Any business can learn a thing or two from the Internet giant Amazon. If you have been considering placing sample survey questions or customer feedback on your website, it is beneficial to stop for a moment and consider the example of Amazon.com’s vast record of success.

Amazon has become such a vast and vital part of the global economy for a variety of good reasons. Often inquiries into their amazing success tend to focus on their distribution, pricing and other factors. All of these factors are, of course, quite vital to the success of this American engine of commerce. But there is more to the Amazon success story that the factors that reside at the surface. Look a little deeper, and you will find additional layers to the Amazon success story that point to the importance of sample survey questions and customer satisfaction survey questions.

One critical factor is the fact that Amazon was one of the first companies to realize the importance of opening up its site to the public. Amazon realized that creating and fostering a platform for interactivity and expression would play a pivotal role in the growth of the company. With this in mind, Amazon not only allowed users to post comments about products, but they encouraged it. Soon the site was overrun with people giving grades and reviews for every type of product imaginable.

The success of Amazon’s customer feedback underscores the importance of having interactivity, such as in the form of sample survey questions, on your website. Customers want to voice their opinion, and a great many customers also want to interact with you about your product, service and website. By following Amazon’s example and actively fostering this sort of communication, you will reap the benefits.

What could really be more important for a business than knowing what customers want to buy? The answer is very little. Knowing what your customers want and how they want it delivered to them is as good as gold!

Sample survey questions can give you a rough idea of what kind of questions you should be asking your visitors and customers. There is no doubt that the information you discover will be one hundred percent worth your time and effort.

Everyday more online retailers are adding customer surveys to their checkout process. Without consumer ratings, often merchants find that assessing whether or not customers are pleased is a somewhat of a guessing game. Consumer ratings have many benefits including the fact that merchants can gain valuable feedback about the shopping experience from the customer’s point of view.

Adding customer surveys to your online store can be one of the most effective ways of increasing the loyalty of your shoppers. As a result, this method can be extremely beneficial for growing sales. Not only will your customers be more likely to turn into repeat clients, they may be so pleased with their experience that they recommend your products or services to others.

On the other hand, often when your customers are unhappy with their experience, they won’t say anything. They will just disappear for good. Needless to say, you have lost their repeat business. Often you will find through customer surveys that the issues that your clients have are quite small and can be easily addressed. However, just these issues could have very easily equated to customers choosing another shopping destination for future purchases.

There are a variety of ways to easily add customer surveys into your transaction process. For example, one company called Shopper Approved adds customer surveys that come up right after a customer orders his or her product. This way a client’s initial thoughts can be expressed through the means of this customer survey form.

Through the Shopper Approved software, customers can also opt-in to participate in a longer survey after receiving their purchase. This sort of automation through the means of software allows customer surveys to be a smooth and easy process for your customers. Luckily, computers allow online customer surveys to be a thoroughly automated process. As a result, confusing paperwork and/or mailers are now a thing of the past.

I had a lot of great feedback from my “Ping.FM Video – Syndicate & Update Your Status” video and also had a lot of questions about how to add Google Buzz to your Ping.fm account.

Below you will find the simple steps to adding your Google Buzz account to your Ping.fm account for auto syndicating.

1. Of course you must have a Ping.fm account, sign up here – http://ping.fm/

2. Add Gtalk by clicking “Add Network” at the http://ping.fm/networks/ page

3. Next enter your email address and password associated with your Google buzz account then click submit:

4. And for the last step, you need to add Gtalk as a connected service by logging into your Google Buzz account. See images below for steps:

That is it, your Ping.fm posts will now automatically post to your Google Buzz account. Most other social networks are much easier to add as you can see in the video I shared here.

There are some things you need to know with using Ping.fm as a social media tool. You need to remember that it is simply a tool that will help save you time. It is not an automated tool that will make you millions or get you more followers necessarily. I see many people abuse the tool to the point that they are not being social anymore with their friends and followers. As we know, Social Media is all about the conversation and being social. If all you are doing is submitting updates and not a part of the discussion then you will loose out on what social media really is.

Just wanted to share this funny video with everyone. Always good to have a good laugh.

I put together a very quick video that I wanted to share with everyone on how to quickly and easily update your status on all the major Social Media Networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and many more.

Watch the video above about Ping.fm an amazing tool that will save you tons of time. Learn how easy it is to set up a Ping.fm account and then hook all your major Social Media profiles to your account. This makes it super easy to syndicate and update your status, tweet, or whatever you want to call it.

