For SEO there is often a race to the bottom and that leads to product devaluation and greater expectations because of the perceived competition.

A good product can be sold at a price that makes both buyer and seller happy – Brandon Hopkins

I’ve always believed that a good product can be sold at a price that makes both buyer and seller happy, but this is a fine line. If you’re priced correctly, you have enough money to get a job completed and the customer is happy to pay for the results you can achieve. If either of those are skewed you’ll have no clients or no results.

[tweetthis]A good product can be sold at a price that makes both buyer and seller happy[/tweetthis]

ORM Results

Getting results with online reputation management campaigns can be tricky. Depending on who the client is and what the negatives are, your approach should be different. For small clients, generally individuals without a lot of online assets and only a weak negative you might be able to get away with some social media accounts and an EMD (exact match domain). For someone with a large online profile you’re going to need some kind of premium content, social media won’t be enough. If you’re not focused on results, you’re doing your client a disservice.

[tweetthis]If you’re not focused on results, you’re doing your client a disservice.[/tweetthis]

If you’re not focused on results, you’re doing your client a disservice.

SEO Results

SEO and ORM are different but in pricing they’re similar. They both will often take ongoing and often long term engagements to achieve and maintain results. With SEO I always look at the long term goal. If a client wants to be in business 2 years from now you need to be building a marketing plan that won’t damage their business or website so that they can be long term clients and have long term success. This usually involves substantial cost or time, both drive the necessary budget up.

Here are a few Do’s and Dont’s – Lessons I’ve Learned Over the last 12 Years.

Don’t Race to the Bottom

Don’t focus on being the cheapest, unless you can do thousands of transactions and have the infrastructure to deliver on those transactions. This has never been a successful business model for me. I’ve tried offering a freemium model of web hosting that didn’t work out. I’ve offered $77/month SEO which didn’t work. Nothing cheap has ever worked out for me.

[tweetthis]Don’t focus on being the cheapest, unless you can do thousands of transactions per month.[/tweetthis]

Do Know Your Strengths

My strength is in sales. Throughout my career most of my jobs has been sales oriented in some aspect. My uncle taught me how to upsell and teach customers what they need rather than what they ask for. I’ve learned from that and understand that my strengths do not lie in a high volume of clients.

Don’t Copy Competitors

You need to be able to establish and clearly communicate a unique selling proposition (USP). What makes you different? Can you explain that in 30 seconds to a prospect? Your USP should be different from your competition. If you’re selling the same thing as everyone else, it’s a race to the bottom and everyone will lose.

Do Offer Additional Value

If you can one-up your competitors go for it! Are they offering an inferior product? Make sure you’re highlighting where you’re different and why that’s better. Just like every other SEO and ORM company, we create EMD’s, web 2.0’s, social media accounts and other low-hanging fruit.

My additional value is two-fold.

1. Premium content – I have a focus on premium content right now. I can get you featured on Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and many other publications. Want to be featured on an industry-specific journal, magazine or website, we can do that too! These articles and links will be around 5 years from now and we have exclusive access. That’s my USP, I have abilities and connections that nobody else has.
2. Adaptability and Testing – I spend a considerable amount of money every month so I will know what strategies are effective. This allows me to spend money testing rather than spending a clients’ budget testing and hoping for results. I know conclusively what will make a website rank and what makes them tank.

I believe that pricing should be reflective of your values and in a free market economy, you’re worth what someone will pay for your services. Want to charge more, offer more value.

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This is something that I give a lot of thought to. Reputation management is deductible in almost every business (I suggest you talk to your CPA) as a marketing expense, but what if it were a true marketing endeavor? The way that I accomplish this for my clients is through specific marketing approaches. For example, every good reputation management company will need to create content on behalf of the client. Why not focus content to be about a particular product or service too? Let’s look at a real world example:

GT Advanced is a company who has partnered with Apple Inc. to create sapphire glass for a future product Apple will develop, possibly including the Apple Watch or the next iPhone (iPhone 7?). That’s pretty great, but right now GT Advanced has two clear reputation management problems, in my opinion.

1. Bankruptcy filing. As seen in this screenshot, GT Advanced’s bankruptcy has completely changed the typical person’s focus on the company. Last week they were known for having a state of the art facility and creating one of the world’s most advanced display overlays. Today they’re known for filing bankruptcy.

2. Lack of plan B. According to industry experts, part of the agreement with Apple was that GT Advanced was restricted from doing certain types of business with certain companies. They had all their eggs in one basket.

