Over promising is a problem only when you under deliver. There are a number of ways that you can overdeliver to your customers or prospects, and as a result create a win-win situation for you both. They will be provided with some additional value, while you will be upgrading your learning around a particular issue, adding another product or service to your business, or even increasing the mastery level of your craft.
For example, let’s say you are a communications coach. You might consider offering a complimentary group call for your current clients. The discussion during this call will not only increase your understanding of some aspect of your business, but it might provide the raw material for crafting a top 10 article, an e-book or an e-course - more things which might be passed along to your clients as a value add. Of course, your clients will love the opportunity to have more time to benefit from what you have to say - and at no cost to them!
What can you do today to provide more value to your prospective and current clients?
1. Underpromise and overdeliver. Before you even think of providing more value, you must set the stage from which you will operate. Always deliver what you promise to deliver by way of your products or services within the time frame specified. Never leave any loose ends. But, when you do deliver to your clients, always provide them with more than they expect. Not only will this come as a welcomed surprise, they will consider you as someone who is generous and who really cares about them. It can be as simple as providing a handwritten note or any of a number of other possibilities which will be discussed shortly. A human being’s highest need is to be acknowledged. Think about the different ways you can acknowledge others when doing business.
2. Provide complimentary support. One of the easiest ways to provide additional value is to provide complimentary support for your products or services. You can provide phone or email support, or even an FAQ document that can be posted on your website. This gives the customer confidence that they will have a way to follow up with any questions or concerns that they might have. The beauty of this is that very few people will ever take advantage of it, yet by providing it, you can create a tremendous amount of customer goodwill.
3. Provide information and lots of it. We all crave knowledge and information. Provide as much information as you can around your products and services. You can provide articles, special reports, and links to other resources on your website. You can write the articles yourself, or use those of others with their permission. In less than a half day, you could find a dozen articles and as many links to other informational sites to support what you do. If you have your own articles to post, that’s an added bonus. With your own articles, you can feature them in your email signature, along with an autoresponder (a type of email system that delivers the article automatically and immediately) so that folks can receive a copy right away. A small investment of your time can provide valuable content for your website and a valued resource to prospects and current clientele.
4. Create a free eCourse. It’s so easy to create an eCourse. An eCourse is merely a series of short emails delivered via an autoresponder designed to teach a concept or series of concepts in an easy-to-understand manner. You can easily take a top ten article or other information that you have and “chunk” it into a series of 5, 7 or 10 lessons, which can be delivered over as many days or weeks. Each lesson is a short description of the topic along with an example and perhaps questions or resource links for future follow-up. An eCourse is set up in a mechanism called an autoresponder, an automated email system that delivers lessons at the interval you specify. An e-course is the perfect “product” to advertise in your email signature and can be triggered by the recipient merely sending an email to a specified address. From that point forward, the lessons are automatically issued without any further intervention on your part. E-courses are a great way to showcase an upcoming product or program offering, a way to get people interested in what you have to offer. They are a great way to offer a lot of value with less than a day of effort to write a simple course, set it up for distribution and let it work for you.
5. The benefits of an R & D team. Offering prospects and current clients the opportunity to join and participate on your research and development team is another way to offer value. Your R & D team can be used to test product or program ideas that you might have. By seeking feedback now, you can gather new ideas and you can which ones are worthwhile and of value to others. The benefit to the recipients is that they can play a role in influencing the types of products that they like most. Many folks who have R & D teams also enjoy offering participants special incentives like coupons, discounts, or even a free sample of the product or program before it is issued to the general public.
6. Offer free teleclasses. Offering free teleclasses to prospects and current customers is a great way to generate goodwill while providing valuable content. Free teleclasses are a wonderful way for newcomers to experience who you are and how you operate. For folks who already do business with you, they look at this as a wonderful bonus to experience more of the quality service they have come to expect from you. Teleclasses are a cost and time efficient value add and an easy way to reach others on a global basis. You may want to consider recording these classes and making the audio available from your web site.