If you are sure exactly what Syndicate means here is the definition:

“verb: to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places: Her column is syndicated in 120 papers.”

Take some time out of your day to learn how you can SYNDICATE your content faster, better and with less effort!

Visit Ping.fm today to set up your Free account.

The concept of ‘Social Proof‘ is so important when it comes to your website visitors beginning to build a relationship with you. We all know that people have to trust us before they will buy from us.

Watch this video and see some statistics that will blow your mind:

These statistics are the very reason why I want to share Shopper Approved with you.

Shopper Approved is a Customer Satisfaction Survey Software that helps you gather ratings and reviews from your customers right after they purchase from you. They also are able to review the product or service when it is received.

By adding the Shopper Approved rating/review service to your website, your customers will be able to provide you with valuable feedback, ratings, and reviews automatically. You can then give your new customers easy access to this brand building information by displaying our exclusive ‘Shopper Approved’ trust seal in a prominant location on your website. Those ratings and reviews highly influence new customers to buy, they build instant trust and credibility, increase your sales, and even lower your return rate!

Here are some of the key reasons why you should add Shopper Approved to your website today:

• Advanced Seal and Certificate technology, powered by Trust Guard. As one of the leading Security websites online, Trust Guard helps to protect millions of online shoppers from hackers. Shopper Approved utilizes Trust Guard’s proprietary seal and certificate technology in order to provide our clients with up-to-date, authentic, accurate information.
• Outstanding Rating and Review Conversion. Shopper Approved is so effective at gathering feedback from your clients on average, almost 1 out of every 2 customers will provide initial ratings and/or reviews, and nearly 1 in every 3 customers will opt-in to fill out a full survey once they receive their order.
• Instant ‘Social Proof’ of your product or service. One of the most effective ways to increase your sales is to show new customers that other customers have bought from you and had an enjoyable, positive experience.

Shopper Approved specializes in creating the optimal environment for new customers to be able to trust you, giving them the ability to quickly evaluate your past ratings and reviews, helping them make an informed decision.

By adding Shopper Approved seals to your website, you can provide potential customers with valuable ratings, feedback and reviews, exactly when and where they want to find them.

Make sure you take some time out of your day to see if Shopper Approved customer satisfaction survey software can help your business.

Interviews

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Below is the full transcript of the Linkedin Marketing Tips interview with Lewis Howes:

Garrett: Hello everyone welcome to another Building Social Equity interview series. Today, I’ll be interviewing Lewis Howes. We’re going to be talking about LinkedIn. I’m very excited to pick Lewis’s brain. Lewis Howes is a previous two-sport collegiate All American. He’s also the NCAA All Division record holder for the most received yards in a single football game, which I thought was really cool.

As an athlete, Lewis was featured on ESPN and Sports Illustrated. He’s also founded the Sports Executives Association and sportsnetworker.com. Lewis is the co-author of the LinkedIn success book LinkedWorking: Generating Success on the World’s Largest Professional Network Website. That’s why we’re going to interview Lewis today, for that specific reason, because I think of him as a LinkedIn expert. I know a lot of people are missing out on the networking opportunities of LinkedIn. Lewis, welcome to the call. Tell us a bit about yourself and you came to where you are today.

Lewis: Thanks so much for having me. Like you mentioned, I played sports in college and I actually played arena football for a season after college. I was trying to work my way up to the NFL. A career-ending injury left me sidelined and wondering what I was going to do since my passion was taken away from me. How was I going to make money and what was I going to do now?

I was kind of depressed for a while because I was in a full arm cast for 6 months and couldn’t work out. For my whole life, my passion was playing sports, and it was taken away from me, from a competitive level. It’s kind of a moment in my life where I was thinking, “What do I do now?” I was 25 at the time so it was basically a quarter-life crisis. I didn’t have any work experience. I didn’t have a job. I went right into playing football after college.

I didn’t want to work for anyone because I’m stubborn like that. I just wanted to work myself, really, so I spent about a year soul searching and figuring out what was next. During that time, I was introduced to LinkedIn. Right when I was injured, a friend of mine introduced me to LinkedIn. I don’t know why I ended up spending so much time on LinkedIn; maybe I just saw the potential in it. At that time there were probably 23 million people on there and currently by this time of this interview, there are 60 million people on LinkedIn.

