TRUE Results To REPLACE YOUR JOB

Archive for August, 2009

Back To Where It All Started

About 3 weeks ago, a customer of WOW Minisites placed a design order to have an ecover created for one of her products. For simplicity reasons, let’s just call this customer C.

(By the way if you’re still in the dark, WOW Minisites is a minisite and ecover design service specifically catered for Internet marketers and product owners, and WOW Minisites is one of my Internet businesses).

The turnaround time for delivering an ecover is 3 working days or less. Yet, after a week we still have not designed C’s ecover.

You see, for some weird reasons (I‘m guessing a human error on our part), our team did not receive C’s order, even though she had paid in full.

So a week passed and realizing there still weren’t any updates on her ecover, C contacted us and asked about her order. It was then that we realized that we missed C’s order and had not even started on designing her ecover.

We immediately refunded C’s money completely and offered to design her ecover for Free PLUS another completely different ecover Free of charge as well. In addition, we started work on C’s order at once and in a few hours time, we completed her ecover design.

Very Impressed

C was so impressed by what we did for her that she said she’ll come back to us for ALL her graphic needs PLUS she is going to refer our service to LOTS of people.

This is real proof that if you provide GREAT customer service and deliver customer satisfaction, then people are going to be so impressed with you (even after you’ve disappoint them) that there’s a chance that they become your customer for life.

And the really AWESOME thing is they will talk about us and refer their friends to our service.

How cool is that? This is word of mouth marketing at its best! And you don’t even have to spend a single red cent!

Customer Service Is THAT Important

In running a business, you simply can’t SURVIVE without providing customer service.

In running a SUCCESSFUL business, you simply CAN’T DO WELL without providing GREAT customer service.

I hope you pay very close attention to the 2 statements above as they are THAT important.

As humans, we are prone to make mistakes. Even computers make mistakes too when they start to crash. Computer programs and softwares also have bugs in them.

That said, it is okay to make mistakes. The most important things are:

1. Learn from the mistakes so as not to commit the same ones in the future

2. Compensating our clients for the mistakes we’re responsible for

Saying “Sorry” Is NOT Enough

Number 1 is pretty self-explanatory.

Number 2 means saying a mere “sorry” to our customers is NOT enough. It may be enough a few years ago when you don’t really have a lot of competitors and apologizing for something you’ve done wrong can get you by.

With the fierce competition out there today in virtually every market, doing “just enough” to “get by” is almost guaranteed to doom your business.

Customers have a lot of choices today when it comes time for them to buy whatever they want to buy. Why should they choose you over your competitors? More importantly, everything else being equal, why would they WANT to choose you when your customer service is subpar compared to that of your competitors?

Though price is an important factor, competing on price alone is not enough in this day and age.

While there are a few different ways to differentiate yourself from the competition, one of the best ways is through EXCELLENT customer service.

Because when you provide excellent customer service and customers are satisfied, then they’ll keep coming back for more and they’ll be very eager to tell their friends about you.

Customer service experience is a BIG DEAL to most, if not all, customers.

Summing Up

To sum up this post, we’ve learned that:

Providing above-average (GREAT) customer service to deliver customer satisfaction is one of the most important factors that will determine the success of your business. Be sure not to disappoint your customers. If you do disappoint them, make sure you find a way to compensate them for the error on your part. Don’t simply say I’m sorry because sorry is not enough.

By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about satisfying your customers, you can take a look at an article I wrote some time back.

Please post your thoughts and feedback in a comment below as me and other blog readers would love to hear what you have to say…

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I’m sure by now you’re already aware of how “meta tags” such as “meta description” or “meta title” or “meta keywords” play roles in optimizing your web pages in search engines like Google.

Everywhere you go in the forums or blogs, there seems to be a lot of discussions on search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

It is very common to see or hear from these sources that to rank well in the search engines (especially Google in particular), you need to have as many 1 way incoming links that point to your web page that have the targeted keywords as the anchor text of the links.

