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Want to improve your business presence when people visit your website? Want to drive traffic to your business with very little work? Interested in winning repeat business without spending hours every month on marketing?
Nope, we’re not trying to sell you our latest passive income product. Nope – we’re just talking about the power of testimonials. Yes, those little blurbs you see on other people’s websites talking about how great the person is and what a great job they do. Those couple sentences can really do the trick when you’re trying to up your freelance game.
But are they really that powerful? Here are a few ways testimonials can change the way you do business overnight.
Credibility
Knowing whom you’re really dealing with on the Internet is sometimes tough. A small business that you came across may look like they have everything together, but who are they really? Is everything they say true, or just a fabrication to take my money and run?
This is what your clients go through every time they come across a website that doesn’t have any sort of “back up” to its claims. However, as soon as they come across your testimonials page, all this changes. Suddenly they’re faced with a handful of quotes from respectable sources telling them that you’re awesome.
Better yet, you’ve kindly included links to the clients’ websites, so if customer really wants to check on your sources they can. You know that lying on the Internet is one of its oldest traditions, and you want your customers to feel totally safe.
Repeat Business
After a customer visits your website for the first time and reads your testimonials, they may decide to hire you. After they do and you (hopefully) knock their socks off, you’ve just hit them with a one two punch.
Not only did they read about your great work, they also experienced it firsthand. This means their pre-hiring assumptions were confirmed. When they need services like yours again, who do you think they’ll call? Your testimonials have confirmed their assumptions about your business and now they’re a client ; a client who will call you whenever they need work done.
It Shows Pride in Your Work
Some may think that including testimonials on a website is gloating, however that is not the case. You work hard on your business, and you want to talk about it and gain more business. You’re proud of your business and you want others to know it. What’s wrong with that, especially if it helps you get more of that same work in the future?
Furthermore, showing pride in your work exudes confidence to your clients. They don’t want to hire someone who “sort of likes what I did, I guess.” They want a freelancer who has no problem standing behind what he did and saying it’s awesome. If you do that for others, they think, he or she will do the same for my assignment.
Of course after you’ve completed a new assignment, go ahead and ask for another testimonial. It is more than likely that they’ll be happy to hand one over. Keep in mind you don’t want to have 10,000 testimonials all over your website because that would be over the top (and a little obscene). Keeping them up to date, though, means your blurbs will never be outdated and stale.
How do you ask your clients for testimonials?
