Entries Tagged 'Business Development' ↓

I recently got an edition of SmallBusinessNewz in my inbox with an article by Chris Crum on “7 Steps to Earning Customer Trust Online”. The complete article can be found here. I thought it was worth mentioning here, as I’ve been striving to build credibility and trust in my own online store. At the risk of ruining your read of the actual article, I’ve re-summarized the 7 points here as well, though with my own notes.

Chris starts with a stat claiming that 81% of consumers don’t trust small online businesses. Shocking? Not really, if you think about it. Personally I’ve grown over-used to trusting things online, and I’ve slapped down my credit card for more offers than I care to think about. So it came as a small surprise to me the other day when my sister asked my advice on buying a study guide online. I had a look at the sales letter, and turns out it was hosted by ClickBank. To me, that was golden. I realized though, that for most people, at least that first initial ebook purchase can be quite intimidating. The same holds true for physical goods.

So what’s important?

1. Branding

You might ask what can a small company do in terms of branding? Well there’s lots. You don’t have to be Coca Cola with $58.2 billion of brand equity to be successful at branding. I’m working hard on this with my store, DigitalFrameGuy.com. Putting forward a consistent image, whether it be your logo, your signature, or your marketing claims, all helps to build your brand. People tend to trust the familiar more than the unknown, unless you’re one heck of a copywriter.

2. Make Yourself Appear Larger

Do you have a toll free 800 number? If not, go get one for $10 a month. I specifically chose an 800 number over cheaper 888 or 877 variants, simply for the psychological “big company” factor. If you hear 1-800, your brain has been trained to think corporation. Even though it is just me, there are ways to appear much larger.

Using your home address? Throw a “Suite 110″ in front of it and mail yourself a letter. I’m actually trying this as I write it, but I’ve read it works. Plus, chances are “Suite 110″ sounds more official than your street address. By law you need to include your address on emails (for instance if you use Aweber), so why not try to use that as a trust builder?

On your email and voicemail, you can create separate departments as well. Now, you don’t want to confuse people or cause unnecessary bureacracy, but separate lines for service and sales is usually pretty straightforward. You can do that all for free with Ring Central.

I’ve got more ideas, but perhaps that is a whole separate post

3. Design

Site design is crucial. Ever visited one of those websites that was clearly somebody’s 1990’s brainchild that never grew to maturity? The instant I see a site like that, red flags and alarm bells start up even as I’m clicking back to Google. People tend not to trust the digital donkeys that don’t have modern site designs or technology. Plus, the site needs to be straightforward and easy to use. Have you searched for your site in the search engines, and then followed the process all the way through to checkout? I did that the other day and found a glaring error that I fixed immediately. You might be surprised with what you find.

4. Reputation

I care quite a bit about my businesses’ online reputation. Once that gets dragged through the mud it would be very hard to recover. Because I want people to trust me, I’ve given my customers my 100% guarantee that I’ll take back their order for any reason within 30 days. If my supplier won’t take it back, then I’ll be on the hook for it. However, I’d prefer to sell it on Ebay for a bit of a loss than to take the PR hit in some forum or blog somewhere. I recently stumbled upon a blog where the owner had had a run in with one of my competitors (do you Google to see what your competition is up to?) and he had quite the horror story going on! I jumped into the comments, trying to console him while at the same time explaining how my store was different. There are emotional people online, and they won’t keep silent. Use it to your advantage. Provide much more than they anticipated and they’ll heap praises on you! Let the down, and you better look out!

5. Security and Privacy

SSL certificates. Privacy Policies. No, you cannot sell or rent your list. Pretty straightfoward, but some merchants still aren’t getting it.

6. Testimonials

People are far more likely to believe someone else who’s walked a mile in their shoes than they are to believe you. Get over it. Once you get over it, use it to your advantage. Don’t have any testimonials yet? Have you asked? Send out an email asking for testimonials to all your past clients. Offer them a discount or something if you want. But you must use testimonials - they are a very powerful marketing tool!

7. Humanize Your Business

I started out right from the beginning with this one, calling the store “Digital Frame Guy” which has a personal feel to it. My logo has a guy in it, and I’ve tried to keep the site copy personal, especially the guarantees and such.

Looking for more ways to personalize your site? Put a picture of yourself the About Us page, or do some employee profiles. My next step is video - I’ll shortly be rolling out a series of videos for the site which I hope will both drive traffic and build a personal touch for the site. If you’re doing a video series, you’ve got a great opportunity for branding there as well. More on that in a different post, once the videos are out. We can’t give everything away all at once, can we? =)

Do you have any other suggestions or comments for building trust online?

