Online review sites now give customers the power to write a public review of your business at any time, making many business owners feel completely defenseless against the potential onslaught.

Reviews can pop up when you least expect them, and they can have a lasting effect on how potential and regular customers perceive your business.

In short, online reviews can be a pain—especially if you're below the three-star average range.

Managing online reputation is absolutely essential to building a strong customer base and maintaining steady revenue, especially for small businesses. Most people will make their buying decisions through online research, and reviews are often a facilitating factor—especially when ratings are usually the first thing that a potential customer will see when searching for your business on Google.

Building a strong online reputation is no walk in the park, but following through with each of the following five tactics could effectively bring those scores up and promote an overall positive image of your company.

1. Immediately respond to every review on every site

What you'll accomplish...

• You'll show potential and current customers that you care.
• You'll locate and solve potential problems.

The major review sites for the general market are mainly Yelp, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google+. However, you need to be aware of the various review sites that pertain to your particular business and industry.

For example, e-commerce sites should be concerned about the reviews that their products receive on Amazon. Hotels and restaurants need to keep a close eye on TripAdvisor and Yelp, and preschools need to worry about GreatSchools.org.

Managing reviews on all those sites takes a lot of work, which is why it's a good idea to assign at least one person to check each site daily. Make a list of every site where your business or product could be reviewed by a customer, and bookmark each page for easy access. Not every site will have a new review every day, so this process will be pretty quick and seamless.

Most sites allow you to respond to reviews, so write a response for EVERY review that you can, directly on the site: Share your perspective of an incident if there was a bad review, and try to rectify the issue publicly; also show your appreciation to customers who raved about your business. When you do, potential customers will see how responsive you are to both positive and negative reviews.

If a site doesn't allow a direct response to a review, see whether you can locate the particular customer's information and contact him/her; however, do so only if the customer gave you his/her information willingly. You can also write a response to the customer's profile directly if the site allows it.

Here's how you should handle review responses:

• Respond to a positive review with a "thank you" and give them some incentive to come back again
• Respond to a negative review by offering to help fix the situation. Provide your contact information and follow up with them if they don't reach out to you.

2. "Intercept" reviews before they're posted

What you'll accomplish...

• You'll prevent negative reviews from being posted.
• You'll resolve customer complaints before they're made public.

Create a system for consistently contacting customers immediately after they do business with you, and ask their opinion of your service. You can use online surveys that you send immediately after a transaction or an on-location visit, or at-the-counter forms that they can fill out.

Anything that you can do to receive a customer's opinion right when (or before) they walk out the door (figurative or actual) is important for managing reputation.

When you reach out to customers that quickly, you will have given them an outlet to express their potential grievances or compliments.

Allowing them a private outlet to voice their views could prevent them from ever posting negative reviews online—even if the problem isn't resolved—since they essentially get their complaints out of their system.

3. Locate your happy customers and get them to write about you

What you'll accomplish...

• You'll build relationships with happy customers to keep them coming back.
• You'll convince customers to recommend your services and spread positive word-of-mouth.