Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

Hey everyone, welcome back! A new year, new possibilities – I’m excited!

I wanted to lead off this year with something I noticed while I was on break. It’s about the claims you make as a business about your product. More specifically, the ability to back them up.

My example comes from a drive I was on, where I passed through a small grove of shops. In the same town, there were two bakeries both with shingles out that proclaimed their pies “the best in the world”. What are the chances? The world is a big place, and here we have not one, but two stores virtually next to each other proclaiming their product to be the best.

Now, obviously this is hyperbole on the part of the bakery, but it illustrates an important point when making claims about your products – particulalry when your business exists online.  Read more...

On the weekend I caught up with friends for breakfast at a local café. They had turned up earlier than me and already ordered. I sat down and ordered a coffee, and then had a look at the menu. It was from here that an almost comedic service routine started.

I was asked not long after ordering if I’d like to order a meal, which I did. At the same time, my friend ordered another coffee and had it arrive about 5 minutes later. Still no coffee for me. The waitress then came to clear my friend’s plates and asked if we would like anything else. Perhaps my meal, or at the very least my coffee?

So then I got my breakfast. Still sans coffee. After asking yet again for my morning caffeine fix, I was told “we’re really busy”. Not “sorry”, just “we’re really busy”.  Read more...

Yesterday I was shopping for my wife’s birthday present, and was at the counter when I was asked if I had a Myer One card. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked this question – it’s the stock standard one that all Myer staff are required to ask.

But something different happened today. When I said no, I was asked, “would you like to apply for one?”

This is the first time I’ve ever had a sales person try to upsell me to their rewards card, and it made me wonder how many new card customers Myer is missing because not all of their staff ask this. Obviously not everyone would say yes (I still didn’t) but even if it gathered a few more applicants a day then surely it’s a worthwhile exercise?  Read more...

The internet is a big place – information coming from everywhere, all the time. To get ahead in your online business, you need to keep up to date. But how do you manage this constant flow of information to make sure you get what you need out of it? There is a process that I work through each day to make sure I extract maximum value from all of the information. Think of these in reverse too – giving your customers these tools make it very easy to find and distribute your content:

Email - This is my start point. It might sound obvious, but the information I want to read every day I get delivered straight to me. A lot of blog sites have the option to subscribe through feedburner, which essentially takes all the new posts from a given period and delivers them in text format to my inbox. I get it on my iPhone which means I can take it with me and access when I want, even when out of range.  Read more...

I think it’s true for everyone that no matter where you have worked, you will come across people within an organisation who are just really, really good at what they do. Certainly for me, having worked across a number of different media companies, I have found people in all sorts of departments (not just mine) who know their stuff inside out and astonish me with their knowledge.

I consider these people as my Fantasy Business Team – the people that if I had was to go into business for myself and had the scale, I would want to recruit and have work with me, because they each bring something special to the table. It’s the kind of team that you think you could accomplish anything with.  Read more...