Not having a backup plan is outside of my control, but the reputation management and bankruptcy filing is something I could definitely control and spin. Imagine that GT Advanced is losing $100,000 per month in business as a result of their negative publicity. Now imagine a full reputation management campaign would cost them $50,000. That $50,000 wouldn’t just be to clean up their online reputation but also to market their business, products and services. They likely spend more than $50,000 per year in marketing but that is not helping with their online reputation. Spending money on reputation management can not only clean up their online presence, but hopefully gain new clients who are looking for their products.

My clients get to choose their marketing angle and we can often include a few different marketing angles including new products and services. I have a dental client for whom we created an entire marketing campaign including logos and press materials. They’re combining reputation management with newspaper ads and direct mail and it’s looking to be a fantastic success.

For more information on how to make your reputation management campaign a positive marketing experience, give me a call at 559-871-1613.

threatening economic harm to induce a person to pay for a legitimate service is not extortion.

This can open up all kinds of new business opportunities! Imagine someone going out and buying domains about your business and writing hundreds of scathing reviews about your business. They could then lease those websites back to you, as soon as you stop paying the extortion money, they put the scathing reviews back online.

the Seventh Circuit has likewise concluded that ‘[w]here the defendant has a claim of right to property and exerts economic pressure to obtain that property, that conduct is not extortion and no violation of the Hobbs Act has occurred.’

Economic pressure is not considered extortion. This implies that someone could stand outside of a bakery and pay people $5 NOT to go into the bakery. The individual could then tell the bakery that it will cost them $100 per day to stop paying people. Seems ludicrous, but entirely plausible.

To start, we note that there is no allegation that Yelp directly threatened economic harm if the business owners refused to purchase advertising packages from Yelp.

In essence the Ninth Circuit Court did not believe that a 1 star review will cause economic harm to a small business owner.

One of my favorites, Yelp is not obligated to fairly show the good and bad reviews because Yelp is a thing they created and maintain. I agree that Yelp should not be obligated to show both good and bad, but I do believe it’s extortion to say, “If you pay, you get good reviews shown. If you don’t pay, you get bad reviews shown.”

Seems logical, Court says, “Nope.”

Seems “wrongful” to me.

Wow! Why doesn’t Yelp just put up a big banner saying, “This company is horrible!” and offer to take it down for $200 per month.

Yelp can legally move all of the 1 star reviews to the top. If you pay, they can move them to the bottom. Totally cool move, nothing “wrongful” about that.

The ruling states that a “pay for higher ratings” setup is fine and dandy. In most circles we call that extortion. Just in case you’re unaware of the definition, here you go.

ex·tor·tion – the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.

Obtaining something (customers advertising dollars) through threats (pay or lose customers). Seems pretty simple to me.

I own and operate a reputation management company. If you’re dealing with Yelp I’m happy to help defeat them. If you couldn’t tell, this ruling hits home with me. I’m also a small business owner and I have the resources to suppress Yelp so they no longer negatively impact your business.

Contact me at 559-871-1613 or by email at brandonchopkins@gmail.com if you need help

I have made the full court document available on my website here.

1. We will place content on your behalf each month.

Content will obviously be created each month of your behalf. This is a given. Every reputation management company should provide this. It’s not a unique selling point. You don’t shop at Walmart because they offer to turn on the air conditioning in the summer, it’s just something they do and what everyone expects. Content is king and you should expect that content will be created!

Positive content creation is the backbone of every reputation management campaign. After all, something needs to be able to suppress the negatives and most people don’t have enough content naturally so content is created.

2. We will show you all of the links we build.

Unless you work for a SEO company, you probably don’t care about each specific link; you care more about the effects of those links. Continuing with the Walmart example, Walmart doesn’t show you which shipping container your dog food arrived in. You don’t care to meet the guy who unpacked the box. You just want to buy dog food to feed your dog.

All good reputation management companies are going to build links. Link building and reputation management go hand in hand. Link building pushes up positive content in the search engines. Beginning with high quality content makes some link building unnecessary for now. We build links because you never know what Google’s algorithm will look like next month. Are your high quality sites still going to be strong or will they need links to push them up. Speaking of formerly good sites, anyone log into MySpace lately?

3. We will post X articles every month.

Quantity is important, but more is not necessarily better. Would you rather have 2000 sq. ft. of living space or would you rather have 20 sheds totaling 2000 sq. ft.? The point is not all content is created equally and the most important thing is the end result. You could have a front page story on the New York Times, but if that story never gets to the NYTimes.com website, your online reputation is still going to be tarnished.

The total number of articles is not important, the metric that you should care about is where do those articles show up. Great articles on page 10 aren’t going to fix up your online reputation issues.

