Small Office, Home Office Information

Well what can you say about a week where the highlight of your small business life was almost stepping on a snake in your own backyard?

I guess that shows how closely linked your home life and business life is when you work from a home office

I guess it also shows that some weeks are taken up with nothing but doing the same thing over and over again and that’s what I’ve been doing this week for one particular client.

So on to Friday’s links - done on a Saturday morning this week.

The Myth of the Sleeping Baby and Other Fallacies for the Work at Home Parent - this one particularly resonated with me and I’m sure it will with you too. Our neighbours probably thing we’re out of work too

How to Deal With an Irate Person - in my experience this is not the way to deal with every irate person you meet through your small business. However it certainly will work in many instances.

Sizeasy - your size comparison website - need to judge the size of something you see advertised on the net but have trouble visualizing it? This site will help.

Color Meanings - Explore Palettes and Symbolims - Color Meaning and Colors That Go Together - I guess the title says it all and there is no doubt that color is very important.

And that’s it for this week. I hope you all have a great weekend - spent anywhere but at work

Those were my exact thoughts just a few moments ago.

I’d picked up a press release overnight that was announcing a new small business radio podcast and I thought it might be worth listening to. So off I toddled to the website and found what I wanted to listen to.

I also found a short tutorial on what I would have to do if I wanted to listen to the podcast.

Step 1: Download Pod catcher Software

‘Ok’ I thought. ‘I can do that … now where is the link’.

I then spent five minutes hunting around the site looking for a link to the software I needed and couldn’t find it. Eventually it dawned on me (I’m a bit slow today - I’ve been up since 3am) that they didn’t have a link to any Pod catcher Software and I was supposed to go and find my own.

That’s when the ‘ah stuff it’ moment arrived.

I don’t have time right now to go scratching around the Net looking for Pod catcher software. If the site had provided a link to the software I would have used it but they didn’t.

So now the site has lost me and the small amount of viral marketing that I would have happily produced for them.

I guess the lesson is to never let the clients and customers of your small business have an ‘Ah Stuff It! moment.

What do you do when a client has unreasonable expectations of your small business?

Since Toni’s business has been in operation she has built up quite a decent number of clients and there are now at least three that undoubtedly fall into the major client category.

Each of them spends a considerable sum of money with us each month on a variety of written work. Two of those clients often come to Toni for advice and suggestions on ways that they can extend their business and increase their income.

Toni does not charge for this consultancy work at all because often her suggestions lead to more work for us.

Early last week one of those clients approached Toni for some advice on what was ‘new’ on the Net and Toni suggested that he look at building an authority site. She pointed out that it would be a long-term investment that would require a reasonable amount of money to get off the ground. She also pointed out that, while there was no guarantee of success the client did have more chance of making money from it if he aimed at a particular niche.

He asked for some prices and went away to think about it. By Friday he was back and wanted to develop Toni’s suggestion into a project almost exactly as she had suggested. However, there was one sticking point.

“I don’t know if this will make money or not – can you reduce your prices to help me out.”

Basically he was worried about risking the sort of investment such a project was going to require and so he wanted us to carry him. Now if he made a million dollars out of the project there was no indication that he would then pay us the difference between what we wanted to charge and what he wanted to pay.

Instead he wanted us to carry some of the costs of him getting this project off the ground without any hope of making any more money than what he was going to pay us.

Needless to say, the short answer to his request was a polite ‘No’.

At that point it would have been easy just to forget the whole deal but Toni hates to see money walk away so she has put plan B to him. Instead of having Toni and I write the articles he wanted (because we’re well-qualified to write in that particular niche) Toni would get our other writers – who have little or no experience in the niche he is targeting – to write shorter articles for a much reduced price.

Toni pointed out to him that he would be getting what he paid for and the chance of his site achieving genuine authority status with those inferior articles would be greatly reduced. And now he has gone away to think about it again.

Lesson: It’s not up to a small business to carry its clients and we should never give in to unreal expectations … but sometimes there are options.

We’re hearing a lot about viral marketing these days and sometimes it seems that if you’re not actively involved in viral marketing then your small business is doomed to fail.

But what is viral marketing? Is it more than just asking your clients and customers to tell others about your great service?

In an article entitled ‘What Makes It Viral?’ published on the ClickZ Network way back in July 2000 Kathleen Riley had this to say about viral marketing:

“Producing a message with a quality offer or an incentive for pass-along is what viral marketing is all about …

Offer something worthy of sharing a valuable discount, vital information or offer an incentive for sharing additional entries into a sweepstakes or an added discount or premium service and viral marketing happens naturally… and often quite successfully.”

So what can you do to get your clients and customers talking about your small business?

Ok - so it’s Friday and even though I’ve been flat out like a lizard in the sun this week I still have some great links to share with you.

The first one is Top 10 Dumbest Online Business Ideas That Made it Big Time - how often do we have a light bulb moment and then dismiss the idea as being just too crazy to work? Well here are 10 crazy ideas that did work.

If you’re into selling stuff then Lessons learned from a job that sucked is definitely worth reading.

Do you need some free fonts for your website? Let’s face it you can never have too many fonts and Urban Fonts is just the place to get them.

And that’s it for this week.