7. Offer free assessments. Another way to provide more value is to offer assessments. Assessments are wonderful because they provide the prospect or client with additional information. Provide useful information, links to other sites (or yours), references to helpful organizations or even titles of books to read. Gear the assessment outcomes to focus on various products or services that you have developed so you can drive people to consider your various offerings. People like assessments because they can do them on their own and get immediate feedback. You may also consider bundling an assessment with a 15-minute complimentary consult allowing you to develop a stronger relationship with this prospect.
8. Celebrate special days in special ways. There are hundreds of different holidays celebrated throughout the year. Find a way to couple something you’re doing with an upcoming holiday and share that with your customers. For example, if you’re a relationship coach, you might want to send out a special report on celebrating Valentine’s Day the week before. For folks who might be spending that day alone, you might provide a complimentary teleclass for everyone to get together to talk. If you’re an event planner, you might wish to send out a special collection of easy-to-prepare recipes for the Fourth of July or the Super Bowl. These are simple things to do, but can mean a lot to your clientele.
9. Reward your long-time customers. It has been said that it costs up to six times as much to get a new customer than it does to maintain the ones you have. One of the best ways to maintain a good relationship with your current clients is by rewarding them for their long-term patronage. At least once each year, offer them discount coupons for themselves or to give to a friend, free product samples, or other promotions to thank them for doing business with you. This type of relationship building will go a long way in creating customer good will and it will probably result in many more referrals. Low cost offerings like this generate additional revenue for you, and can expand your client base with very little effort on your part.
10. Share the wealth. If you create new products or services based on customer requests, figure out some way to reward the person or persons who came up with the idea. You might compensate them by giving them complimentary access to your product or service. You can formally acknowledge them as an inspiration on your website, or you can send them a monetary or other gift as a “thank you”.
© Copyright 2004 by Alicia Smith
Alicia Smith is a Coach and Trainer whose specialty is helping people Make Money Now. She has taught over 70,000 people how to improve their business bottom lines. To learn more about her courses, products and services please email her at alicia@aliciasmith.com or visit www.AliciaSmith.com and www.90DayMarketingMarathon.com
Buy Wholesale And Save BIG! Copyright © 2006 Prepaid Solutions
Are you ready to join? The Internet shopping bandwagon, that is.
Shopping online has become increasingly popular over the last
few years, with new and improved safety measures, specialty
shops and giant retailers like Overstock.com; all designed to
entice shoppers.
In fact, shoppers spent $30.1 billion online this season, up 30
percent from $23.2 billion last year, according to Goldman
Sachs, Nielsen/NetRatings and Harris Interactive.
Additionally, e-commerce transactions are estimated to be close
to 168 billion dollars for the year 2005. In fact, in the year
2010 it is projected online sales could top the 315 billion
dollar mark (Forrester Research 2005). One may ask, why such an
increase?
Many factors can explain such increases. Improved security
measures, ease of use and convenience are just a few of these
factors. Let’s explore these factors.
Security Measures- Despite all the fears of identity theft,
online transactions account for less than 4% of identity theft.
There are numerous software programs available (some for free)
that the user can download to protect themselves from viruses
and spyware. Worried about spyware? Download a free spyware
program at www.safer-networking.com (called SpyBot Search &
Destroy).
Additionally, look for the locked padlock in the toolbar and
make sure the http changes to https in your browser. The “s”
indicates that the web site is a secure site and adheres to the
industry standard for security values Secure Sockets Layer
(SSL). Therefore, your personal information is encrypted and
stays private during transmission over the Internet. If you use
Internet Explorer as your browser you will generally see a lock
in the bottom right of page which indicates that the site has at
least 128 bit encryption (which is safer than shopping offline).
Always delete sensitive information when exiting any website and
do not give your credit card number to anyone requesting it in
an email (phishing scams). Follow these simple steps a safe
online shopping experience.
Ease of use- We have all seen the banner advertisements, just
click on them and they take you to the web site advertised.
