MBA1486 Lessons & Actions You Can Take When Googling Your Business

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Because every insight counts when you're building your business. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn lessons and actions you can Googling your business. When you put your business, your brand name in Google, what do you get? What do you see? Hopefully your website's number one. But besides your own website, what is out there? Are there other blogs mentioning you? What are they saying? Are people reviewing your business? What do those reviews say? Are people comparing you to a competitor? What does this all mean and what do you do with this information? Googling your own business really can help you take control of the conversation, the narrative that's out there about your business. If you're not actively getting involved about how your business is being presented, then somebody's gonna talk for you. Somebody's gonna say what they think your business is all about. And that may not be accurate and it may not be favorable. So take control and I'll show you how in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Okay? Let's get started. The first thing I want you to do is open a fresh Google browser. Now, I know all the SEO experts out there are gonna tell me, hey, you know, when you're searching on your browser, your IP and your location will, you know, change your results? I get all that, but we're gonna stick with the fundamentals right now. And you're going to search your business name. So if your business name is Wacky Workout warriors, you're gonna type that right in. Now, in another tab, I want you to open a Google sheet, a spreadsheet, even a document of some sort. You're gonna take some notes. You're gonna make three boxes, and in each box, you're gonna have two columns. And what we're gonna do is that we're gonna go through page one of Google. You're gonna skip the ads, of course, that say ad right next to it. And you're gonna go down the first page and write down all the websites that refer, that talk about your business that is your business. Okay? So your first box represents the first page on Google, and you're gonna go through each website. So if it's your website on, you know, position number one, that's a positive thing. That's good to have that you're in complete control of what that says, right? So obviously it's going to say all good things. So under the positive column, you're going to write the website name, right? So if it's your website, wacky workoutwarriors.com and you go on to the next listing, the next might be Wacky Workout warriors was mentioned on a Forbes article. And maybe you're quoted talking about how working out could be fun. So you're going to write down the website forbes.com and that's a positive comment that's helping you get positive traffic, right? But then the next website might be a review from maybe a disgruntled customer that didn't get a refund or maybe had less than expected results, and they write a blog post about you on their very popular blog. It's on position three. So you're gonna write the name of the blog right on the negative. Now, this is not fun to do, right? It's not fun to read negative things about your business. But this is very important because if you just leave it, it's just not going to do anything for you. And you're going to go down the whole line. That means you're clicking each link, you're looking at the content of that post of that website. And the mention finding out if it's positive or negative. And you're going to put it in a column, you're going to do this for the first three pages of Google. Most people don't go past page one. But the first three pages, I think, are the basics. You really need to make sure that you cover at least the first three pages of Google. Now, there are certain actions we're gonna take for each positive post and each negative post that showed up on the first three pages. Let's start with the positive. You wanna give those positive posts as much love and as much juice as possible so they can rank higher and higher and dominate the first few pages of Google. So how do you do that? Well, you get in those posts, you comment, you answer questions that maybe some people have in the comments. You share the post regularly on social media. So put, put it in your publishing schedule for social. So maybe publish or share that post every two weeks or every month at least. You might even want to reference these posts in your blog posts on your own site, giving it some juice through some backlinks. So the point here is that you want to promote and support these positive posts. You may even want to reach out to the bloggers or the writers, the reporters of these articles on Twitter or on social somewhere and thank them for the mention, build a relationship with them and ask them if there's any way you can serve them. You'd be happy to. You might be surprised. They might call you back, they might write you back and say, hey, I have another article I'm writing that may be worth your time. Maybe it'd be worth me interviewing you. And we can mention your website, your brand, getting you more positive links. Now what do we do with the negative links that we see out there on Google? Well, you gotta get involved. You gotta roll up your sleeves. You gotta go into those articles, those videos, those whatever. And you need to comment. You need to kind of speak your voice. And you want to be as professional, as polite and friendly as possible. You don't want to be defensive. You don't want to be taking things personally. What you want to do is be helpful, gracious, and really just somebody who is trying to help people without sounding like, hey, you got it all wrong. Okay, so you may want to comment on things, thank them for giving your service a try, or thank them for mentioning you in your article. And you want to represent the best of your business in those comments. Next, you may want to reach out to the author of the blog post. Blog posts get edited all the time. And I've done this before. I've actually reached out to a blogger that wasn't happy with the service they got. I reached out to them and said, hey, I would love to get on the phone with you, get on a video call with you and discuss how we can get better. I'm really sorry you didn't get the service you wanted, but I'd really appreciate a phone call. And we got got on a video call and we discussed and we chatted and I actually was able to help them and be able to solve their problem. But the best thing about this was they changed the article. They went in and changed and I didn't even ask for that. They just changed it. I said, hey, they updated it. I actually had a phone call with Omar. I'm actually floored that the founder of the company reached out to me and actually wanted to help and it changed my opinion about it. And that little update, turn that negative post into a super positive post because it shows that the company cares and actually is really trying to help their customers out. So that's not always going to work. They may ignore you. They may be too upset to even talk to you. The point is, is that you want to just at least try. Now, some of these posts won't be straight up like hate. It might just be a comparison post between you and a competitor and you didn't win that comparison. It could be simply because they're an affiliate of the competitor product and you can reach out to these people and say, hey, we have an affiliate program. We would love for you to review our product for an extended period of time. Maybe give them like a month free trial. It'd be great if you really went deep. And maybe you can recommend our product for people that want xyz. And it's not just, you know, one winner kind of blog post. It's just like, you know, this, I recommend if you want this in your business. Or this is what I recommend if you want this in your business. And they're both affiliate links and they both can benefit. This is sometimes really helpful. And for the blogger, they are often quite happy to do that. They're like, cool, I'll take a free month and I'll try your product out. And that sounds good. It sounds like your product is different enough for me to edit the post to mention this. And again, now you're turning that around from a negative to a positive post.

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The whole point of today's lesson is to encourage you to take control over the narrative of the story of your business, of the brand of your business. And they say your brand is what people say about you. You have to be a participant in that. If you're not sharing your voice, sharing your opinions, then no one's hearing your truth. No one's hearing your business's point of view. And it's your job to be part of that conversation. So take control. You can turn things around, but at the very least you can actually promote and improve the visibility of the positive things that are being said about you. If you're a software company and you have tons of great reviews on Capterra or G2, promote that. Talk about that. Get people to see that. So that way it ranks higher. If you're an author and you have amazing reviews on Amazon, share that Amazon link so people can see how many reviews you have. Some authors complain that their book on Amazon ranks higher than their own website. I say you should be thankful because if they're positive reviews, people are going to hear from so many other people that hey, this author's awesome. This book is great. When they do go to your website, they're already sold. And they're not only going to buy your book, they'll buy your services, your coaching and everything else. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. By hitting subscribe, you get exclusive access of over 1400 business lessons. It's our archives and the only way you can get access is by hitting that subscribe button on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Himalaya we're on them all. Subscribing is absolutely free and it takes one second to click that button. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. How well you rank on search engines is becoming more and more important every single day. People have ad blockers now. People are blocking their whole Facebook stream. People are paying to not see ads like on YouTube. So paid advertising is starting to lose its efficacy. We've seen this in our own business already. We've stopped doing paid ads for the most part. Nowhere near as much as we used to because it's not as effective anymore. And really good old fashioned SEO and word of mouth is king even more today. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Tomorrow's episode, Free Art Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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