I really started to dive into it and started to see a lot of opportunities from the connections I was making. I was reaching out to individuals personally, one by one, sending them really nice messages. I would convert those emails into phone calls, those phone calls into face-to-face interactions, and the opportunities really started to flow in, abundantly, from all the connections I made on LinkedIn.

I’m not really preaching that LinkedIn itself, as a website, is the end-all be-all. It’s the relationships from the people I’ve met on LinkedIn which have really allowed me to do the things I want to do.

During that time, I spent the 6 months that I was in the cast, 6-8 hours a day, using LinkedIn, testing it, tweaking it, trying to figure out what the best thing was, the best applications, and things like that. I was figuring out how to move my profile up when people search for certain keywords. I pretty much tested everything and spent countless hours on there. I still spend a lot of hours on there because it’s so powerful and it generates so much traffic to my website, so many sales for me, so many business leads and things like that. That’s kind of how it started.

Garrett: That’s interesting and I think a lot of people have either signed up for LinkedIn and really don’t know how to use it. A lot of the buzz is about Facebook and Twitter, and I’m sure you hear that a lot. What is the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter? Are they the same? Are they different? What is your take on that?

Lewis: In my opinion, LinkedIn is the most powerful social networking site if you’re trying to build your business. I’ll give you a couple of stats. It’s got the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site, over any other top social networking site. It’s got $109 thousand is the average household income per member.

45% of users are business decision makers, whereas if you go to Twitter and Facebook, and MySpace, those sites – these aren’t the exact stats, but around 25% to 29% are business decision makers on those three sites. The average household income on those three sites is between $90 thousand to $98 thousand. It’s much better and bigger in terms of the number of decision makers you’re connecting with. Basically one out of every two people is going to make a decision on something you ask them, as opposed to one out of four people on the other sites.

The average income is much higher, so it’s a much more targeted place to do business than on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and things like that. People are interested in doing business, and they’re serious about their careers and jobs. They’re not just posting short messages like on Twitter, or looking at videos and pictures like on Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. It’s a clear place to do business.

Garrett: Would you say it’s more for professionals too? Not necessarily professionals, but just more people that are there are there to network with likeminded people.

Lewis: Exactly and you’re not going to find anyone who is in high school or under on LinkedIn, and rarely college students. It’s mostly 22-year olds and up. From every different industry you can think of, all over the world, so you can target down the CEO’s or anyone you want to get in touch with. You can find them through the advanced search and really reach out to them through someone in your network, very easily.

Garrett: That’s interesting. In the introduction of your book LinkedWorking, you give some examples of how LinkedIn has helped you in your life and business. Could you please share an example to help illustrate the power of LinkedIn?

Lewis: To be honest with you, 90% of the business that I generate comes from LinkedIn, or driving traffic from LinkedIn to my sites, or getting people to sign up for the events, the live events that I throw. I throw events around the world and I get 300-500 people to pay me to come to my events. I do all that marketing and promotion through LinkedIn.

I sell countless numbers of books from LinkedIn, just getting people to my LinkedIn profile, them seeing my book on the Amazon application on my profile, clicking through and buying it through there. It’s given me a lot of speaking gigs, a number of speaking opportunities I get from LinkedIn. They find my profile, say it’s compelling, and they read through my websites, and then they end up hiring me to come and speak.

A lot of joint venture opportunities, people are emailing me constantly saying we want you to do this webinar or we want you to do this product with us, or help us market this for a commission, so just getting a lot of different joint venture opportunities. I don’t think there is really one specific thing that stands out because there are so many things that get created from it all the time.

I’m creating a new association for sports executives. I’ve created the largest sports networking group online, that I’m aware of. It’s got almost 25,000 of the top sports executives from around the world on my LinkedIn group. From that, I’m creating an exclusive membership site association of top sports executives who want to better connect, get more training and education, and share their ideas with other likeminded individuals. So many different opportunities come from it. It’s kind of hard to pinpoint just one of them.

Garrett: That’s great. It’s interesting that you’ve pretty much built your whole business and life around LinkedIn. That shows you the power of it, and I don’t think people understand the power of networking, and especially with LinkedIn. I certainly don’t. I don’t use it enough. You named the book LinkedWorking. Why did you name it that?

Lewis: My co-author, Frank Agin and I were trying to think of a catchy name to go with it. A lot of them didn’t stick with us. We were trying to figure out a way to tie it all in, like connecting online and offline, connecting on LinkedIn and transitioning it into business for yourself. LinkedWorking is just a matter of networking on LinkedIn; LinkedIn and networking put together. LinkedWorking is what we came up with as a catchy word to throw in there and it seems to be working well for us so far.

