’ve reached Bob’s Plumbing of Boston, MA. We are unable to answer the phone at the moment because we are busy providing first-class service to one of our clients. We want to provide this same level of service to you, so please leave us a message, and we’ll return your call later today.”

Prospect Genius Voice Mail Solutions

Did you know that you can enable a separate voice mail account just for your Prospect Genius campaign? Our system allows us to intercept calls after a few rings and play a message like the one shown above. We’ll then e-mail any message left on your voice mail to you immediately.
This service can be extremely helpful if you’re trying to juggle multiple businesses on a single phone line or if you just want to keep your PG campaign separate from other advertising efforts. If this voice mail service sounds like something you’d like to explore for your company, just give us a call, and the Prospect Genius team can help you out!

Prospect Genius Announces Plans to Expand Facility, Accommodate Growing Team

Last Updated: August 5, 2011

Prospect Genius, an online advertising company based in upstate New York, announces that it will annex space adjacent to its current office in an effort to make room for additional hires. Expanding its employee base as the demand for Internet marketing campaigns and SEO expertise increases, Prospect Genius must locate additional space in order to accommodate a growing team.
As the nation faces unmitigated economic downturn, small business owners and local service providers have begun seeking affordable advertising solutions that will generate measurable results (i.e. customer leads in the form of phone calls and e-mails) and quantifiable ROI. Because SEO and online advertising are lower-cost alternatives to print advertising like newspaper ads and billboards, many business owners have found that Internet marketing campaigns are a cost-effective solution to their fiscal concerns.
As John Hart, owner of Audio Ace in St. Louis, MO, recently told a representative of Prospect Genius, “You guys single-handedly saved my company.”
Due to the proven efficacy of its lead generation program, Prospect Genius reports a large increase in local businesses and service providers as clients. In fact, even a fellow SEO company recently hired Prospect Genius to assist them in their own online promotion. Alex Pelli, president of the company, comments, “We’re truly excited that we’re able to help so many small businesses stay in business. That’s where we derive our primary satisfaction.”
According to Pelli, Prospect Genius actually plans to double in size during the year 2012. With these plans currently in the early stages of execution, he recently made the decision to expand his company into an adjacent office space in an effort to accommodate extra desks and cubicles. In acclimating to a larger number of clients, the company will see its most recent full-time hire, Amelia, begin her first day on August 15, 2011.
Prospect Genius is an online advertising company providing SEO-based lead generation to small business owners and service providers.

Warning About Fraudulent EDriven Concepts Calls

Last Updated: August 1, 2011

It has come to our attention that a company called EDriven Concepts has been calling our clients and leading them to believe that they represent Prospect Genius. We would like to clarify that those individuals, along with EDriven Concepts as a whole, are NOT associated with Prospect Genius in any way.
The rest of this post will provide you with a few audio samples of calls placed by representatives from EDriven Concepts so that you will be able to recognize them. We will not make any recommendations about whether you should do business with this company; rather, we intend to provide you with all of the relevant facts so that you can make an informed decision on your own.
As you can hear from the audio clips below, which were taken directly from the aforementioned phone calls, the sales approach is always the same. First, the sales representatives try to confuse the business owner by referencing a “previous” conversation that never actually took place. Then, they continue the present conversation and allow the client to believe that he or she is speaking with Prospect Genius, not EDriven Concepts.

In these additional audio clips, you’ll also hear how EDriven Concepts further attempts to mislead business owners. Given that these phone calls took place on our metered lines, which are designed to record every single incoming call, Prospect Genius can say with absolute certainty that the purportedly “previous” conversations between EDriven Concepts and these business owners never actually occurred. Below, numbers 1 and 2 are portions of the same phone call.

In the following audio clip, you’ll hear Josh Murlin, a sales representative from EDriven Concepts, claim to be a former employee of Prospect Genius. This is completely FALSE.

These amusing clips below show the sales rep attempting to locate a handful of random towns in which the business owner has a poor search engine ranking. Unfortunately for him, it turns out on both occasions that the business owner is already ranked on Page 1 of Google thanks to the work done by Prospect Genius.

Repeatedly, the strategy of Mr. Murlin and EDriven Concepts is to mislead the business owners and let them believe that they are speaking with a representative from Prospect Genius. In Clip 1 below, Mr. Murlin does not admit to being separate from Prospect Genius until three minutes and 43 seconds have passed in a phone call that only lasts five minutes in total. In Clip 2, it takes eight minutes and 44 seconds for him to admit that he is not affiliated with Prospect Genius. But the most shocking part is not that nearly nine minutes go by before he admits this—it’s that the confession occurs AFTER he has already instructed the business owner to stop payment on a check for Prospect Genius and to instead fax the check to him!