Email advertising is growing in popularity as well and includes
a link to click on to take the user to the site after they read
the text ad. There are some unique and catchy names of web sites
that are easy to remember. Have a favorite web site or shopping
site? Just bookmark it and add it to your collection of
favorites!
Convenience- Ever wait in long lines during the holiday season?
What a time saver online shopping has become! No lines to wait
in, no parking hassles, no traffic, no gas expense, no crowds
and your merchandise can be shipped right to your door!
Or, if you prefer, you can have your purchases gift wrapped and
delivered to another address. All you do is sit at your computer
with your shopping list and get done in a few hours what may
taken you several days and trips to the mall to accomplish!
In many cases, you will spend less for the product as well as
the elimination of gas, time and parking at the local mall.
There is absolutely no need to be paranoid about shopping online
and the bargains and even wholesale products that are
dropshipped to you are waiting to picked!
There are many more advantages to shopping online (we have just
covered a few) as well as some disadvantages, but carefully
weighed out; the smart shopper will discover a happy medium
between the two and e-commerce will continue to grow and be a
force in the economy for years to come.
—————————————————————–
————— Dan Farrell is the owner of
http://www.buyatwholesaleguide.com where you can get links and
resources to wholesale, closeout and liquidation merchandise
that is dropshipped to your door.
Commission Junction is one of the most popular affiliate programs, which offer thousands of products for affiliate marketers to choose from. There are millions of people who market other companies’ products and services through middlemen (CJ). Affiliate marketers get commission on sale of products/services. CJ is a middleman between the affiliate marketer and the company. The amount of money spent online is increasing day by day. E-commerce is picking up at a very faster rate and more and more people are joining affiliate networks like CJ, link share etc.
Some people have a feeling that there are not many products for them to market. Once you join CJ then you need to apply for the affiliate programs that you would like to market. Each advertiser has their own procedures to accept or reject your application. Most of the advertisers take long time to accept new affiliate marketers. Once you are accepted, then the next step is to take the code or banners and apply in your web pages.
There are thousands of serious affiliate marketers who make huge money with commission junction. It is at the moment the best in affiliate marketing intermediary.
There are some positive and negative points of commission junction:
Some plus points are:
There are thousands of products and services for an affiliate marketer to choose from.
Good statistics and reports.
Good quality companies and no cheap products.
Options for affiliate marketers to choose whether button, text or banners to be added in their site.
Some minus points are:
Difficult interface for new person, it takes time to learn about it.
There is less variety of products.
Some product application takes time when you apply for an affiliate program through CJ.
To learn more visit http://www.totalaffiliates.com
What if I showed you a clear roadmap to affiliate riches in 6 simple steps ? Would YOU be interested ?
If you are ready to put in some efforts and determination, your success is guaranteed with this system.
Follow these 6 simple steps to create multiple streams of autopilot income…
Step 1 - Research Your Theme…
Write down topics that interest you. You might have a great passion for golf. Or you might be master at cooking delicious dishes.
Life will be extremely easy if you create and promote a site around a theme you really love.
Step 2 - Check Demand & Competition…
Check out demand and competition for all the themes that you have chosen.
Visit inventory.overture.com to check out demand.
Visit www.google.com to check out competition.
Now you have to find out the theme that has high demand and less competition. How will you do it ?
Once you know demand and competition for all the themes, apply formula ‘Competition/Demand’ to check profitability of the theme. Lower the result of the formula better is the profitability of the theme.
Choose the theme that has received the lowest result. This is probably the best theme, around which you can create a profitable site.
Step 3 - Research Topics To Build Content…
NOW put your most profitable theme at inventory.overture.com
You will see number of similar topics (keywords) around your theme.
Search for each and every keyword at www.google.com and try to get enough knowledge so that you can write one page article for each keyword or topic.
Step 4 - Research Affiliate Programs…
Now hunt for affiliate programs around each and every topic that you have researched in step 3.
You can check out associateprograms.com
to hunt for affiliate programs related to your topic.
Step 5 - Create A Site…
Create a content rich website around your theme.