If you run a small business online then you most likely have a .com domain name that would have cost you anything up to $15.00.

It now seems that the annual cost of your domain name will rise soon by around 7 percent. Back in March ICANN - the body that governs the Internet - gave VeriSign - the company that controls the overall registration of .com domain names - the right to increase their charges for each domain name by 7 percent.

There has been some hue and cry about that and VeriSign has not yet passed that increase on but you can expect it soon. There have been some discussions and hearings in the US Senate about the increase but that’s unlikely to have much effect on the final outcome.

Obviously, if you own only one or two domain names the price increase is hardly likely to cause you any pain but spare a thought for those people who own thousands of domain names. A 7 percent increase is really going to bite for them.

Well there is another week of good intentions gone down the drain. I had all the good intentions of posting regularly here and instead I barely had time to scratch myself as the inflow of work just went crazy.

Toni has our business fairly well compartmentalized and each of the regular writers has a specific focus. A few of them can cross-over into other areas but none seem to be able to cope with the work that I do.

I’m not sure that we are ever going to find anyone who can take on some of my work load because the people who could all tend to be in their own business rather than working for someone else.

I’m not sure where that little dilemma will lead us but it’s something we will be thinking about in the coming weeks because, in this last week, we’ve picked up some highly specialised written work from a guy who is building what will turn into an authority website.

His site will be dealing with something that is of special interest to us and we are really going to enjoy writing for him. At the same time a regular client has just dropped thousands of dollars worth of work on us and it’s in one of those areas I specialise in.

Small business life can get interesting

For some odd reason this week seems to have been rather quiet when comes to links to point you to interesting articles online.

I do have a link to a site that will teach you 31 different ways to tie your shoes - but seeing I rarely wear shoes anymore (such is the life of an overworked beach bum) I might skip that one.

However, if you do happen to be involved in e-commerce and have a checkout on your site then you may be interested in improving your conversionsw by 50% by cuting down on the number of pages a surfer has to go through to actually check out.

Brendon Sinclair talks about the one page checkout and you can see it by following the link.

If you want to improve your site’s chances of ranking well for search engines then 21 Great Tips from Google’s Matt Cutts might be worth reading too.

And that’s the links for this week - the weekend is all but upon us but that’s not going to count for much here at CopyText where there is a considerable amount of work to be done to catch up with all the orders that have come in this week.

At least we look like having a pleasant dinner with guests from Germany on Saturday night.

We small business people often feel that we stand no chance if we have to compete with the big end of town and once those guys move in then it’s game over for us.

Well try telling that to Daniel Giersch who has taken on the might of Google on his own turf in Germany … and won. He’s even on his way to scoring another victory in Norway too.

Back in 2000 Daniel registered a trademark that included ‘Gmail’ and of course when Google began to get interested in the free email scene and wanted to register their Gmail trademark in Germany they bumped up against Daniel.

At first Daniel was interested in doing business with them but then he found: “Google’s behavior is very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful, and to me, it’s very evil,” he said in a recent telephone interview with CNET News.com from his part-time Los Angeles home.

Subsequently Daniel took Google to court in Germany and he won and retained the right to his trademark.

You can read the full story here

BTW if you missed me (… yeah go on … admit it … you didn’t even notice I was gone) it was because the last week both Toni and I have been facing some rather brutal work schedules and it’s probably not going to get any better next week either.

Oh well … at least it pays the bills

Oh boy - today has been one of those days when we should have just turned over and gone back to sleep instead of getting up trying to work.

This morning we had a network guy come round to check on the security of the wireless networ. We got a major tick there but then he thought he would fix a minor glitch in the networking ability of my laptop. It was nothing major and I’ve lived with it for 12 months or more.

Well I won’t have to live with it anymore because tomorrow it’s going to down to the shop to be wiped and reloaded. Instead of fixing a minor glitch he stuffed it up completely.

Toni has had no better day. She took the station wagon from the shop down to the bank and she left it in the parking lot while she picked up some small items for the shop. When she came back there was a nice big white streak down the side of the wagon and a dent from where the car that had been parked next to her hit the wagon as they reversed out.

No names, no phone numbers - just a lot of paint work and panel beating to remember them by.

Funny, Toni is still down at the shop and we’ve been chatting via ICQ - neither of feel like doing anything else today.

However, if’s Friday and that means that it’s time for some more links to sites and articles you may find helpful.

My top 10 worst ideas to make money - they’re not my ideas at all. Instead they belong to a very successful solo search engine marketer. If you want to see just how successful he is just have a look at the cheque he’s holding up in the ‘Most Viewed Photo’ that should appear to the right of the story when you follow the link.

Becoming Clueful: What You Should Know Before You Redo Your Web Site - it’s a bit of a long read but if you’re planning on renovating your website then the five tips discussed here are definitely worth reading.

Secrets of Online Business Success - this is definitely worth reading if you are thinking of moving your bricks-and-mortar business online.

Zippy - this is an interesting tool if you’re interested in seeing what the search engines think of your website(s). They don’t appear to think much of mine

And before I go back to trying to achieve something out of the day let me leave you with this link if you’re interested the real details on Vista pricing and delivery

Have a great weekend.