WL Marketing Review – Horrible RSS Feed Submission Service for your Blog
Recently, I tried the RSS Feed Submissions service offered by WL Marketing. The service seems great, and it's very cheap. What they do is take your blog's RSS feed, and submit it to 50 or 100 different RSS Feed sites. The goal here is that your RSS Feed gets syndicated by all of these sites, giving your blog more exposure and more traffic.
They offer two packages. One package is for $10, and they submit your RSS feed to 50 sites. They also offer one for $20 that they submit to 100 sites. They say completion takes about 15 days for 50 sites, and a month for 100 sites. It was faster for me, they were done within 1 day.
The good thing about WL Marketing is they also provide you with a detailed report showing each site that they submitted to, plus the directory in each site, so you can check it out for yourself.
So, how did it work out you ask?
Horrible! I was completely disappointed. No wonder this was done in one day instead of 1 month. I opted to pay $20 for the 100 sites, and the next day received a detailed report on what was done. About 30% of the sites on the list were 404. Of the rest of the 70%, I couldn't my feed on a single site. Some of them didn't even have categories on the site (a site error), so I'm not sure how they were even submitted.
I complained to WL Marketing and received a quick reply that they were sorry and were going to replace the broken links with new ones. A day later I received a new report, but it was just more of the same.
I will never use them again. I thought it would be hard to mess up RSS submissions, and thought it was a good service for a cheap price since doing it manually is very tedious. But WL Marketing makes money by not giving you what you paid for.
My first time using WL Marketing, and after this negative review, I will not be using them again.
SiteJabber Reviews – Why you can’t trust SiteJabber
And it's not just SiteJabber, but that site seems especially hit with bogus reviews. The problem with review sites like SiteJabber is that they allow anyone to post reviews, and there is no check as to who the person is. You get a lot of negative reviews posted by competitors, and then when a negative review comes in, you get the actual company contradicting the negative review with a positive review and you end up in a circle of fake reviews.
SiteJabber is bold to say their site helps to prevent fraud when their site is one of the biggest fraud mediums.
So beware people, review sites aren't what they are cracked up to be... they are there to make a profit, and as long as there are page views the false reviews will keep popping up.
Make educated decisions by looking at various sites and trying to pick out reviews that seem real, and are from members that have been there for a while. Yelp is a much better source for this, but Yelp doesn't review sites, they review businesses.
Until SiteJabber cleans up their act, I say stay away.
StatCounter vs Google Analytics – Which is best?
We have been using both StatCounter as well as Google Analytics for about the past 10 years, and we have a few things we like about each. For those of you who need solid accuracy, we strongly recommend to use Google Analytics over StatCounter.
StatCounter
One of my favorite features of StatCounter is that it's real time analytics reporting. You can simply log in, and hit refresh to see what new traffic you are getting. i think for real time there is nothing better. Especially on high traffic sites, this is crucial to be able to tell what changes to your site have what effect on your traffic.
The problem with StatCounter though is overall the numbers are over inflated. We have a site that receives almost no traffic, and we log in one day to find the site had 13 visitors and 13 page views. We look at the traffic, and find that all 13 visitors came from actually one visitor browsing the site. There was no valid reason for StatCounter to could each page view as a visit also. The service also has a hard time separating visitors that use AOL or other such services. These things cause StatCounter to be inaccurate.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics might not give us real time reporting, but that's ok. The hourly filter is delayed about 1-3 hours and the daily is of course, daily. The good thing about this is the information is more comprehensive, and it appears to be much more accurate in it's traffic reporting.
So overall, what we would recommend would be to use Google Analytics on your site, but also include StatCounter and use that for when you need realtime reports.
Reputation Management – How to get rid of negative reviews online
Reputation management - the act of removing or pushing down negative reviews in search engines has been gaining a lot of traction lately. Rightfully so... with so many companies doing business online now, and so many people flocking to the internet for business, there has to be some negative or positive reviews out there.
However, here's the problem - most people who have something to say are typically negative. Those who are happy with you will generally leave with a smile and never be heard from again. However, if you piss someone off, their anger has them look for channels to release their frustration and the most popular channel is the same medium they did business with you in the first place - the internet.
People love to post negative reviews and the websites out there collecting these reviews are designed in a way to make them sound even more negative. So what can you do about this?
I've known several real estate agents who are thinking of not doing it anymore due to their name popping up with bogus negative reviews posted by their competitors in the same city! It's tough to overcome this.
You need to hire a good SEO company to do reputation management on your name or your business name. Typically what they do is to create positive content about you that pushes the negative content down when someone does a search for you.
For example, let's say you do e-Commerce. You might have some bad reviews that show up in Google, so you create info about yourself such as an account on CrunchBase, coupon sites (submit coupons to them), Flickr, YouTube, AboutUs.Org and similar other sites. These sites put your name in the title of your page, so they usually rank well. Don't forget to link to all of these so they get indexed.
Another thing you can do is lets say your company name is Blue Widget Real Estate. And you have negative reviews out there when someone searches for Blue Widget Real Estate Reviews. What you should do is to create a blog, and use the word "reviews" in a positive light, such as:
Blue Widget Real Estate Reviews the new Google
Read all Blue Widget Real Estate Reviews
Create this kind of content on as many sites as possible. Use your imagination for what combination of words you can use. A tough one is Scam. You can do:
Read how Blue Widget Real Estate Fights Scam
Blue Widget Real Estate Fights Back on Scam Emails
You get the idea. If you have any phrases that worked for you in Reputation Management, post them here!