E-Biz Booster Blog

Many Internet marketing and Making Money Online “Wannabes” refrain from creating and selling products of their own, because

• they believe it were too hard to create products
• they do not want to deal with customers.

They rather get into affiliate marketing, drop shipping, selling advertising, …

“Of course it is possible to make money online without a product of your own, but building a real sustainable business is on the other side of the coin.”

Creating your own products has certainly many advantages that outweigh the so called disadvantages.

• You are in total control of every aspect.
  • Product quality
  • The offer
  • Customer relationship
  • Cash flow
  • Your Affiliates
  • etc.
• You set the rules and you own the customers. They are yours.

Does this sound interesting, “They are yours!”, or scary to you?

What's the deal about customer service anyway? I don't want to talk about product creation today, but rather about the question, “Are you ready for a relationship with your prospects and customers?rdquo;

A great long-term, profitable customer relationship is based on the following.

• Products, services, and value that keeps up with the expectations created during the sales process. That means: High Quality Products (I say high quality, not necessarily overly expensive.)
• Excellent documentation
• Excellent follow-up and customer support
• Respect (*)
• etc.
  
  
• Overdeliver and you won't have much problems!
  

Of course, there are certain types of folks that will try to pull your leg. But when selling a product of your own, you are in control how to handle this and you will learn ways to minimize those negative side effects. Otherwise you leave it to someone else (like your affiliate partner, Google, … to fix the problem. All you get are refund reports, invalid click reports, smart-pricing, …)

The key to long term success is building a relationship with your prospects and customers. Yes, I include the prospects that might be on your email list already, but did not buy anything so far. The terms of such a relationship varies of course with the ticket price, and if you sell to businesses or consumers.

Back to respect (*)

I have observed it in large corporations, in small businesses (though more in consumer markets than in business-to-business markets) that product managers, CEOs or other relevant employees call their customers names and simply ignore their input and signals.

“Any business person that fails to understand the basic tenets of treating people right is most definitely not a genius. It’s very, very disappointing.”
~Ed Rivis

Many companies operate on the edge of what is fair or even what is legally allowed, and not too few have lost masses of clients, credibility, reputation, and fortunes.

“There is no place to hide in todays Web 2.0 economy, you better show respect and play fair in all what you are doing. Otherwise it will fall back on you sooner than later.”

Think twice about how you can support your prospects and customers. Is your business built on arrogance or support?

Yours
John W. Furst

Being in business means that you have to deal with statistics, reports, spread sheets, … a lot of numbers. Unless you are a statistician, almost everyone will prefer a graphic depiction of the numbers. Actually statisticians prefer graphs, because they have the power to reveal and express correlations in very intuitive ways.

Throw some parameters

• on the x-axis,
• another on the y-axis.
• show changes over time.
  
  
• add a third dimension
• change the level of granularity and aggregation
• use circles, bars, lines, colors, and different shapes
• map data to geographical regions
• use colors, shapes, line styles, etc.

And voilá. You may gain access to understanding very complex developments and dependencies within a glimpse of an eye.

Check out this 22 minutes long video of a presentation at some conference.

Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen (↑)

About this Talk: You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world” using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling's hands, global trends -- life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates -- become clear, intuitive and even playful.

You will learn a lot about

• state of the World economy
• quality of human life
• on different continents,
• in different countries
• most importantly changes over time.
  
  
• The sheer power of animated graphic data representation

Did any TV reports give you such high a density of overview about where the human race is standing? I guess not. They are accustomed to report about the worst and best cases only. Media in general gives a very poor representation of overall situations.

Policy makers, business owners, and managers need to make decisions based on the overall situation. As this professor points out it is important to have free access to data and have software tools that allow for querying, correlating, and representing data in intuitive ways. That's not only true for global data, that hold true for your business data as well.

Imagine Google pickep up on that idea and gives us Google Global Stats on top of Google Earth.

Now, think about, what extensive data analysis can do for our business.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: Special thanks to James D. Brausch, who pointed to that online video on his Internet Business 101 Blog (http://www.jamesbrausch.com).