4. We will build example.com and maintain it for you.

Hey! A shiny new domain! That domain costs about $10 and can be set up almost completely automatically costing a grand total of about $20. Add some content and your total cost should be less than $50 total.

The problem with buying and setting up domains has never been the cost, the problem is how long they typically take to begin ranking. At this time (2014) a new domain can take anywhere from 6-18 months to begin ranking on the first page. There are exceptions, but in most cases you can expect to wait at least 12 months for that domain to begin showing up.

By that time, any good reputation management company would be so far done with your campaign that you’ll have forgotten my name.

5. We will add followers to your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

In 99% (rough estimate) of these cases, the followers, likes, and retweets are all from fake accounts. This isn’t always a bad thing, because it can lead people to believe that you’re more important than you are (wait, maybe that is a bad thing…). The real issue this causes is skewed percentage of interactions. If Facebook is tracking the percentage of interactions with your page (which they claim to do) fake likes could be harming your business. A pretty substantial analysis of Facebook likes and engagement can be found here.

Facebook has a baseline for expectations of interactions.  Facebook has enough data to know, for example, that 5% of people interact with a business they like on a monthly basis.

If a company has purchased about 9500 followers and has 500 real followers, they have a total of 10,000 followers on Facebook. With a 5% interaction rate, they should have 500 interactions per month, but in reality only 500 people are real meaning they actually get about 25 interactions per month. That leaves a wide and obvious margin telling everyone you bought fake visitors. Unless you’re a well known brand, fake followers aren’t fooling many people and could be hurting your business. Should your reputation management company be engaging in practices that could be furthering the reputation problem?

When considering each of the above issues you’re left wondering what’s the most important metric: numbers of links, total number of press releases or search engine results? If your reputation management company isn’t talking RESULTS, you’ve been tricked!

Monthly Fees

Every reputation management company that I know of charges in the same way, “setup/startup” fee and then monthly payments. Many companies will set a loose timeline of 6-12 months but others will stop billing when the work is complete.

Warning: This is very dangerous for a customer. When does the billing end? What happens if the negative is still on the first page? If they work isn’t finished in the timeframe, will you be billed indefinitely? Why would the company want the work done quickly if they’re getting paid monthly?

Flat Fee

When my company works with a reputation management client, we only charge a flat fee. When you get off the phone, you know exactly how much it will cost. There are NO MONTHLY FEES or any other tricks to get money out of you. You will pay the stated price and not a penny more.

It gets better! You will only pay half of the fee up front and the other half is due upon completion. This ensures that both the client and our company are on the same page – we both want the work done as quickly as possible, and we put our money where our mouth is, you don’t pay until the work is complete!

Do any other reputation management companies have a financial incentive to get the work done as quickly as possible?

Contact us today for more information and to get a quote and straight advice, no tricks, gimmicks or hidden fees.

What is PR and what does it affect?

Thanks for the question.  Page Rank (PR) is a metric that Google created.  PR is a valuation of all of the links coming into a site.  Google looks at and analysis the links pointing to a web page then gives that page a PR value from 0-10.  Without any in bound links (IBL’s), most sites will remain under 1. Once your site starts gaining traction, you will likely get to 2 or 3.  Without purposeful link building you won’t likely ever get higher than PR 2-3.

There are many services that offer to build links to increase PR, but does that matter? Personally and for my clients, I want to rank better in the search engine results pages (SERPs).  If you have a PR9 but don’t rank for any good keywords, does that PR matter?

I have noticed that you’ve been getting more involved in reputation management. How would I start a career in reputation management?

That’s a good question and one that I definitely feel qualified to answer since I recently (in the last couple of years) have been transitioning to a full time reputation management business.

There are two ways to get into reputation management as a career.

1. Create your own business.
Creating your own business has both pros and cons. The benefits are that you control everything and get all of the revenue. The cons are you are also responsible for finding all of your clients, managing payroll, advertising, accounting, etc.

2. Work for someone else.
There are many reputation management companies looking to hire sales people with experience. If you can get some experience and have sales experience there are a lot of companies that would be interested in hiring you. Most reputation management companies pay a base wage per hour and a percentage of the sales that you bring in. The last company who offered me a position was paying $11 per hour plus 1% of all gross sales. That gives you an idea of what type of rates you can expect working for someone else.

Having experience in other types of sales, online reputation management is one of the most fun!

Good luck getting started! Reputation management is a fun and growing field!

In an effort to clean up his name defamed reputation he contacted the newspapers and they refused to retract the story, remove his name and mugshot or help him in any way.  He contacted me for reputation management.