You can get FREE website templates at www.freewebtemplates.com
You need some html skills to tweak these templates. You can learn html at www.htmlgoodies.com
Step 6 - Drive Truckloads of Targeted Traffic…
Get traffic, traffic & MORE traffic from…
1. Search Engines.
2. Exchanging Links.
3. Writing Articles.
4. Following up your optin-list.
5. Pay Per Click.
6. Ezine Advertising.
Just follow these 6 simple steps and you are on your way to affiliate riches.
NOW pull up your sleeves and get down to work.
Just imagine… having a site up and making at least $1000 with this system in just 2 months.
You could easily create 6 sites within a year, making a passive income of $6000.
But the MOST important step is to get started right NOW.
Murtuza Abbas specializes in creating simple ‘Profit Pulling Minisites’.
Churn out simple, effective Profit Pulling Minisites in 3 Hours or Less. Grab your FREE $147 ‘Minisite Creation Pack’ & learn how to start an internet business today.
Google Base - what is it? How do I use it? How do I make it like me? Froogle why don’t you return my calls?
I am the first one to admit that I am slow in keeping up with the latest changes in the Internet world. Having been a new online merchant, I discovered eBay. Ok eBay is nice and they allow merchants to subscribe and setup an online store. This is nice but the insertion, selling and Paypal fees leave me with very very very little profit. It would be better if I bought eBay stock instead of working so hard to sell my products to have eBay and Paypal prosper. Enter Google and their Beta Froogle site. Eureka, God Bless Google. In the spirit of Open Source, Froogle provided merchants a free online merchant product showcase. A showcase to which you could bulk upload all of your product inventory in a specified tab delimited format to a Froogle FTP upload server or directly through the Froogle merchant home page. Users could search Froogle for their product of interest, Froogle would display their search results, the user would then click their desired product and be taken to the merchant’s product landing page. The key here is that you land right on the merchant’s product detail page. Not just the merchant’s home page. So no more searching for the product once you get redirected to the merchant’s online store.
I have successfully used Froogle for the past six months. They had some slight technical glitches, but for a free service that drove customers to my site, I was not about to complain. I love Froogle. Now enter Google Base. I am behind the curve on what Google is trying to do here. At the same time Google Base went online, the Froogle merchant homepage stopped working and FTP uploads to their hedwig ftp server were not being processed. Then one day all of my product listings were removed. As well as many other merchants. This left many of us guessing. If not turning us off and returning to more reliable services like eBay and other proven merchant sites.
Before I give up all hope on the new Google Base, I decided to convert my Froogle data upload feed to the Google Base required format. Ok, this took a few hours but I had my new Google Base product data load ready for uploading into Google Base. I had already established my Google Base account and uploaded by Google Base data file. Within 24 hours all of my items were approved and searchable from Google Base. I also noticed that all of the items uploaded to Google Base were now visible in Froogle. So this leads me to believe that Google Base is going to be the hub (or Base duh?) for all of the Google services like Froogle, etc. Or maybe Froogle will be going away. I do not know.
Being perfectly proud of my switch to Google Base, I return to enriching my Cycle Solutions site with motorcycle related content and articles. I chose to write original content related articles over pursuing Link exchanges mainly because Link exchanges wore me out and you could never trust the other Webmaster to post your links and to not remove them in the future. SO I punted and decided to be original and put some honest sweat labor into my site and provide useful motorcycle related articles that may benefit some of my users.
Fast forward a few weeks and I go to see how my listings are doing on Google Base. Well, I log into my Google Base main page and see all of my listsings have now been disapproved with no email or note or explanation anywhere as to why. The only thing stated is that you must follow Google Base policy guidelines. Ok, I am ethical and honest and want to play well with others, so I reread the Google Base policies and guidelines, scratch my head. Look at my disapproved listings and decide to punt. I have no clue why these were disapproved. Doing a Google search on “Google Base Disapproved” turns up very little useful information. So, I try to just add 1 simple little product to Google Base via my Google Base upload file. The file gets ingested by Google Base, it burps and tells me to check later for my listings. Well I do and this one gets disapproved. Now I thing, Google Base how can I say I am sorry if I don’t know what I did wrong. I then get adventurous and send an email to Google Base support. Note Google nowhere on any of their sites have phone numbers. They are the game in town and will become the Matrix and Big Brother. They must first defeat the evil Chinese empire, when they do, here comes Orwell’s 1984 ala Google style. Maybe the “Mark of the Beast” as mentioned in revelations, will be a forcibly applied Google tattoo placed on or forehead or hand. hmmmmm.