Garrett: You talked a lot about the opportunities that you’ve had because of LinkedIn. What do you think the opportunities people are missing out on by not using LinkedIn?

Lewis: I think people just don’t understand that it’s much more than a resume. I think a lot of people have the misconception that it’s a place where you go when you’re looking for a job, or just when you’re in transition. I’m not in transition. I’m not looking for a job, but I spend at least an hour a day on there. I know the potential of it.

It’s currently always one of the top five things that drive things to my site, usually above Twitter and Facebook. I’m on Facebook and Twitter all the time. I’ve got 25,000 followers on Twitter, so I’m sending a lot of traffic through there, but LinkedIn drives more traffic to my site, over the other social networking sites, almost all the time. Some months Twitter is just ahead of it by a few hundred clicks, but it almost always drives more traffic to my site.

I have yet to find someone who can tell me what they’re looking to achieve or what their goal is, and not be able to figure out how to help them do it on LinkedIn. I challenge anyone to show me that they can’t achieve a certain goal using LinkedIn, whether it be – goals usually come from connecting with certain individuals. You can always find the right individual through LinkedIn or always find someone to help you achieve that goal through LinkedIn, whether it’s driving traffic to your site, selling more products, generating more leads – these are a lot of the problems that people face. They’re trying to get more leads, get PR, get free press; you can do all those things on LinkedIn.

It’s a matter of kind of understanding it and being educated on the different things that you can do on there, for people to really start being able to take action. I think a lot of people don’t know that you can do these things; they think it’s just a site to post your resume.

Garrett: That leads us into the next question. Give us a good example or steps of how someone should start using LinkedIn?

Lewis: It depends. If you’re just starting out or whether you’ve been on there for a while, the first thing you want to do is really complete your profile 100%. When you go to your profile it tells you, if you don’t have a picture it’s going to say add a picture and you’ll get 5% more complete. Follow the steps until you are up to 100%. By doing that, it’s going to allow your profile to look more full, although that’s not the end-all/be-all. You want to take it to the next level.

You want to start connecting with everyone. I feel like you should connect with everyone because you’re able to export your connections’ emails into one CSV file on LinkedIn. The more connections you have, the bigger your database is going to grow. I think a lot of us know that our database is one of the most powerful assets we have. On Facebook and Twitter, you can’t export your friends into a CSV file like that, so that’s a reason it’s valuable. Connecting with everyone is going to help you expand your network by your 2nd and 3rd degree, which means more people will be able to find you, contact you, and hire you for your services. That’s a big thing as well, so really connect with everyone.

The next thing you want to do is fill out your summary and your specialties with rich key words. The more rich key words you have that specify who you are, who you help, and how you help people in your niche, the higher you’re going to show up when people are searching for those key words in the people search.

For example, if you’re talking sports, depending on how you’re connected to me, I’m usually the number one search result when you type in “sports” under the people search under the top right of the LinkedIn profile. For me, that’s got over 500,000 results for that, and I’m number one. That’s how I’m able to generate more opportunities and more leads every day because people are finding me very easily, they’re adding me, and they’re connecting with me.

Make sure you fill out your profile 100%, add a lot of connections, connect with everyone, and then add keywords throughout your profile.

Garrett: That’s great. You talked about connecting with everyone. Give us a bad and a good example of sending an invitation to connect with someone on LinkedIn.

Lewis: I get a ton of requests from people. I probably get 20-25 a day from people. A lot of people I don’t know, some people I do know, adding to connect. The ones that stand out are the ones that send me a personalized message. A lot of people just send a generic message that says “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn,” and then they put their name down there. This isn’t very memorable because I get tons of those.

Make sure every time you send a message to someone to connect with them, you send a personalized message. This can be time consuming, but all you need to do is send one or two sentences. It doesn’t have to be a long paragraph unless it’s someone you really want to connect with and build that relationship with.
If you’re sending an invitation, just say, “I notice we’re in the same group or we’ve got the same niche, same industry, or three of the same connections, and I’d really love to learn more about what you do, based off the things I read in your profile. It would be great to connect and let me know if there is anything I can do to help. Thanks…” and sign your name.

That’s a simple way to go about connecting with people, just making a little personal connection to them somehow, whether through their profile, some groups you’re in together, or the people you’re connected to. It breaks down the barriers to entry with that person’s trust and they’re more willing to connect with you, not only connect with you, or remember you for your niche, or look back on your profile and see if there are ways they can help you in the future. Make sure you send that personal invitation.

