Angie's List for Offline Small Businesses

I have a friend in California who is an accountant/tax specialist.

He is far from the normal.

He is continually using all sorts of
marketing methods to grow his firm.

I don't know if he has used Angies List or not,
However Yelp is the main source of new clients.

Are you thinking of this training would be for the end advertiser or
those that advise them?

Best,
Doctor E. Vile

Another interesting note. Angie's List started as a magazine 13 years ago. When they moved a lot of their muscle and money online, they took years of past issues and thousands and thousands (11,000 and growing) of professionally produced/edited articles and made them digital. All the articles are geared towards home services (How to choose the right painter, avoid a plumbing nightmare, best kitchen sinks, redesign the layout of your bedroom). That's a big source of their dominance in search.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em right? If you have a locally-based company, rather than spending the time and money trying to outrank AL, I see the path being much easier to piggy back on the traffic the "List" provides, and just position yourself to garner most of that traffic.

If you're struggling to consistently rank on the Big G, find a different playing field. Have 50% of 1,000 rather than 2% of 10,000 and put a lot less time, money, and effort into it.

I've known contractors to have issues with sites like Angieslist because customers feel very powerful and use that power of a possible negative review to get contractors to bend over backwards for them. I've never had any desire to use those sites, but I can see the value if you play the game.

Just my .02 here. As a consumer, I was very disappointed with Angie's List. It had very few service people in my area (suburb of New Orleans.) I hired someone to fix my refrigerator's ice makes b/c he had glowing reviews. Turned out he had no idea how to repair the more computer-based refrigerators on the market (mine is a Samsung.) He tried his best, but never did repair it. I'd rather look at yelp or even google reviews. Why should I pay a subscription fee for something I can find out for free? I'm suspicious of the reviews on there, anyway. As one should be of most reviews unless they are verified purchases. Best of luck.

I don't have any stock or vested interest in the company anymore, but I thought I'd try to give more information to help people better understand the platform.

Angie's List does say "contractors don't pay to be on Angie's list"...and they don't pay. Just like you don't pay to be in Google search results. There are hundreds of thousands of companies who are enjoying free traffic or free listings on AL.

That being said, you CAN pay to have a featured listing on AL. Much the same way you can pay (PPC) to have a featured result with the Big G.

I think it is possible to game the system and get a few legitimately "fake" reviews, but with all the loopholes you have to jump through in order to verify a membership as well as the lengths they go to in order to weed out bogus reviews (a DETAILED cross-reference of any data or behavior that links a reviewer to a provider and human powered investigation into any suspicious instances) it's not possible to do it on a big scale. I can't tell you how many companies I had that were blacklisted indefinitely for fake reviews..which sucked for both me and the provider.

I can totally sympathize with the challenge of consumers using the "leverage" of a review. There are definitely people who will abuse it. In my experience, it has been a small percentage of the consumers. I think people feeling like they do have recourse, though, gives them confidence to use the platform, and the reviews give them the confidence to hire someone on the spot. That's why the traffic converts insanely well.

Combined with the fact that the fee-based membership tends to weed out some of the people that are looking for whatever the cheapest option is. The membership is ~$6.00 a year. So it's not a significant amount, it's just a significant process that people who have already paid for access to reviews in order to find the best company are willing to pay for the best company.

People are always going to try and game the system, it's human nature. But it's so easy to do it legitimately, and potentially so rewarding to build a simple long term strategy, it doesn't make sense to.

To quote Tom Haverford, "I always take the easy route. It's SO EASY!"

When I was in real estate we were on Angie's List (well, she still is).


We got millions of dollars worth of listings from Angie's List with the free account. Though, real estate is a high-transaction business.


Plus, it's a great place to get testimonials. Once someone writes a review we would ask them if we could use it as a testimonial on all of our marketing materials along with their first and last names, and city.


So, kill two birds with one stone... get leads and testimonials.