One great, overarching question is looming over all small business owners today: How can I adapt to still make money in a bad economy?

While the answer to that question differs for each business depending on circumstances, local demographics, the structure of the business, and so on, there is a simple answer that might help!

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A new article has surfaced over on CNN money, and what it has to say might shock you:

Allowing customers to review your products and services live on your website builds new-customer trust and returning-customer loyalty. And, get this — according to the article, it doesn’t even matter if some of the reviews are bad!

Obviously, if all of your reviews are negative, you’ve got far bigger problems to focus on than worrying about optimizing the customer experience of your website You’re screwed. However, having a few bad reviews sprinkled in can give your website an air of legitimacy since most saavy web-users tend to become wary and suspicious if every review they read about a certain company is glowing.

If you’re still worried about putting a review system on your website (and opening the flood gates to any criticism that you were able to conveniently ignore before), know this: according to the article, an average of 87% of all reviews are positive.

What you should take away from this: Reviews (and in the grander scheme, testimonials) are an invaluable asset that should be added to any organization’s website, whether it’s goods or services that are being sold. Reviews help build customer trust and loyalty, and can vastly increase your sales. And most importantly: don’t be worried about bad reviews driving your sales down. In a very strange twist, mixing some bad reviews in with the good ones adds legitimacy to your reviews and should actually help drive your sales up further!

Now, Go Out There and Get it Done!

This just in!  This article explains a new proposal on capital hill that might just save all of those small banks that predominantly finance small business startups!

From what I’ve read, any bank with a cap under $75 million will not fall under the proposed new regulations (which are vastly more harsh than current regulations).

What you should take away from this: Whether you feel that more regulation (in the grand scheme of things) is a good thing or a bad thing, this proposed ammendment to the regulation bill should keep small business lending at least as open as it is right now, and probably as open as it was pre-debt bubble.

Please feel free to chime in and let us know your thoughts on this issue! And, as usual…

… Go out there and make it happen!