Garrett: Those are great tips. In your book you talk about networking and becoming actively involved. What are some powerful ways to stay actively involved on LinkedIn?

Lewis: The groups are extremely powerful so what you want to do is search through the groups search function: your key words in your industry, your passion, your hobbies, and things like that. For me, it’s sports, so I search all the different sports groups. I joined probably ten or fifteen different sports groups.

I interact by posting articles from me website in the discussion section. It’s like a mini website, mini forum, each group is. You can post discussion, you can post news articles, you can promote a job or search for jobs in there. I really try to be active in the groups a lot by posting articles which helps me drive traffic back to my site.

I post comments on various discussions peel talk about in my niche, answering questions – the Q&A section is a great place to build thought leadership, and generate new leads by answering questions in your niche.

Go to the Q&A section and search for your industry, the questions you want to answer, and then give your best answers. That’s going to help build your thought leadership. Those are a few of the ways you can do it.

Garrett: That’s cool, and I bet a lot of people listening didn’t even know half of those things existed so that’s great information. One of my favorite parts of the book is the section called “Take Consistent Action”. I like that part because being consistent is something I always talk about. What are some specific activities we can do each day to stay consistent in our networking efforts?

Lewis: One of the things you could do is as simple as update your status once or twice a day with a question, or with a link back to a compelling article on your website, or promoting another website in your niche. If you don’t have a lot of time throughout the day, you can update your status. You can use ping.fm or you can sync it with Twitter and do it that way so at least if you can’t go on LinkedIn each day you can still post something which by posting something in your status, it’s going to show up in the stream of all the people you’re connected to, on their home profile when they first login. It looks like you’re being active, even if you can’t go on there or don’t have the time to go on there. Updating your status is one thing.

Every time you take action on anything, whether it be add a period or a comma in your summary, add a new job description, connect with someone, join a group, post a discussion, add a news article; anytime you do anything, it shows up on the home profile of anyone you’re connected to at some point. Just by doing a bit here and there, it’s going to help you be on the top of mind for people because they’re going to see your picture and your name all the time, in their stream on their LinkedIn home profile.

Consistent action is the most important thing. A friend and mentor of mine is Chris Brogan, who is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the biggest social media thought leaders out there today. He constantly writes posts about how he’s gotten to his success, how he’s achieved his level of success. He says he hasn’t done anything special, anything that anyone can’t do. What he’s done is written a blog article every day for the last five years. That allows him to bring in $20 thousand speaking gigs, etc., because he’s consistent and he takes action every day. All you need to do is a little bit every day and over time it’s going to grow.

Garrett: That’s so true. Lewis, you’ve given us some awesome insight on how to use LinkedIn to help grow our business. I suggest to everybody that’s listening to go to Amazon and search for Lewis and his book LinkedWorking. I’ve read it. I suggest you read it. It’s a great read, and I’m definitely going to start using LinkedIn more to help grow my business, to help grow my relationships, and start building that social equity that I talk about. Lewis, if someone wants to learn more about you and your services, where should they go?

Lewis: The best place to go is LewisHowes.com, and you’ll see all the information there. You’ll be able to connect with me on any other website by going there first.

Garrett: That’s awesome. Thanks again, Lewis, and have some safe travels. I know you’ve been traveling a little bit, and again I do appreciate your time.

Lewis: Thanks so much Garrett. I appreciate it.

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Alex Mandossian, Dave Lakhani, Martin Wales, Justin Brooke, Mari Smith, Mark Murnahan, and Joel Comm!

Simply click on the image or “Click Here for Interview” link to
access the full audio, mp3 file and transcripts of each interview.

	Click Here for Dave’s Interview
Dave Lakhani ———————————–
	Click Here for Alex’s Interview
Alex Mandossian ———————————–
	Click Here for Martin’s Interview
Martin Wales ———————————–
	Click Here for Justin’s Interview
Justin Brooke ———————————–
	Click Here for Mari’s Interview
Mari Smith ———————————–
	Click Here for Mark’s Interview
Mark Aaron Murnahan ———————————–
	Click Here for Joel’s Interview
Joel Comm

I find all of Tony Robbins stuff very useful and inspiring. I just wanted to share this great video with you. I have tons of Tony’s self help products like Get The Edge, Personal Power and Power Talk. I think of Tony Robbins as a mentor in my life.

Do you have a mentor?