Apart from incoming links, you most likely also learned from these sources that you need to have your targeted keywords in the title tag of your web page.

Then you also need to have your targeted keywords in the “meta keywords tag”.

The One IMPORTANT Aspect That Is Neglected

While all of this is true, there is one important aspect about SEO techniques that is truly neglected.

I’m talking about human behaviors and their/our interactions with how everything is connected.

If you think deeply enough, you’d realize that everything we as marketers or business owners are doing, be it generating traffic using SEO techniques, capturing visitors’ contact info to turn them into leads, and then following up with them to convert them into customers - everything that we are doing at each step of the process involves human interaction.

Even though you could argue that you’re using automated systems to drive traffic and utilizing autoresponders to follow up with your prospects and therefore involve no human interaction on your part, in the end, you still have to interact with your prospects regardless of the method of interaction.

Autoresponder is just a means of communicating with them (your prospects) to ensure that they are in the right hands and that they should trust you. For all you want, you can also follow up via phone or snail mail. That would be A LOT more expensive and time-consuming though. However, that is not what this discussion is about.

The underlying point I’m trying to convey here is that your leads/prospects are still HUMAN BEINGS who need to be treated as HUMANS. This shouldn’t be any different when it comes to optimizing your web pages for search engines.

After all, it is humans who are searching for information using search engines. It is humans that will eventually visit our web page and read/listen/watch what we have to say. It is humans who will finally buy our products and give us their money.

The Search Process

A user who is searching for information using search engines typically follows this process:

1. User types a relevant keyword to whatever he is searching for in Google.

2. Search results are returned and he performs one of the following actions:

A)

He may or may not click the first web page returned (even though there is a high possibility that he is going to click it since it is the first result and humans read from top to bottom)

OR

B)

Instead of clicking the first result, he scans through the first 10 web pages that are returned and he chooses one that is the most relevant to whatever he is searching for (based on what he sees).

For example, take a look at the top 4 Google results below for a particular keyword phrase:

If you were searching for information on how to make money online, and you’re scanning through quickly to decide which one to click, which one would you choose?

Narcissism reasons aside, I’d most likely click the 2^nd result first (which happens to be my blog you’re reading right now). I’m sure you’d click the 2^nd result first as well.

Why?

Because the description says “The Beginners FREE Place To Learn How To Make Money Online”, which is what I’m looking for PLUS it’s FREE to learn PLUS it definitely has more persuasive power in enticing me to click on it than the other 3 results. So I’d say to myself “Why not click this one first”.

This illustrates that it is possible that a person may choose to click the number 2nd,3rd or 4th result FIRST before clicking the first result.

This proves my point about the importance of catering to humans as well when you’re doing SEO to optimize your web page, because after all, it is humans who are going to read what you have to say. While the ranking of your web page in search results is important, so is the way of how you present/persuade humans to click your site.

Present What You Want Them To See

And the good news is there is a way to present whatever information you want people to see, just like the example above where I managed to put in the words “The Beginners FREE Place To Learn How To Make Money Online”.

I did that by using the “meta description tag”. Whatever I insert into this meta description tag will be shown right under the title of the web page:

The title of the web page (or meta title tag) is “Internet Business Make Money Online | Make Money On The Internet” (without quotes).

The meta description tag is “The Beginners FREE Place To Learn How To Make Money Online” (without quotes).

Summary

To summarize what we’ve covered in this post, we’ve learned that:

1.  While catering to what search engines want for good search engine rankings is important, so is catering to humans. It is because of humans that search engines were created in the first place, to make searching for information easy and fast.

2. You can use the “meta tag description” to put in a persuasive description for your web page to describe what your site is about, so that you can entice people to click your site. When done correctly, you can outperform web pages that are ranking higher than you in the search engines.

Please post your comments/opinions about this “Meta Description Goes Here - What It Has Got To Do With Your CTR” post in a comment below. I’d like to hear what you have to say…

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Before you get all excited at the thought of starting your very own Internet business, there are 3 VERY important Internet business requirements / points you need to bear in mind.

