Small Office, Home Office Information

It doesn’t come any easier than this:

“Excuse me sir but where did you see this advertised?”

That’s the question I was just asked at a local franchise for a well-know bakery chain when I bought a specialty loaf of bread.

They immediately knew that like two people before me I was buying the loaf because I had seen it advertised on a television show the chain was sponsoring.

Do you ask your customers how they came to contact you?

If you do you will quickly learn where you need to concentrate your advertising.

Are you advertising your small business in the right places?

Who are the people who buy your product?

What other products do those people buy?

Is there a possibility you could network your product with others?

You might find The silver-greay Japanese car syndrome - over on Seth Godin’s blog interesting and perhaps your thoughts might go in the same direction as mine.

Common Sense Cannibalization

Business models and how they might be applied to small business has always fascinate me. That’s why one that works on the basis of a business consuming itself caught my eye and has got to be worth looking at and thinking about.

It seems that Skype - the VoIP company - has such a business model. To read more about it follow the link in the sub-heading.

It’s important even if you’re wicked

This is a Wicked Camper - it’s one of a fleet of vehicles that you often see around Australia. They are very popular with people who want to go camping on the cheap.

Quite some time ago I wrote about these vans on my motoring blog and ever since then that particular page has been attracting quite a few search engine hits. It’s also brought a couple of adverse comments about the company from customers who were far from happy about the service they did … or didn’t receive.

One of our daughters will be coming up to stay with us for a few days in January and she plans on hiring one of these to get her here so I sent her the link so she could be warned. (I knew that she and her sister had hired one last year but didn’t know what their experience had been like)

She responded to my email with a typical ‘Dad you’ve got nothing to worry about’ response but she also took the time to tell me in glowing terms how positive her experience had been. But she didn’t take the time to comment about her experience on the blog.

So I see a lesson there for small businesses - people who feel they have been treated poorly are always quick to complain and these days, complaining on the Internet can attract a whole lot more attention than in the past.

Sadly those who have a good experience are not quite as quick to tell others.

Basically I guess it comes down to working harder to keep your customers satisfied.

You can read the original post and all the comments (including a quote from my daughter’s email) at A Wicked Camper

There are more ways to sell your product than you might think

If you’re involved in selling anything online then you can easily fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to do it is via banners and text. But there are definitely other ways of selling things online too and here’s a link to an article about a different way that IBM is marketing one of its products online.

A variation on this theme just might work for your small business. Here’s the link

Some components die young

Yesterday was one of those odd days when I worked hard yet seemed to achieve very little. I guess I should have known it wasn’t going to be a great day when my laptop refused to fire up.

The laptop I use when I need to escape from the office and work outdoors or in another part of the house is almost three years old and yesterday, without any warning at all, the hard drive died. It blue-screened on shut down on Sunday night and when I tried restarting yesterday morning it failed.

So off it went to the computer shop where our partner diagnosed a some corrupt sectors in a critical part of the hard drive. Fortunately I store almost no data on the hard drive of the laptop so nothing was lost except some time.

It seems that laptop hard drives have a tendency to fail around the three year mark so be warned, if you keep important data on your laptop’s hard drive make sure you back it up regularly and if you can avoid storing data on an older laptop’s hard drive then do so because it can all be lost in the blink of an eye.

There was one good thing come out of that failure - I lost Internet Explorer 7 and had to revert to IE6. The more I use IE7 on one of my PCs the more I think it’s a waste of time.

Here at Insanity Central - where too much work isn’t nearly enough - this message is important

Writing is a physical effort that can play hell with your back, your neck, your eyes, and your breathing. (Many writers slouch, which cuts off full breaths, so your CO2 builds up. If you get headaches, get a better chair. And set a timer for forty minutes — and force yourself to take a five minute break, where you stretch and take deep breaths to clear the system. It works.)

That’s a direct quote from a post on John Carlton’s Big Damn Blog and whether you’re a writer or a marketer what he has to say on that blog should be required reading for you.

Guess who has had problems with his breathing lately?

IE7 has been released

The final release of Internet Explorer 7 happened just two days ago and over 8 million people have already downloaded it from download.com while so many more have hit the Microsoft site that the site all but collapsed from the pressure.

But is IE7 worth downloading? Follow the link above to read my first take on it.

SomehowI managed to miss publishing any links last Friday - I think I was still recovering from the relief of finishing a big job that just didn’t want to end.

So my apologies for that ommission and here are some links that you might find helpful for your small business.

Serial Deviant - ignore the name, trust me … just ignore the name because what you will find on the other end of that link is a valuable tutorial on how to turn a WordPress installation into a working online shop. If you are a small business or home office person and you have something to sell online then this link could be very helpful.

Safe Haven - an interesting read about the possibility of an economic collapse. It doesn’t make for fun reading but you should be aware of the possibility that this could happen.

33′ Rockers - again please trust me, the name might sound strange but the information is invaluable if you happen to use Firefox as your browser. The information is invaluable because the page contains links to 13 great extensions for Firefox users who happen to make their living on the Web

And that’s it for this week. I’ve got a couple of hours more work in front of me and then Toni will be back from the office and it’s beer and noodle night

Have a good weekend folks

Or are you simply throwing it away?

Money is almost always in short supply for most small businesses and so it’s very important to save money when ever you can. But sometimes there’s a subtle line between saving money and just plain throwing it away.

I was reading a message board yesterday and came across a request from a programmer who has a client who is looking for a 6-8 page website complete with the ability to sell and download items direct from the site. The client wanted something that was stock-standard and was only prepared to pay $500 to $1000 dollars.

Of course there was someone who knew the perfect way to do it for just $500 using the basic version (read that as ‘free’) of a content management system but was that really going to save the small business client money or was it just throwing their money away?

The problems for this small business client
1. A website that will make money for a small business needs a solid and professional looking design - the content management system they were going to use was rather clunky and guiding a visitor to the point where you actually make the sale is rather difficult.

2. Who was going to do the search engine optimisation? Build it and they will come is delusional so what is the point of spending any money at all on something no one will see?

3. Who was going to write the targeted sales text for each page? For an all inclusive fee of $500 there’s no guarantee that whoever writes it can even spell. Good sales text does not come cheap and for an 8 page site you wouldn’t be hiring us for under $1,000.

Cheap does not equate to good value
I guess that for small business a figure like that just for the text can be rather scary and even daunting but if you want to make money from a website then you have to spend some first and $500 is basically peanuts. So all that small business owner is going to get is something a monkey could put together.

About 12 months ago we had an informal approach from a new real estate agent in town who wanted a website designed. They thought the figure we quoted was absurdly high and told us they could do it themselves using Microsoft Publisher.

In the highly competitive world of real estate in the sea-change town where we live - where the lots of people use the Internet to check out the town before they arrive - this real estate agent still does not have a website.