2% Of The Population Are Not Happy About ANYTHING!
If you ask 1,000 people to pick their favorite day of the week, 980 of them would chooose one of the 7 days on the list. But 20 of them would pick "none of the above". Interesting to note, about 2% of your customers will have a similar approach to anything you do. On any given day, some of your customers will be unhappy with anything you do.
I can relate a few stories about this phenomenon, but for now, let's just assume that this is true. (I'll prove it in a minute for those of you skeptics) But for the moment, assume it's true.
How does this affect you as a web business owner?
I open my emails every day and find someone that is unhappy about something. The more customers you have, the more of these emails and phone calls you get. If you get a LOT of them on the same topic then you may want to look at your operations and do some improving, but if you are getting about 2 for every 100 customers, then the chances are you are just hearing from one of the "Two Percenters" in the crowd.
The trick is to not get discouraged by these people. Here's how I keep it all in perspective. I look at the total sales income for the day and multiply that times 2%. I mentally set aside that amount for today and then look at the contacts from unhappy customers. For example, if today's sales are $1,000 then I put aside $20 mentally and look at the emails. Hmmmm... 4 of them. Each one takes about 3 minutes to handle. So I'm trading 12 minutes for $20 income.
Not bad! That makes today a winner in my book!
On the other hand, there are days when the numbers come out the other way. Oh well. Keep it all in perspective. You just can't make everyone happy all the time. Or as someone said in a song... "Some days your the windshield, some days your the bug!"
If you readthis previous post about building your list, then you're ready for this next bit of information. Once you start building your list, the next step is bringing customers to your website using that list.
Each time you add new content to your site, you should let your list members know about it. A short email that includes a link to the new article is the best way to do this. Don't copy the entire article and put it into the email going to your customers. There are two problems with emailing the whole thing to them...
One problem is the ISP-Filters. Most ISP's today do at least rudimentary filtering of emails inbound toward their customer's email inbox. A long email from you stands a much higher chance of being deleted before it ever reaches your customers.
Another problem with emailing the entire article is that your website thrives on getting visitors to the site. Once they visit your site, the customers are exposed to your other articles and also to your advertisements. Distributing the entire article in your email defeats the purpose of creating the website.
The Purposed Of A Business Is To Get And Keep Customers!
Get that right and you will have a big business. And your business will thrive. Get that wrong and you will soon be out of business.
I can hear it now..."But I thought the purpose of my business was to make money!?"
Nope. Making money is a side-effect of focusing on getting and keeping customers. It cannot be the focus of your business.
What IS a customer? Well - isn't that a person that buys something from you? And if you focus on finding people that will buy something from you and keeping them buying from you, then you have a sustainable business. And you make money.
On the other hand, if you focus on making money, you can lose customers. How? Let me tell you what happened to me recently at a local business...
About a month ago there was an advertisement in my mail for a new local car service place called "Roy's Rapid Oil" for a $12.95 oil change. I thought that was a great deal and since I needed to change the oil on my Jeep, I drove over there and told them I wanted an oil change. The OWNER of the business asked what kind of oil I wanted. I said "Penzoil". He said okay and had his employee changing the oil for me in a few minutes.
I leafed through a magazine while I waited and about 20 minutes later the owner said my car was ready. When I went to pay the bill, it was $24.95 for the oil change. I asked what happened to the $12.95 price? He said, that's only if you use Quaker State oil and pointed to a small sign over his right shoulder that spelled out the terms of the $12.95 offer. It said in about a 14-pt font that the $12.95 offer is only valid when using Quaker State oil.
Of course I said "Why didn't you tell me that when you asked what kind of oil I wanted in the Jeep?"
He said "I can't help it if you don't read the sign!"
I asked him how many of those mailings he sent out. He said he paid $500 to print and mail out 1,000 of them. I smiled and paid him the $24.95 and walked out. Could I have argued about this? Sure. Could I have called the attorney general's office about this? Sure. I could have done a lot of things, but it was worth the extra $12.00 to me to have this experience to write about.
Naturally, I will never go back to his shop for any kind of service. AND I have told this story to every neighbor I see because it's so stupid on his part. One of my neighbors said "Thanks for telling me, I was going to take my car there next weekend for thier special but now I will go to my dealer instead." I saw the neighbor again last night and he said he passed this story on to another neighbor who said exactly the same thing!
I went to my local car parts store for new wiper blades this morning. The subject of oil changes came up and I started to relay this story again. The guy behind the counter said "So YOU"RE the guy!" He had already heard my story from one of my neighbors! Word is getting around pretty fast. Amazing how far the story of cheapskate-Roy's $12 had traveled!
