Written by: Jophiel Silvestrone
Jophiel Silvestrone has written 326 posts in the Tech Blog.
Jophiel grew up on a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana near Chico Hot Springs. Working on the ranch instilled work ethic and self motivation. Filled with this drive, Jophiel started mowing the local school's yards twice a month throughout the summers, at the age of 12. He moved to Billings in 2004, where he has been deeply involved in the local business community ever since. A serial entrepreneur, Jophiel has ran multiple businesses in our local community. The first business, a janitorial and carpet cleaning company, founded in 2005, has employed over 50 locals. Moving on to the media industry, Jophiel and several partners founded Green Directory Montana in the spring of 2007. Green Directory's sustainability ranking software awarded points based on sustainable or "green" actions. These points counted towards a business's total "Green Score," which in turn ranked them against other businesses in their category and throughout the entire site. It also featured a limited edition print version distributed annually. A business acquisition allowed Jophiel to focus on new projects, and a few close business colleagues and Jophiel started Rocky Mountain Mr. & Ms. Magazine, a lifestyle publication for men and women in the Magic City. After a year and a half at the helm of RM3 Magazine, the business was purchased. He now runs a web development company SkyPoint Studios and fathers his son Jaoquin, who plays football, basketball, soccer, and is learning snowboarding from his dad. Recently, has expanded to locations in Havasu, Arizona & Vegas. SkyPoint Studios is a market leader in both Billings & Havasu and Jophiel is working on building that same level of market dominance in Vegas. Specialties: Extensive experience in online and offline business. Especially savvy at WordPress, and operate several sites, one example is the blog: skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com/tech-blog. Check out skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com for the latest projects from SkyPoint Studios.
Get More Reviews
We all know how important reviews are online these days. They can be a make-or-break factor when a customer is deciding to choose your business.
Businesses with more reviews tend to be better trusted and tend to get more calls and more sales. So how do you go about getting more reviews for your business?
Well for one, be very good at what you do and always follow through with what you say. This may seem pretty straightforward, but it really is good advice when in business to do the best possible job possible and always take care of the customer a 110%.
Now there is way to get more reviews online that is a rather nice hack. And this is using a little tool called Bit.ly, which is a link shortener to send a customer who is happy with your services directly to your review page on Google.
The way to do this is to set up a Bit.ly account, you can do that here. Once you have a Bit.ly account, you’ll want to navigate to your Google local page to where the reviews are done.
Open up the review area where the stars are at and copy the URL in the browser bar at the top of the page. Once you have this should go back to Bit.ly and paste it into the short link box to create a short link.
Inside this box will create a random number and letter link and you can highlight that and change it to whatever you want, like review your business. For example SkyPoint’s is bit.ly/reviewskypoint. This takes the visitor directly to where they can leave a review for our business and makes it much easier to get the customer to actually fill it out.
The cool thing is when you know you’re sending to a Gmail account, then that person will already be logged into their Gmail account and can fill out the review immediately.
Without having to login, this is much easier for the customer and is what makes it so successful!
So go get out there and get more reviews for your business. It will definitely pay off as you get more and more business calls and sales down the road with the more reviews you have.