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Building a Word of Mouth Reputation That Supports Your Alternative Revenue Streams
Alternative revenue streams can be a great way to supplement an income and grow wealth. Whether you’re moonlighting as a writer, tutoring students as a side gig, or pursuing your biggest passion in life, you can monetize the skills and assets you already have without quitting your day job. However, if you want your second source of income to be a success, you first need to build a positive reputation that attracts your target market.
While alternative revenue streams are often individually run, working solo doesn’t have to be your Achilles’ heel. No matter how many team members you have, the right tactics can help you efficiently improve your reputation through word of mouth. Here are four tips to help you get noticed by the right clients and get ahead of the competition.
Excel in Customer Service
While your current reputation may not fully represent your brand, it’s usually derived from the truth. Your customers’ personal experiences with your products or services shape what they tell their friends and family members about your brand. If the majority of their experiences are negative, you won’t gain enough traction to grow your alternative revenue streams. However, excellent customer service can inspire your buyers to become your advocates and drive new customers to your business.
The most important rule of thumb when improving customer service is to listen to your stakeholders. When you receive negative feedback, take steps to resolve the issue, prevent it from happening again, and maintain a positive relationship with your clients. When you receive positive feedback, show your gratitude in your response and continue honing in on your strengths.
Since your alternative revenue stream isn’t your full-time job, consider clarifying your office hours to prevent any dissatisfaction with slow response times.
Deliver Quality Work
When you want happy customers who help you improve your word-of-mouth reputation, aim to go the extra mile to satisfy your customers. If your work is high-quality — and consistently so — they may naturally want to brag about the products or services they got from your company. This can not only improve your word-of-mouth reputation, but also your brand awareness, which can make your company feel well-established, familiar, and trustworthy to the greater public.
While acting on the feedback you receive can help you excel in customer service, improving your quality of work depends on your ability to proactively collect feedback about specific products or services soon after they’re delivered. Even if your customers have a positive opinion of your work, they can offer insights about where you have room to improve. As a result, you can fix negative trends in public opinion about your side hustle before it affects your word-of-mouth reputation.
Offer Referral Incentives
A good customer experience doesn’t always inspire clients to spread the word about your alternative revenue stream. If you want to improve your word-of-mouth reputation fast, you need to give customers incentives to promote your company to their friends and family.
Build a referral program that rewards customers who recommend your business to people in their immediate network. When one of these leads conversions, you can provide a gift card, free product or service, or something else desirable that will spark your customer base into action. Even when referrals don’t lead to conversions, positive word will start to spread about your brand, which can lead to an ever-growing list of leads for your alternative revenue stream.
As an extra plus, the connections you build through word of mouth can help you maintain a positive community of stakeholders that can combat the psychological effects of working from home on alternative revenue streams.
Blend Word-of-Mouth and Social Media Marketing
When you build your reputation through word of mouth, people share the story of your brand and their experiences directly with individuals they interact with. Since friends and family members are consistently the most trusted sources of brand information, word of mouth can instantly change perceptions about your brand.
While social media is a powerful channel for growing your second source of income, it doesn’t have the same, immediate impact on your reputation that word of mouth does. However, social media marketing has the power to initiate and influence conversations about your brand. By encouraging and sharing carefully selected user-generated content on your social media channels, you can impact how people talk about your products, services, and the company overall.
Build a Word-of-Mouth Reputation You Can Take Pride In
When you improve your word-of-mouth reputation, you can quickly attract quality leads to your business and grow your alternative revenue streams faster — and it doesn’t have to be difficult because you’re working solo or on a small team. You can shape public opinion just by improving your customer service and delivering quality work with feedback from your customers in mind. When offering incentives for people to give you referrals and pairing your efforts with a social media strategy, you can further develop your positive word-of-mouth reputation.