How long do you think this new oil change shop will stay in business? The customer you make the most money on is your repeat customer because you had zero acquisition costs to get him in the door. On the other hand, Roy paid $500 to acquire customers via his mailings to my neighborhood. A typical direct mail response rate is 2%, so his $500 should have bought him 20 new customers. His $12 extra income had just lost me and two other customers he would have picked up from his mailing. Unless the NAPA store manager relates this story to other potential customers.
Even more fun is that this story will be read by over 100,000 people this year. Some of them will live in the Elgin/Streamwood/Schaumburg area. Let's just say Roy's will reach a whole lot of people with his $12 extra income. :-)
How does YOUR business treat customers? Are they just the pathway to your money, or are they the focal point of everything you do? When your customers find a flaw in your strategy, do you sacrifice their future business so you can make an extra $12 today, or do you make them feel like you are the sort of place they want to come back to over and over again?
If you haven't read Customers For Life: How To Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer yet by Carl Sewel then you need to buy the book and read it. You'll never see customers the same way again after reading how Carl turned his business from the worst to the best by simply focusing on building customer loyalty.
A freelance writer was recently recommended to me by a mutual friend. The writer is looking for some side-jobs to supplement his day job. I'm not looking for any writers with this person's area of expertise but I do have a simple plan to help him out.
This article is called "Three Steps To Making Money OnLine" for a reason.
Here's the three steps...
1) This site was built using TypePad.A similar site can be created for $4.95 a month at www.typepad.com You can even find free software at www.blogger.com and free hosting too. It has ads on the site that you don't have any control over which I don't care for so I opted to pay at TypePad instead.
2) Once the website has been set up, create a Mailing List at http://groups.yahoo.com/ for free, or if you want one with no advertising in it, use the ones atwww.aweber.com instead. The email list is THE KEY to making a website profitable because it helps bring readers back to the site over and over, increasing traffic expotentially. (See this post for more on this topic)
3) To turn this site into a revenue generator, either sell advertising on it, or place Google Ads related to the topic on the site. Take a quick tour here... https://www.google.com/adsense for more info on how AdSense works.
For Example: The ads on the right side of this page... http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pocket+pc could appear on a website about Pocket PC's and when a reader clicks through one of the ads, the site owner would make a percentage of the revenue that Google collects for sending the customer to the advertisers website.
Don't dismiss AdSense as an income source! There are many people that make over $1,000/mo just from AdSense revenue sharing on their websites. Some people make over $10,000 / mo doing this! I recommend the book The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense by Joel Comm to learn how this is done in detail.
This is a simple 3-Step Approach and it will work provided the content is worth reading and the site owner works at building his readership up. For a more complex plan with even higher income potential, stay tuned for "The Apprentice" - an in-depth look at how to make money on the web for the beginner.
When I was twenty-something I rented an apartment. The building was in a run-down neighborhood that was making a comeback. The landlord had recently bought the post-civil war era two-story building and was rehabbing it when I rented. We worked out a deal where my deposit was in "sweat-equity" so I helped him with the work.
The bathroom had originally been in the backyard, but had been moved inside sometime in the 1920's. The house originally used a coal-fired furnace but it had been converted to run on city gas in the 1930's.The building had been originally designed for gas lighting, but in the1940's it was retrofitted for electricity.
Each of those updates had been done by the homeowner and it was obvious by the workmanship that he wasn't in the trades, but when Norman finished HIS work the place looked really elegant. His secret weapon? Wallpaper. Norman said "A good wallpaper covers a multitude of sins" and I guess he was right.
My friend Gerry is having a hard time making his on-line business support his family. He's a smart guy and he works hard, but after a couple years of working full-time in his business, it's not quite bringing in enough to make them comfortable. In fact, he's losing money almost every month and robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Here's the thing, everything he's doing is ALMOST right...
His sales are ALMOST as high as he needs...
His profits are ALMOST high enough...
His advertising is ALMOST working...
... everything is ALMOST right.
The only thing he's really not doing well at is building his opt-in list. It's only at a few hundred people after a year of working on building it up. Of course Gerry's been working on everything else too and it's hard to keep up with all the irons we have in the fire as an entreprenaur.
I offered to give Gerry a hand up one day by marketing one of his products to my list. Let's just say it made his month. A few minutes after sending an email to my list, I told Gerry we would sell 142 of his products.
