I’ve started a few business in my time, and I’m always trying to absorb knowledge from others that have also.  There is one undeniable truth that all successful business owners preach:  word of mouth is the best advertising available.  Think about it: if someone you trust that has nothing to gain from the recommendation goes out of their way to tell you that a product or service is worthwhile then you are likely to give that product or service a try.  To get good word of mouth advertising, your business needs great customer service.  Take care of your customers and everything else will take care of itself.

I’ve heard a lot of tweets lately about customer service.  A few good ones are below:

Good service leads to multiple sales. If you take care of your customers, they’ll open doors you could never open by yourself.  – @ShanePike

“One customer, well taken care of, could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.” ~Jim Rohn – @ZigZiglarQuotes

These quotes are as true as they come.  However, depending on what you do, that $10,000 worth of advertising estimate may be quite a bit low.

I’ve had a few good customer service experiences in the last week.  Both instances really opened me up to the particular business I was dealing with.  Coincidentally, they were both local restaurants.  Last week, I went to Five Guys Burgers and orders my cheeseburger.  Well, it came out with onions instead of mushrooms.  Did I order onions accidentally?  Who knows, but I wanted mushrooms.  I took the burger up to the front and an employee saw me coming.  She came out from behind the counter and met me half way.  I was ready to give the whole story and go into the typical hoopla it takes at most restaurants.  However, she stopped me, went ahead and had them start me another burger, wrapped mine back up and handed it to me and told me to take it home to someone who might want it.  I was impressed!  Not only did she take prompt care of my “issue”, but she gave me the old burger as well because they could do nothing but throw it away.

This morning, I stopped by Wendys to try their breakfast as I had never had it.  I ordered a homestyle chicken biscuit and proceeded to the window.  The lady at the window informed me that it would be about 3 minutes for the chicken to fry and asked if I would like a drink while I wait (I had not ordered a drink).  I replied “yes” and got a free coke out of the wait.  Not a big deal, cost the company next to nothing, but small things like that help the customer to understand that you care about their experience and that they are important to you.

When I was just starting out in business, I had the problem of thinking that everytime someone requested something, it was an emergency.  I would work all night on website updates for someone, just because the client said it was important.  In doing so, I found myself working all the time, taking calls late at night for updates that had to be done by morning.  It was a very stressful time, and still to this day I find myself falling into this trap.

There was a comic posted at an office I used to work at that said something to the effect:  “Lack of preperation on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine”.  Live by that.  Don’t be afraid to say “no” or that you can’t meet a requested deadline.  Don’t fall into the trap of dropping what you are working on to take care of the “call of the moment”.  Make them wait their turn just like everyone else.

I have clients where everything is an emergency.  How could this be?  How could everything be this important?  It’s not.  It’s just their nature to be worrysome.  On the other hand, I have clients where I sometimes feel bad because their updates took so long, but they call and thank me for “jumping right on it” when they are done.

Being in business is more than managing projects.  It includes managing clients.  If you can manage your clients, then the job will eat you alive with stress.  So, chill out, seperate the truly time-sensitive updates from the rest and tell them to wait.

In my recent trials from trying to sell my house and purchase another, I have learned a lot about selling and buying big ticket items.  I’ll use my house as an example, but this really applies to anything.  It used to be my naive opinion that selling something simply meant that, compared to everything else available on the market, you had the best to offer in your price point.  If you had the best at the right price, it would sell.  This is true, but a slight change in this methodology will lead to quicker, more frequent sales.

The truth is, you don’t need to have the best product on the market.  You simply need to have the best that a potential buyer HAS SEEN.  The key to this difference is that people are lazy, and they don’t always spend the time necessary to look at every available option.  So, if you are pro-active in finding buyers, then whatever you are selling will probably be one of the first items the buyer sees.  If they like it and it meets their price point, then you have a good chance of selling it.

For example, I had a potential buyer I was talking to on Twitter about my house.  He had found another house and was in process of purchasing, but the deal had stalled when the house didn’t appraise for asking value.  Well, I hit him up, talked him into coming to see my house.  He was thinking it over, but had already fallen in love with the house he was trying to purchase.  Even though, in my opinion, my house is better (bigger, recently remodelled, better lot, etc) and at the same price point, he had seen that house first, liked it, had spent the last few weeks dreaming about how he would fix it up, decorate it, paint it, etc and so he decided to not even come by to look at my house after the seller met the appraised price.  In this case, it did not matter that my house was better.  What mattered was what he saw and liked first.