Back when I originally read the 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss I thought outsourcing was the coolest thing. Pay someone to do those things that you don’t really want to do - especially when you can get them done cheap! Well, that was months ago, and I never really did much with it, or really got a handle on how it could help me in my business.

I should mention that I keep a spreadsheet that tracks my affiliate activities, and I’ve updated it every day for the last few years. I’ve always wanted a program that would basically do that for me. So I thought, why not outsource the creation of such a thing, at least to see how much it would cost?

If you’ve followed this blog at all you’ll know I’ve dabbled in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. That was my first experience with outsourcing, and it went fairly well. It was also extremely cheap. So I thought I would take a step up, and try out another site, Scriptlance.com. Last week I posted this project on Scriptlance, to see what the cost would be. I’m currently a member of an online service which does something similar to what I wanted, and I’m paying $100 a month there. So I figured if I could get it done for a few hundred bucks, I’d be ahead, right? Well I ended up selecting a bid for $325. The guy has lots of great reviews, and many people have even paid him bonuses, so I figured he would be a good choice to build my software.

Anyways, we’re just now getting into the process of starting this, so I’ll keep you updated as we go along. However, the whole concept of outsourcing has seriously made a come back into my brain. Now I’m thinking of all kinds of things that I can outsource.

Link building, for instance. My web store needs some serious, dedicated link building and SEO work to attain a top position, and I’m no longer certain I want to be the one doing it. As I’ve written in previous posts, I want to learn how to do SEO, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it! I mean, link building is seriously boring work! Try it for a few hours and tell me otherwise!

So I came across this other site, called AgentsOfValue.com, and I’m considering now whether or not to hire a person through them. The idea goes beyond project based outsourcing; you’re actually hiring a full time employee! In the flimsy business development timeline I had in my head, I had never really considered hiring a full time employee, especially not so early in the game. I had an idea that hiring an employee would likely mean having someone working for me, possibly out of the basement in my house. It seemed like it represented a huge step in the evolution of my business… one that would likely take a few years to achieve.

And yet here I am, seriously considering taking on a full time employee, from the Philippines. I can get a full time (yes, we’re talking 40 hours a week) link builder for about $675 a month. Do the math. That is $5.63 an hour, for skilled labour. And for them, that’s higher than average pay, locally.

I sat back for a few minutes, thinking to myself: “Can I realistically keep such a person occupied on a full time basis?” ie - is it worth it?

So we get to the core of the question - what is YOUR time worth? In other words, presumably this work you’re thinking of outsourcing is worth doing, right? Well, how long would it take you to do it?

In my case, I probably can’t do the work a whole lot faster than someone else can, who is skilled and trained in link building and other SEO work. So you’re basically looking a the bulk of my time being used on this. And that is only for one web store, and I’ve got several other projects that I really want to start spending time on! So how much is my time worth? Well I won’t tell you what I’m making right now but let’s just use $20/hr as a nice round number. I think you can see where this is going…

If my time is worth $20 an hour, and their time is worth $5.63 an hour, then the choice is easy; pay them to do the work. This frees me up to start other projects and hopefully generate some new income streams.

You see, the whole question is about opportunity cost. Yes, I CAN do the work. But if I do, then I can’t do anything else while I’m doing it. What is the cost of that lost opportunity? Now, I’ll quit freely admit that I’m somewhat lazy and don’t exactly work like a mule at my business, but there again is a lifestyle choice that I value. I don’t want to be overworked, in fact I don’t even want to be working 40 hours a week, necessarily! So if I can outsource that work, why not?

As I’ve been writing this, more ideas have popped into my head. I might go so far as to outsource the entire creation of a new webstore, then the SEO after that. The part that I really don’t like - researching dropshippers… why not outsource the research? Pay someone by the hour to sit there and find every possible option, compile a list and essentially do the dirty work for me?

Product creation, customer support, graphic design, web design, writing, link building, programming; the list goes on and on as to what you can successfully outsource these days. The question is, are you ready for it? Can you make efficient use of someone else’s time?

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. As my time is freed up, I will start new projects, which I have no doubt will create new tasks to throw at my personal link builder / SEO expert. I’m starting to think that it will be a leap of faith, but I can see it turning out to be an incredible step in my business development.

I’ll keep you posted =).