That number was a S.W.A.G.
A "SWAG" is "Some Wild-_____ Guess" but it was based on the percentage of people that had bought in the first half hour and the percentage that had opened their email up to that point. Then I calculated how many sales he would get if the percentage of sales-to-open stayed the same for the rest of the list. It wold be 157 sales. I then backed the number down about 10% to be on the safe side and boldly said "We'll sell 142 of them." He said "I'll write your number down and see if you're right."
We ended up selling 158 of them. I shouldn't have backed out the 10% and I would have been exactly on the money. (Note to self: File that thought for future reference.)Gerry told me that if he had those kind of sales numbers consistantly he would be VERY comfortable.
Nothing changed in Gerry's business except the number of people he was able to market to that day. And suddenly he could see how he could be "very comfortable". To paraphrase my old landlord Norman... "A good LIST covers a multitude of sins"
e-piph-a-ny"A sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience."
Getting our business to grow bigger has been a process, not an event. It's has always been a matter of discovering what works then "tweaking" it to make it work better. Of course, the only way to KNOW if it is working better or not is to MEASURE the results!Most people I talk with about growing a business admire the results we've had, but don't understand the process.
The 7-Step Process is really simple. Let me lay this out for you...
1) Try something.
2) Measure the important results.
3) Try something different.
4) Measure the important results.
5) Keep doing those things that give better results.
6) Abandon those things that give worse results.
7) Keep doing this!
This makes total sense to everyone that reads it. And I have TOLD these steps to several people over the years. Yet I constantly see people messing up at every one of these steps. How so? Let me tell you the ways...
Mess Up #1: The person that never DOES anything. They are either afraid to try because they fear failure, or they just never get around to actually doing anything. The read about things, think about things, plan things, start things, but never finish anything.
Mess Up #2: The person that does something but doesn't measure whether or not what they did is working. Or the only thing they measure is the bottom line. (That's a whole 'nother series of articles!) Determine what the important results are and track those results for as long as you are in business. These are your business "metrics".
Mess Up #3: The person that understands what they are doing isn't working, but they keep doing the same thing anyway! If something isn't working, try a different approach!
Mess Up #4: The person that tries something different but doesn't measure to see if the new way works better than the old way. They just ass-u-me that it is better.
Mess Up #5: The person that finds a better way to do something but gives up on that better way and goes back to the original way... because it's easier!?
Mess Up #6: The person that keeps doing what doesn't work!
Mess Up #7: The person that doesn't continue to grow and tweak their stategy and tools.
Business growth is a process, not an event. Follow The Steps Up!
e-piph-a-ny"A sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience."
When we first started our business we put up our website and did what everyone else was doing and waited for the sales to come in. We did some advertising, investing $100 a month into Google Ads, posted ads to our site in Yahoo groups that allowed advertising, and looked for other ways to bring customers to our site.
It worked! We made some sales in the first few days and by the end of the month, we had made $176 in sales. Between web hosting fees ($100/mo), advertising expenses ($100/mo) and merchant account fees ($85/mo) we had lost money, but that wasn't the important part. The important part was that we had learned to sell on the internet!
Epiphany #1 was this...
If we could sell $1 worth of product, then we could sell $100,000 worth of product!
The only difference between the two numbers was a matter of US learning how to get from the first number to the second one. We just had to figure out how to do it.
My uncle Charley was a gardener. He grew vegetables and he was a really good at it. Charlie entered the county fair every year. One summer I remember he won first prize for having the best tomatoes in the whole county. They gave him a blue ribbon and a check for $25. Uncle Charley had that check framed and he hung it on the wall under a photo of his tomatoes in a little basket. Above the photo he displayed the blue ribbon in a shaddow box.
My uncle Roger was a truck farmer. No, that's not somebody that grows trucks. That's what we called farmers that grow vegetables and truck them out to stores. One of the crops uncle Roger grew was tomatoes. When he saw uncle Charlie's check and photograph with the blue ribbon, I saw a funny smile cross uncle Roger's face.
Later that summer I was at uncle Roger's house for haying time. Walking through his kitchen, I saw something that brought a smile to my face too. On the wall, there was a photograph of a truck load of tomatoes, there was a note scrawled on a blue scrap of paper hanging above the picture. The hastily written note just said "Nice tomaters!" Below the photo there was a Xerox copy of a check for a little over $7,000 (Uncle Roger had cashed the real check.)
"It's not how much you make per tomato, it's how much you take to the bank!"
by Joel Comm to learn how this is done in detail. 