When selling houses, the mistake is using a realtor right away.   I would always recommend you at least try to sell it yourself first, then if you are not able to sell it, find a realtor.  A lot of people look online for houses.  Put it on craigslist, in the local online classifieds for your paper and see if you can proactively go after a buyer.  Talk to everyone you know and push your house.  In this situation, they are pretty much comparing my house to the others on craigslist or in some cases only currently considering my house.  In this situation, if they like my house (not like it better than another, but if they like it at all), it is sold.  If I go with a realtor, my house is being compared with everything in the local MLS system.  The odds of my house being the best a buyer has seen is greatly reduced with a realtor.  The flip side is that realtors have a larger buying pool, but give it a go yourself before you give in and see if you can get it sold.

Lately, I’ve been trying to use facebook ads to drive some affilliate marketing re-bill offers. Well, most re-bill affiliate marketing opportunities do not come close to meeting the Facebook advertising guidelines so getting one approved is proving difficult.

Initially, I thought this was going to be easier.  I built my landing page promoting several offers and submitted it to Facebook.  It was approved in about 12 hours and I was under way (so I thought).  Well, my ad was very weak and I wasn’t getting a good CTR so Facebook increases my recommended minimum bid and I stop getting impressions.  I quickly update my ads, changing the targeting of the one I already have and adding more that are a little edgier.

Well, the Facebook Ad Monitors now decide that my offers are not meeting the guidelines.  Of course, they don’t exactly tell you this.  They give you a hint as to what terms are violated, but they don’t tell you if it is the offers or your site.  So, I spend the next day redoing my landing page to make 100% sure it meets the guidelines but I am still unable to get any ads approved.

Over the last day, “Ad disapproved” has become my new best friend.  I’ve submitted over a dozen ads with none being approved.  In doing so, I have noticed that for the exact same targeting, my minimum recommended bid increases each time one of my ads are disapproved.  I’m wondering if I am beginning to be marked as a “trouble maker” because I am continuing to try to get these ads approved.

It was my assumption that the recommended bids are simply determined by the targeting of your ad.  However, this seems to be  firm evidence that past performance plays into your future advertising recommendations on facebook.

I consider myself a fairly patient person, at least in most cases.  However, when I’m excited about a project or something I am doing I like to jump on it and go while the adrenaline is still pumping.

Recently, I have been trying to get back to spending considerable time and resources on affiliate marketing.  I learned a lot when I was focused on it, and was making good money in spots.  However, big projects came in and my available time decreased and I stopped working on my campaigns.

Yesterday, I started experiementing heavily with Facebook ads. Once I get a number of clicks on an ad, I like to make adjustments and submit another ad.  However, my ad approval time is taking 6-10 hours and it’s really taking all the fun out of testing and finding something that works. If my memory serves me correctly, this is about twice what it was taking last year when I was testing facebook previously.  Obviously, the moderators are much busier now.  It’s just another sign that facebook is exploding as an advertising platform.

I have strengths and things that come natural to me that allow me to be successful in what I do.  However, I also have weaknesses that I struggle to overcome everyday that hold my business back.  You can’t do it all, and the sooner you find out what you suck at the sooner you can be on your path to greatness.

For example, today I am looking at starting over on my QuickBooks file for the year because I am about as disorganized as I could possibly be.  If I were just a little more organized, I would finish projects faster and make much more money because I would keep up with records better and bill a lot more of my time than I currently do.  I struggle with this, but really need to force myself to slow down and track everything.  It really doesn’t take that long to do once everything is setup, but it is just so out of my nature to do so.

You need to examine your business and find out what you personally or the business as a whole sucks at doing.  Once you identify your weakness, find the best way to overcome that obstacle.  It may be as simple as putting forth more effort, getting your spouse to help, or it could come in the form of hiring more help.  Regardless, eliminating your weakness is a big step in preparing yourself for success.

We have been experimenting and toying with the open source shopping cart platform Magento Commerce for some time.  If you read this blog, you’ll see the issues that we have encountered while testing the system.  However, we have decided to give it a full production run and have just completed our first Magento shopping cart.  We just unveiled the new design for Walking Canes this week and would like to know what you think.

We didn’t want to go too wild with our first attempt at it, so the template is fairly simple.  However, that is what Walking Canes’ market calls for so it worked out great!  The site has the premium domain name for this market and was ranked on the first page on Google for the main industry keyword of “walking canes”.  However, the site ranked poorly for just about all long tail keywords. We have moved them up to the top fold on Google with the new design launch and hopefully they begin to see some longtail traffic very soon.

Look at the site and post what you think.

I have been about as loyal to The Planet as I can be.  I’m not all that unhappy, but not particular thrilled by them either.  I started leasing my first dedicated server back years ago with Rack Shack.  Rack Shack was eventually bought out by EV1 Servers which was then taken over by The Planet.  So, I guess you can say I’ve been a client of The Planet since before they were The Planet.