Ok, I digress in my rant. I receive a response from Google Base support:
> Hello Jim,
>
> Thanks for your email. Please don’t include an image that states, “image
> not available.” If your item doesn’t have an actual image, simply don’t
> upload any images. You can recreate your item again without any images,
> and it should appear on Google Base shortly after you publish it.
>
> If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email us back.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Lisa
> The Google Team
Now this really confuses me since the single/one/uno/mono product that I uploaded had a valid image link, valid text, and a valid shopping cart landing page. Oh Google Base why do you tease me so?! So here I sit wanting to be part of the Google enigma, but I am clueless. I will wait to see if others have answers as to why Froogle uploads are dead and Google Base is the new portal. And mainly I am hoping someone more clever and in the know than I, will help me out to help me be assimilated into Google Base.
I want to now throw a weird twist into my Google Base confusion. Ok, if I have not caused you to start drinking heavily, please read on. As you now know from my previous rant, all of my Google Base product listings and blog have been disapproved. I get curious to see if there is latency to the Google Base database indexing. I do not see much of one. What I do see is that now my eBay store items are now listed via the Google Base search. The store name source says eBay. WTF now Google Base has become the Orb of confusion. Again, I am impressed with Google my frustration comes in their lack of communication to their end users as to how to play well with the Google Base.
I wanted to start this rant in the hope others share my confusion. Maybe many individual Google user light bulbs that are flickering on their own will burn much more brightly together. I do not want to fear the Google Base, but to make it my mistress and love it all over. Please Google Base, call me for a second date.
XOXOXOXO
Contributing author to Cycle Solutions
http://www.cyclesolutions.net
An Exploding Marketplace
The world has become a busy place, with trillions of dollars changing hands each year in business transactions and consumer spending. While the customary method of doing business in person or via telephone is still in use, the growing trend is to conduct ecommerce transactions on-line, with the use of computers.
On-line revenues from ecommerce in the U.S. alone have grown from 24.1 billion in 2000, to over 100 billion in 2005. And, the number of on-line users in the U.S. has exploded from 124.7 million in 2000 to over 200 million.
Canada’s combined private and public online sales have also experienced a boom. Up almost 40% in 2003 from a 27% jump in 2002; public sector enterprises realized nearly $511.4 million in sales.
Along with the skyrocketing use of the virtual marketplace comes the need for special tools, such as ecommerce web hosting, ecommerce software, and the ecommerce shopping cart.
How Does it All Work?
Ecommerce web hosting provides a business web site with special tools for doing business over the internet. Features such as extended data storage and monthly data transfer capacities, security certificates, and complex data bases are required to make a business web site run smoothly.
Higher data capacities allow for the sheer size of a business site, and the enormous exchange of information involved. Security certificates make the site safe for monetary transactions, and databases such as SQL keep track of individual accounts, purchases, inventory, or any transaction.
The ecommerce shopping cart allows the customer to select items and then purchase them at a virtual check out stand, usually with several payment method options, such as credit cards and PayPal.
Businesses require skilled personnel to implement and monitor these special tools for marketing goods or services on-line. There are many ecommerce web hosting firms that meet these and other special needs for a successful ecommerce solution.
Acecomp.com offers experienced ecommerce web site design and hosting, and ecommerce solutions for any type ecommerce web site. Visit them on-line at www.acecomp.com
Max Sheppard is Co-Owner of Acecomp Plus at http://www.acecomp.com Customer Website Design, Website Development, E-Commerce and Content Management Solutions to maximize our clients online potential.