Small Office, Home Office Information

For those of you who have a small business that involves eBay this piece of news from ReveNews might raise your eyebrows.

Antitrust concerns may put a stop to it though

Although it’s still early days yet a recent survey in the US has found that more and more US households are beginning to pay their accounts online instead of writing a cheque.

Is there some advantage there that you can see for your small business? Would you get earlier payments if your clients had the convenience of paying online?

There are plenty of options for accepting payments other than by cheque. Here in Australia banks will accept the payment online and credit it direct to your account under a system known as BPay.

There is also direct deposit straight into your account where the client has your bank account number and simply goes to their online banking site and authorizes the transfer of the money to your account. We pay several of our writers with that method.

The of course there’s the possibility of having your own merchant account and running a secure section of your website where clients can make a payment using their credit card.

There are probably other options too and some of them might work for your small business. Of course there are drawbacks as well and cost is one of them but if you analyze the costs of accepting payment by cheque as opposed to one of the other methods you might be surprised.

Of course whether it is going to work for you or not is something that only you can decide but, as Toni often says, it’s just a thought.

If you are in any way involved in placing images on websites then this will be of great interest to you.

Microsoft has announced the release of a new image format that will be supported in its upcoming Vista operating system. It will also be supported in XP.

Windows Media Photo is said to allow great compression of file sizes while maintaining a clear image. Microsoft suggests that their new format will replace the Jpeg - the current Internet standard.

You can read the full story here

Toni and I don’t get to watch a huge amount of television so perhaps we’re getting a rather skewed view of television advertising lately but we can’t help noticing that there seems to be quite a few advertisers who are using kids in their ads lately.

Here are just some of the ones we have seen over the last few weeks:

MacDonalds use a bunch of kids in pedal-cars going through one of their drive-thrus to encourage people (especially women) to unlock the child within and have breakfast at MacDonalds

Telstra - a major phone provider here in Australia - uses a bunch of kids in a kindergarten class to promote all the things that people can do with one of their mobile phones

Bigpond - the biggest ISP in Australia - uses a child to promote their broadband services. He wants to know why they built the Great Wall of China and his clueless father thinks that it was to keep out the rabbits. The message is that if you don’t want to appear a dummy to your kids sign up for a broadband account and suddenly become full of knowledge.

Medibank Private - a health insurance fund - uses a bunch of kids constructing an incredibly wobbly launching ramp to encourage parents to sign up for health insurance.

G J Gardner - a home builder here in Queensland - uses kids running through a new home singing the company jingle to encourage people to buy their homes.

And there are others too. I just wonder if there is a lesson in there somewhere for small business.

Personally I didn’t find any of those ads made me want to rush out and buy the product. The home builder’s ad positively turned me off. The MacDonalds’ ad and the Telstra ad made me thinki of what it was like when my kids were that age.

And the other two … well I’m glad I kept my shed locked when my kids were small and if I didn’t know the answer to a question I admitted it and the kids and I would look for the answer together

I can’t help but be reminded of the words of a famous actor who once said that you should never appear with small children or animals because they tended to steal the show.

On Monday talked about another businessman who had taken something I had written and used it on his website and used it as his own.

After attempting to post a comment on his blog with no success I c ontacted his host and now the offending article has gone. Whether that was as a result of my unpublished comment on his blog or because the host took action I’m not sure.

However, the website owner did contact me and appeared to blame the problem on his “marketing partners” who “purchased articles and reprints (with permission)”.

I guess that just goes to show that you should always check that your “marketing partners” have the same high ethical standards that you profess to have. Otherwise your small business can suffer some damage.

… and I’m even worse before my first coffee of the day.

So Bob B. when someone pointed out that you had taken one of my posts and placed it on y0ur blog and claimed it as your own I had no hesitation in sending your host a request to remove my work from your site.

Bob - you make yourself out to be some sort of expert on personal and professional development - what sort of expert are you if you have to take other people’s work and claim it as your own?

I wonder how many other people have had their work taken by you and used as your own?

I never realised that theft could be classified as personal development.

I’m sorry to say that this has very little to do with small business but I just could not let it go without a comment.

You will find the story here

Big boobs are perfectly acceptable advertising throughout America but show fully clad women and hint that they might be talking about an orgasm and you’ll never get it on a billboard in the Bible Belt.

Yesterday Toni and I downed tools and headed for Brisbane for a doctor’s appointment. The appointment had been made well in advance and there had been all sorts of tests done to prepare for the consultation. Everyone considered that this consultation was really important so we were focused on getting there.

About 100 kms into our trip my mobile phone rang and it was the doctor’s receptionist. The doctor was ill and the appointment was cancelled.

Not only were our plans for yesterday thrown into disarray but plans for the weeks ahead are not getting rather uncertain.

So it was timely that Toni should point me to Seth Godin’s post on flexibility this morning.

He has a very valid point to make. I do note that someone who links to that post seems to think that Seth has got it totally wrong but from my experience it’s the person doing the linking who has it wrong and I just hope he has the flexibility to cope with any changes that might be necessary when life throws up something that he wasn’t expecting.

For some reason advertising and the effectiveness thereof has been exercising my mind over the last week or so. Perhaps the fact that we have been approached to build a website for a fish and chip shop has got my subconcious mind in turmoil.

And advertising has already been mentioned here this week with Boy Eats Own Head in a Small Business post yesterday so let’s continue with the theme of advertising today. After seeing this television ad for the Toyota RAV4 I just wish our television advertisers here in Australia were so creative.

Please be warned that you should not be eating or drinking anything while viewing this ad

Recently copywriting has been undergoing some major changes but it’s good to see that even though much has changed in copywriting the need for a good headline has remained.

Troy White, a very successful copywriter, suggests that if you want to promote your small business then you need to be thinking like a tabloid writer and use a strong headline. Follow the link to read more of what he has to say on the subject.