These next two clips offer some insight into the “SEO” that EDriven Concepts will provide. In actuality, the company plans to utilize several different local numbers on Google Places in an act that is, quite clearly, spamming. Why is that a problem? Well, as we all know, spamming goes against the rules established by Google. One rule in particular clearly states, “Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.” In other words, the practice of creating multiple listings—which EDriven Concepts promises to do—is strictly forbidden. Unfortunately, going against Google’s published guidelines is a lot like playing Russian Roulette: while there’s no guarantee that you will get caught, the consequences are dire if you do.

During this final audio clip, you’ll hear Mr. Murlin from EDriven Concepts promise to list the business owner in 150 directories each month. There are two problems with this. First, while there may be hundreds of online directories in existence, the majority of them are not useful or effective in the slightest. In fact, the latest Google algorithm update called “Panda” targeted exactly these kinds of low-quality sites. (You can learn all about Panda here.) This means that since the Panda update, there is little to no chance that any value whatsoever will be provided by links from those directories. Furthermore, as a team of SEO specialists and industry insiders, we can tell you that those directory submissions are almost always done by a piece of software, which means that no human thought or effort goes into the submission process. In short, it’s a very spam-like tactic that no longer works. The second problem with this approach is that many of those hundreds of links will likely end up being relegated to one of Google’s “bad neighborhoods,” a classification saved for directories of poor quality that contain spam-like activity. If that happens, you won’t just receive zero value from the directories—you’ll actually be penalized.

If you would like to research EDriven Concepts even further on your own, here is some contact information that we’ve collected:
EDriven Concepts
41951 Remington Ave Ste 100
Temecula, CA 92590
Miranda (customer service): 951-296-2041
Josh Murlin (sales): 951-296-2245
Please be very careful not to give representatives from EDriven Concepts any sensitive or personal information, as we cannot guarantee its security. If you have any doubts regarding the legitimacy of a phone call, simply hang up, dial our main line (1-800-689-1273), and ask for your account manager.

Wishing you pleasant, honest dealings and continued success,
Prospect Genius

Don’t Get Banned From Google

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Spam: It’s Bad for Business

In past blog posts, we’ve talked about how Google works: the changes to Google Maps that display search results as a combination of organic rankings and map placement; the Google Spam Department, led by Matt Cutts; etc.
But we wanted to talk about all this again because Google’s Spam Department has been stepping up enforcement. They’re taking spam activity on Google Places so seriously that your business may even be banned if caught!
The most important thing to understand is that Google will attach any spamming penalties that they dole out to any available pieces of information, including:

Your business name
Your URL (http://www.bobsbusiness.com)
Your phone number
Your address

In their quest to deter spam activity on Google Places, Google looks for business listings that appear to be for the same business yet contain slight discrepancies in information.
For example: Bob wants his appliance company to have a higher ranking in all of the smaller towns surrounding the metropolitan area he serves. So he starts by creating a map listing for his company, including all of the relevant data:

“Bob’s Appliance” in New York, NY; phone number: 212-555-5555; address: 1234 W Main Street; website: www.bobsappliance.com

However, then he creates more listings, each one with slightly differing information:

“Bob’s Appliance” in Queens, NY; phone number: 212-555-5555; address: 567 Broadway Ave; website: www.bobsappliance.com
“Michael’s Appliance” in Bronx, NY; phone number: 212-555-5555; address: 1234 W Main St; website: www.bobsappliance.com
“Bob’s Appliance” in Brooklyn, NY; phone number: 212-111-1111; address: 1234 W Main St; website: www.bobsappliance.com

If he gets caught, what could happen? The short answer is that all of his information could be flagged and banned. That means any new listing containing a SINGLE piece of the flagged information would be rejected from Google Places. In some extreme cases, that information could be entirely banned from all of Google, in which case your website—and by extension, your company—would essentially cease to exist online. If you get to this point, and all of your information is banned on Google, you really only have two options: grovel at the feet of Google and beg for a reprieve or completely change not only your address, phone number, and website URL, but also your business’s name!

Staying Safe with Google Places

Surprisingly enough, remaining in the good graces of Google is actually a lot easier than it may sound. If you don’t want to get blacklisted or banned from Google, just tell the truth!
Follow Google’s guidelines by accurately representing the physical world in your online profiles, and you won’t have to worry about penalties or blacklisting. If your company really has two physical addresses in the real world, feel free to make two listings online, one for each location. If you only have one real location, don’t just make up a second one! And so on and so forth. You can even list your home address if it’s your only place of business.
What you don’t want to do is list the address of your auto body shop, your cousin Larry’s house, and then go on to make half a dozen more listings for an empty lot, abandoned church, etc. If you do that, Google will catch you and they will punish you. It could take days, months, or even a year, but Google will eventually catch you and subsequently ban or blacklist all of the addresses—and other information—associated with the spammed business listings.
Remember, having an effectively optimized Google Places listing connected with an equally well optimized website is crucial. Together they will work to get you the best overall placement in Google search results.

Prospect Genius

Prospect Genius Announces Plans to Expand Facility, Accommodate Growing Team

Warning About Fraudulent EDriven Concepts Calls

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