Small Office, Home Office Information

I’ve been collecting business cards - Toni has been collecting collectable cars on eBay for our grandkids.

Both of us have been having a very interesting time - yep collecting business cards from local businesses has been interesting because it has really been teaching me something about perception.

I’ve been collecting business cards for a website project that I’m working on and I now have quite a collection form many of the small businesses here in the town where I live and didn’t think much about them until I read an ad in the local paper.

A new design studio has opened in town and one of the things they specialise in is business cards and their ad included this statement:

“… a business’ identity should be a combination of style, well defined colour and most importantly, be visually appealing and create a lasting impressions.”

That made me take a look at my collection of business cards and think about the impression that they have left with me.

What sort of impression does the business card for your small business leave with your potential clients? Is your card robust, vibrant and professionally made or is it something you’ve cobbled together yourself and run off on your inkjet printer?

Which type of card would think left the best impression?

While the names of the people mentioned in this article won’t have a lot of meaning to anyone who doesn’t come from the east coast of Australia their stories are an example to us all.

The article is called Millionaires Row but every one of them started small - just the way we do in small business

Step 1. Hang up the phone.

That’s all there is?

Yep, that’s all there is. Don’t talk to them, don’t listen to them, don’t waste your time, just hang up the phone.

These people are the modern day versions of carpet baggers. They’ll spin you a wonderful tale of all the amazing things they can do for business, they’ll take your money and they won’t deliver because they can’t.

You’ll find an interesting story of an encounter one person had with one such company here at “Internet Advancement Fuels My Rage”

And now I’m back to the work that has kept me away from Small Office Home Office Information but I claim the Arnie amendment … I’ll be back

There are a lot of small businesses and home office people involved in affiliate marketing. It can be very demanding and not all that rewarding but there certainly is money to be made there.

It can be very encouraging to read of the success of others and my last post I posted a link to a story over on Site Point of a guy in New York who has worked hard and is making a lot of money from affiliate marketing.

That thread on Sitepoint encouraged another affiliate marketer from the UK to post his success story. He approaches affiliate marketing from a different perspective and his story - My Bank Statement - Monthly Earnings from AM - is worth reading and so is the whole thread.

If your home business revolves around affiliate marketing then you might find some inspiration in this thread over at Site Point.

Over $80k a month from Commission Junction is nothing to sneeze at - or course there were those who instantly suggested that the screen shot had been doctored and others who suggested that they guy had an ulterior motive. But if he has then I sure missed it as I read through the thread.

Thanks to Darren from Problogger for drawing my attention to it.

One of the local newspapers carried a sad story of a local small business owner today. For some years Margaret Woolf had been plagued with split heels and nothing that was available could alleviate the problem for her.

In frustration she developed her own range of skin care and repair cream. It took her a few years to move from initial product through to the point where it had been approved by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration but she achieved her goal and her range of products is about to be launched nationally as Maggie’s Secret.

Unfortunately Margaret didn’t live to see all her hard work come to fruition. She died in late January after a long illness.

If you run a small business that has a website you may be aware of how important it is to appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) for terms that relate to your business.

You may also know just how hard it can be to achieve a good position in the SERPS and you may have even seen some of your competitors beat you for those positions by cheating. There are various ways you can cheat including doorway pages and Javascript re-directs that show the search engine spiders a page stuffed with keywords while it shows the surfer a page that looks entirely different.

I know that when you do get beaten for good SERP placement by those who cheat the temptation is there to do a little cheating yourself. However, I would strongly recommend that you don’t because when the search engines catch you, and they really are looking for those who cheat, your site will get kicked out of the search engine completely.

And it won’t matter whether or a small business or a huge business; search engines like Google don’t like to be cheated. Just this week BMW in Germany found that out when Google revealed that it had found bmw.de cheating with multiple doorway pages that each had a Javascript re-direct. Google didn’t waste time, they simply removed bmw.de from their listing and won’t relist it until BMW complies with Google’s rules.

BMW wasn’t the only one; camera maker Ricoh also drew the wrath of Google and an un-named American car maker got a 30 day warning for what they were doing on their European website.

If Google will do that to the big guys they won’t think twice about squashing a small business website that is found cheating.

I don’t know much about it, I haven’t finished reading the website because I’m flat out keeping up with an order for work from a client, but it looks interesting and it just might suit your small business.

It’s called Thingamy and you can find it at the other end of the link.

Yesterday I mentioned the website that was paying Google (via Adsense) to show people a blank page and I also mentioned the server problems we had been having. I also happened to share our server problems with a friend via ICQ. This morning he woke up to his own server problems.

He and his business partner run a small business that involves a number of online jewellery stores complete with shopping carts etc. These two guys are very technically minded and the handle all their own server issues themselves as well as writing their own software too. But for their jewellery stores they use a shopping cart script and add-on modules written by someone else.

This morning our friend woke up to find that someone had gained access to their server through one of those add-on modules and added a malicious toolbar to every page on every site that was on that server. That meant that anyone visiting their sites, no matter what page they went to, was instantly downloading the toolbar and basically losing control of where they wanted to go on the Net.

It took both guys all day and some of the night to track down ever instance of that malicious code and remove it from their server. At the same time they lost a full day’s worth of sales and quite a few customers as well because no one is going to go back to a site on the Web where they picked up something as nasty as that.

The moral of the story? If it happened to them it could certainly happen to you so, if you’re running anything out of the ordinary, it pays to have the technicians, at the place that is hosting your site, go over your sites to look for anything that might allow someone access to your server without you knowing.

Our friends knew what they were doing and yet they still got caught. If you’re in any doubt get someone who knows what they’re doing to check out your sites and assess their vulnerability.

This morning we woke up to find that one of our servers (the one this site resides on) was down and had been for about 4 hours. By the time we realised it and contacted our host they were already working on repairing the fault.

Until recently we hadn’t much on that server that was critical so the monitoring system we had in place only sent out an email whenever the server went off line. But a few months ago Toni added a new site and a new service for some of our clients to that server and even though we should have upgraded the monitoring system we hadn’t done so.

So as soon as the server was back on line we went looking for a new monitoring service that could do more than email us if there was a problem. Of course we went to Google and on the first page we looked at we found a paid ad for just what we were looking for.

We hit the link … several times … and each time the company that had placed that ad paid Google to show us a blank page. Yep, all we got each time we tried that link was a pristine white page devoid of anything.

I do most of my browsing in Firefox and there are times when sites just don’t come up in Firefox. It’s usually a coding problem that causes the page to fail completely in Firefox even though it may be showing up quite clearly in Internet Explorer.

If you’re running a small business website let me tell that a problem like that can be fixed even before the site or page goes live simply by spending a few moments checking it in each browser. A few extra minutes in the checking stage can save you time and money further down the track.

There must be nothing more frustrating than paying Google for the privilege of showing someone a blank page - and you wouldn’t want that to happen to you, would you?