Over time, I noticed a tremendous dip in the level of support they provided, but that seems to have recovered somewhat as of late.  This spells trouble for many others that I know use The Planet.  However, I handle my administration and keep pretty good control on my servers (and have been lucky) so I have not needed much support from them.

Today, one of my servers was unaccessible for some time (how long, exactly, is unknown).  I couldn’t get in touch with anyone at the planet.  However, through the power of Twitter, I quickly learned that it was a widespread issue and not my particular machine.  After I finished dealing with all the client phone calls and questions, the servers finally came back up.

I control a couple hundred domain names and hosting accounts (mostly my own sites).  I am constantly expanding this list and need to be able to expand my hosting as needed.  Anyone have any good suggestions that are in-line or better price-wise than The Planet and allow you the flexibility of setting everything up like you want it?

I’ve been around the block more than a few times.  I’ve designed and developed hundreds if not thousands of websites. If you find this useful and want some tips and pointers on your website and how it could be more successful email me your url and I’ll try to make this a regular segment.

Today, we will review the website of Spencer McDonald at MondayMorningGold.com.  According to Spencer’s Twitter Bio, he is an avid writer and speaker on the subject of life motivation, leadership, team building, and productivity. Also love, Pinot Noir, comedies, and family time.   I assume that his blog is about these subjects mentioned in his bio.

Blogging is not my specialty, although I’m getting better at it.  However, usability and website interaction are right up my alley.  So, hopefully I’ll be able to give Spencer some useful advice.

Design: The overall design of the site is fine.  Nothing ground breaking, but clean and legible.  A professional design would help, but there is nothing here keeping you back.

The content design is not good.  All of the fonts are the same color, headlines don’t stand out too well and the structure just isn’t as well designed as it could be.  It makes it difficult to scan the site and find an interesting post.  You should also design the links and “functions” of the site to really promote people to interact with it.  Big graphical buttons, well-placed will go a long way to prompt people to post comments and interact with your site.

I would recommend finding another theme that does a better job of content design.  It will almost always require some customization to get it right, but this is necessary to get some life into the blog.

Content: The focus of the blog is not 100% clear.  From the content, I am getting a self-help, motivational kind of vibe.  However, I am not sure.  The focus is the hardest part and what many people fail to deliver on when it comes to blogging.  You need a market to get traffic.  To find a market, your blog has to have a focus. That focus needs to be more clear to your users.  At least give me a tagline or something to let me know what the blog is about.

SEO: You want traffic, so you need some way of getting it.  Good on-page SEO is one easy way to get some traffic on whatever topic you are blogging about.  The main issue I see with your SEO is the page names.  I assume you are using wordpress.  If so, get the page names fixed!  It’s easy, no excuse not to do it.  You need to also work on the title of your home page.  It should contain a line explaining what the blog is because the name doesn’t really do that for me.

After you get these items straight, promote the blog.  Search Twitter, find people interested in your subject and follow them.  They’ll most likely follow you back and you now have some one that would be interested in your content.  There are a ton of other ideas to promote the blog, but we won’t get into them here.

Hopefully, Spencer, my useless opinion will help you improve your blog!

So, you work hard at your internet business.  You are doing everything right.  You are close to a breakthrough and you know it.  There are so many people out there like you with the skills and work ethic it takes to make it in this business but are just not quite getting it done.  Maybe they need a little direction, advice, or a little motivation to push them over that hump to success.  That is a big reason why many of the successful Internet marketers have mentors or connections with other big internet marketers.  At some point, everyone needs a little help or advice.

Good news, help is here.  Shane Pike at AskShane.org is having a contest where the winner will receive a once-in-a-lifetime access to resources that could help them take their business to the next level.  Anyone interested in Affiliate Marketing at any level will benefit greatly from the varied prize package in this contest.

The great thing is that Shane has a wonderful blog, but he doesn’t have the follower base like the ultra-well-known marketers like Shoemoney or John Reese.  That way, you have a much better chance of winning!

The price package includes:

• A brand new custom web design from Wildfire Marketing.
• A three-month subscription to Aaron Wall’s awesome SEO training — which is way more than just SEO, plus a powerful forum.
• A three-month subscription to ShoeMoney tools — an incredible array of applications to give your business an inside edge, plus another powerful forum.
• A year-long Pro subscription to Crazy Egg — one of the easiest ways to see huge improvements both in how efficient your site is for users and also in how well it converts.
• A year-long Pro subscription to BuzzStream — very cool buzz-building tools that will be released to the public in the next few days.
• Three hours of consulting with PR and link-building guru Jeremy Bencken.
• Three hours of consulting with me — covering anything from SEO, to PPC, to conversion improvement, to just about anything else…it’s up to you!

Go to AskShane.org and Enter!