First: Just Like Any Other Business

First, running an Internet business is just like any other business. You need to put in hard work and effort, and dedicated time to see results. It’s not about getting rich quickly or making a lot of money without any work.

An Internet business is just another business model, though it’s hard to argue that there’s a better business model (at least in my opinion) out there.

In order for anyone to really succeed online, you need to have the right mindset. Think about a conventional brick and mortar business. I like to use restaurants to illustrate my point.

Suppose you want to open a new restaurant in your local neighborhood. My questions to you are:

- Is it going to be EASY?

- Can your restaurant make a lot of money quickly without doing anything, or with minimal effort?

The answers to the above questions are of course: NO!

Second: Marketing And Entrepreneurial Skills

Second, running a successful Internet business requires that you have at least some knowledge of marketing and entrepreneurial skills.

Without these two, it’s VERY hard, if not impossible, to make it big.

What about programming and all other technical stuff? Don’t you need to posses those skills as well in order to succeed online?

NO.

Why?

Because you can outsource those to professionals who know what they’re doing and who can do a much better job than you at much less time.

Possessing marketing and entrepreneurial skills is, however, a MUST if you want to make it big online. These 2 skills are much more important than any other skills.

Marketing - if you know how to market your products and services effectively, the job is already half-done. The next thing you need to do is to figure out how to convert prospects to customers, and how to persuade them to become REPEAT customers.

Once your customer base (and hence your revenues and profits) increases and your business gets momentum and takes off, the next step is to figure out how to make your business run without you.

After all, the whole purpose of starting and running a successful Internet business is to reap maximum profits without any or minimal input on your part.

This is entirely possible, BUT to achieve this you need to possess entrepreneurial skills.

Of course, when you’re just starting out, you most likely do everything yourself because you’re on a very tight budget. That’s not a problem at all.

In fact, most successful Internet business owners start out like that. When they see considerable profits coming in, they reinvest their profits into human resources to help them in their business. Doing this allows them to LEVERAGE other people’s skills and time.

This process of recruiting team members repeats itself over time as the business profits gets bigger and bigger.

As time goes by, the business owner can afford not to work at all and profits will keep pouring in.

I’m sure you’ve heard of people saying things like “making lots of money without doing anything” or “making thousands of dollars every day even while on vacation by the beach”….

While this is true, some VERY important parts are left out.

They didn’t mention the FACT that you can only achieve that after you’ve done the initial hard work of starting your business and then creating systems in place.

Because they didn’t tell the whole story, most people (especially beginners) have the wrong perception that starting and running a profitable Internet business is easy and you can get rich quickly without doing any or minimal work.

Third: Invest Money To Make Big Money

The third point to consider when you want to start your own Internet business is that you need to invest money in order to make big money online (and offline as well).

This is a REAL business and you should treat it as such.

Going back to the restaurant example, do you expect to run a successful restaurant business without any investment at all?

Yes, there are a lot of Free ebooks, reports, audio and video trainings that show you how to do this and that. However, bear in mind that even if you learn the “how-to” of running a successful Internet business for Free without buying any paid educational products, you still have bills to pay every single month.

Monthy operational expenses such as such as hosting and autoresponder fees, as well as other tools that help move your business forward can’t be avoided.

In short, you simply CAN’T start run an Internet business without investing any money. PERIOD!

However the good news is that you can certainly do that with a shoestring budget.

Recap

So before decide to jump into the “I want to start an Internet business” bandwagon, make sure that you understand these 3 important Internet business requirements / points first:

1. Running a profitable Internet business is not about getting rich quickly without doing any work. It’s about putting in hard work and dedicated time.

2. You need to possess marketing and entrepreneurial skills to be able to make it big. Other technical or administrative work can be outsourced.

3. There is no such thing as “running a profitable Internet business without investing any money”. Understand and realize that this is a real business. Real business requires real money.

What are your thoughts? Let me know in a comment below…

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