*** Course Updated, Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2015 ***

Many of your customers - and future customers - practically live online every day.

They text. They Tweet. They search for goods and services and, sometimes, they'll leave reviews for restaurants; coffee shops; florists; heating and cooling repairmen; plumbers; lawyers; accountants and more.

Your company - whether you're a local start-up; "Mom and Pop" shop or is starting to grow with a larger customer base and more employees - needs to protect and improve its online reputation.

One of the best ways is by earning positive reviews from customers and clients through online review websites such as Yelp, Manta, Google+ Local, Bing Local and many others.

Positive online reviews offer social proof that your company provides excellent products and services to its customers. It tells other potential customer "buy from this company" or "visit this restaurant!"

On the other side, customers can also leave your company a negative review which can quickly cause your business' online reputation to go sour.

In this course, we'll focus on how you and your business can earn positive reviews from customers.

We'll explain how online review websites work and how businesses and customers rely on these websites; how your business can claim, confirm and optimize your online review profile for better rankings; which online review websites your company should target, and, most importantly, proven and inexpensive tips and techniques you can implement in order to earn more positive reviews for your business.