He had already started working on his own reputation and after 3 days he had an almost complete article on WordPress.com.  He explained how he built the site but it wasn’t showing up for his name.

It is truly a good start to DIY reputation management, but it’s far from complete.  When I take on a new client I will typically create 20+ new sites all with unique content.  For one inexperienced person to attempt that would take them a week or two.  Then comes the real work of building links to each of those properties.  Without proper link building your reputation management campaign will never get off the ground.

DIY is great for some situations, but if your name or business name is showing up on real sites like a newspaper, blog, Yelp, RipOffReport or Pissed Consumer, you’ll need a real reputation management consultant to help clean it up.

Your online reputation management (ORM) is very similar to your reputation in real life.  What people think and say about you or your business can be harmful.  Can you imagine someone saying something slanderous about your and then putting it up on a billboard? You would likely want the billboard company to remove it, but they won’t and there is nothing you can do.

Then you have an idea.  You call the billboard company and offer to pay more than your slanderer paid.  The billboard company accepts this proposition and takes down the negative statement.

This is a rough idea of what reputation management is.  I will move everything negative off the front page so you’re only left with good information.

What about review sites?

According to many clients I have talked to, sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor seem to magically publish good reviews when you’re a paying customer and remove good reviews if you are not a paying customer.

Instead of playing that game, I prefer to just push these sites off the first page.  Then you don’t have to worry about them or any other sites like them.

What about Mugshots websites?

Mugshots.com, Arrests.org and other sites that publish mugshots should be ashamed! If you make a mistake should everyone in the world know about that for the rest of your life? Is it the first thing people should see if they Google your name?

Mugshot sites that charge you a fee to remove your name is almost equivalent to extortion and they’re even being sued in some states!

Should you pay to get your mugshot removed? Absolutely not! If you pay to get it removed from one site, what about the other sites? Before you know it you’ll be paying every site out there and that still won’t ensure that there won’t be more that pop up in the future.

By controlling the first page (that’s what I do!) you can essentially block any additional negativity from creeping back in.

Why only the first page?

Studies show that 98.5% of people click on a link on the first page.  Moving a negative article off the second page is double the work, but only a 1.5% return.  It’s just not worth it in most cases. Here are a few links showing data from first to second page listings. 1, 2.

Today I want to discuss (please leave a comment about your opinion) what to do with liquid savings. If you’re not funding your Roth IRA, 401k, and other retirement plans, those are always great for tax deference. But what do you do with your emergency fund?

People are much more careful with their money these days than ever before. The recession that started in the United States and expanded across the world has made conservatives of even the most speculative of investors.

However, there are still some tried and true methods for saving expendable income so that it can work for you in the long run. Below are just a few of the many ways in which you can continue to create more wealth for yourself even in the midst of a recessionary economy.

Savings Accounts

As fixed interest accounts go, savings accounts are the norm. However, there are many different types of savings accounts that you can invest in. There are variable interest savings accounts, high interest savings accounts and many others. The more expendable income that you have, the more options are open to you.

The trick with savings accounts is to find the ones that have interest rates that will outpace inflation. As long as you can overcome the detrimental effects of naturally rising prices, you can make money with a savings account.

Certificates of Deposit

Certificates of deposit, or CDs for short, are perhaps the most well known of the long term accounts. They are certainly safe, as most of them are protected by federal law.

CDs are a great way to save if you have less than perfect discipline. There are many penalties that an investor must incur if money is taken from a CD prematurely; most of these fees are not worth the early withdrawal.

As with savings accounts, CDs are also of a heterogeneous nature. There are many different types of CDs, including variable rate CDs and CDs in which you can deposit more than one time. CDs also pay higher interest rates the more money that you initially deposit into them. Look over your personal finances as they relate to the macroeconomic conditions of the world and choose the best option for yourself.

TreasuryDirect.gov

Government treasuries are by definition the safest investment that can be made at any point in time. These are investments that are wholly backed by the full faith of the United States government, and the interest rates on the treasuries are what set the rate for all other investments.

Invest in government treasuries if you cannot find any other investment that suits you. They are a great place to hold your money until you can think of a better place to put it.

Qualified Wealth Advisors

Finding the right wealth advisor can net you more profit than any of the above investments. The right wealth advisors will be able to diversify your portfolio with further research and a more practiced eye. As with all advisors, you still need to make your own choices.

This was a guest contribution by business professional and journalist Rebecca Leeb. Rebecca has a wide range of professional niches including, business, marketing, legal matters and real estate. For more of Rebecca’s work and professional opinions visit New Wealth Advisors Club.