Registration Please

I cannot seem to talk my clients into spending 10 minutes to write a positive review for me or the salon on Yelp ... or any other peer-review site it seems.

I've posted numerous requests for reviews on the salon's Facebook page — which syncs to my Twitter feed, which shows on my website ... I'm pretty sure it gets seen.

Theoretically, I think it should be a simple process. I'm not asking for anyone to write up a 500 word review — although that's OK too. I'd just really like a handful of my devoted fans to give me a bunch of stars and a quick "Maggie's awesome" or something like that.

I'm not sure if people — at least here in my slow-to-catch-up-to-the-rest-of-the-world town — realize just how powerful positive peer-review sites are for small businesses like us when it comes to snaring new clients. And then there's always the problem of clients who don't want to "share" their nail tech so they intentionally make the effort to not refer us to anyone. You gotta love those clients, eh?

But I think one of the biggest deterrents to getting people to actually follow through with writing a review at many of these sites is the requirement of registering with the site and setting up an account.

I'm guilty of this myself. It is absolutely mind-boggling to realize just how much time it actually takes to do just about anything on the Internet — let alone in "real life." The extra few moments of signing up for an account can mean the difference between bothering to write a review or not. And then there's the hassle of signing in to your account.

I'm so over having to sign up and sign in to everything, and I guess it's fair to say that I'm not the only one. So I guess I can give up hope on talking my clients into writing a review for me if everyone else thinks it's just as much work as I do.

How do you get your clients to write positive reviews for you?