How to Annoy Your Customers in Eight Easy Steps.
July 20, 2007
If you want to lose your customers, and stop them from spending another penny with you ever again, here’s a few great customer service tips to get you started.
Over promise and underdeliver. Tell them you’ll have the picture they ordered with them by tomorrow, even though you know you haven’t got a hope of getting it there, for three days. Of course - you could always tell them you’ll have it to them within three days then get it there within two, but that will impress them too much. You want to lose your customers right?
Tell them small lies, then they’ll either think you’re totally incompetent or they’ll never believe another word they say. For instance - if you’ve screwed up, and their order won’t reach them when it was supposed to - tell them the system wiped their details.  That way, they’ll either think you’re being dishonest, or your system is inadequate. Likewise if you’re a service business and you fail to turn up in time, the best way to lose your customer is to wait until they call then tell them you broke down on the way. Don’t whatever you do ring them to let them know you’re running late. Much better to let them think you’re vehicles are past their best - or that you tell lies.
Don’t put things right immediately when your customers have a complaint about your product or service. Better still, don’t put things right at all.  It’s best if your staff tell the customer they’ll have to speak to you when they have a complaint. Then just make sure you’re not available when they call, and never, under any circumstances, return their calls.
Whilst you’re busy ignoring their calls - it’s a good idea to send them a letter or card telling them how much you value their custom. Keep it brief and don’t mention the complaint in question. And whatever you do - never, under any circumstance address the letter to them personally though - always address it Dear Sir, or Madam, or To Whom it May Concern.
As soon as they’ve purchased something from you - send an offer for a 50% discount on the exact same product or service. That way, you’re sure to annoy them so much that they never buy from you again, because they know you’re willing to sell the very same item to everyone else for half what they paid.
To piss them off even more - don’t restrict yourself to letters - do send plenty of emails to, and it may also be worth getting a temp to make a few telesales calls to them to try to sell them more stuff.
If an unhappy customer does manage to catch up with you - never admit responsibility or try to put things right. Blame an employee, the Royal Mail or even God for their problem, and of course, if you weren’t the cause of the problem, you’re not going to put it right are you.
Why Would a Woman Choose a Plumbing Business?
July 20, 2007
This post is a response to a question from Ian from Phoenix from the Ashes, wanting to know more about Kwik Fix, my plumbing business and how we manage to compete against our rivals. It’s tough to answer in just one post, so I’ll try to write a few related posts over the next few days.
Why Would a Woman Choose a Plumbing Business?
Kwik Fix was only born in March this year. I’m not a plumber myself, which is a good thing, as I’ve realised from past experience that it’s often best if you don’t actually know how to do the technical work yourself. We didn’t launch the business because of all the rubbish in the media about a plumbing shortage. In fact, I personally believe the whole shortage of plumbers story has been overhyped by the expensive plumbing training schools that have sprung up all over the country. However, I do believe there is a lack of good plumbing services, and that’s why we decided to offer something better.
How Can a Start Up Beat the Competition?
We don’t so much try to beat the competition. Some of them are national companies with a mountain of cash to invest in their business, so we’re not even playing on the same pitch. Instead we try to be different to them. Basically, there are a few different types of competitor in the region, so we took all the things we didn’t like about them, and resolved to do it differently. Here’s a few of the things we’ve done so far:
Branding: From the beginning, we’ve had branded vehicles, uniforms, letterheads etc, and our plumbers carry ID cards. It creates a professional image, but very few tradespeople bother to do it.Â
Reliability: This is the main reason we went into plumbing. When we tried to get a plumber for customers in my last business we were lucky if they turned up at all, and if it was just a small job, you could forget it. We decided to offer a service where we could be at emergency plumbing jobs within 2 hours, and non emergencies within 2 days. We always give a definite appointment time, and make sure we turn up when we say we will.Â
USP: Finding a Unique Selling Proposition for your business (business jargon for doing something different to your competitors) is not easy, and finding something that your competitors can’t copy is even tougher. We looked to other industries for ideas and decided to go with “Two hours or it’s free” for plumbing emergencies. A couple of days later, we noticed that a large national competitor had copied us. The hilarious thing is that the competitor in question subcontracts out most of their plumbing work, and that weekend they called us because they’d been trying all day to get a subcontractor to go out to an emergency. We helped them out, but by the time they called us - they were already well over their two hour time limit.
There is absolutely no point in having a USP if you can’t live up to it, but even though our competitor couldn’t actually be there within 2 hours, I was still determined to find something that couldn’t be copied - so now we offer a free washer changing service to existing customers and newsletter subscribers. If this is copied, I’ll keep finding something better.
Customer Relationships: We keep in contact with our customers on a regular basis, but we’re not constantly trying to sell to them, we just make sure we remind them that we’re there - that way they’re more likely to use us again and recommend us to others, and it works. No matter how good a service is, if the business in question doesn’t keep in touch, it’s difficult to remember them. Also, it is a huge turn off when a company calls you constantly to try to sell you something, then they don’t even call you once afterwards to check you were happy with the service. Two companies have done that to me recently and it hasn’t inspired me to use them again.
What I Struggle With Most: The biggest problem I’ve faced is actually finding and recruiting the right plumbers. The problem is the industry is notorious for poor service standards, so most of the plumbers are only as good as those who have trained them. Many are resistant to change anyway, and not everyone is suited to working for a start up. There also seems to be some resentment because we’re not actually plumbers ourselves. We’re hoping to improve this situation by eventually training many of our plumbers from scratch.
Plans for the Future: We currently operate within Cumbria, but we plan to expand into other areas eventually and also offer additional services. I’m determined not to go against my principles, just to speed up our growth, so there’s no way we’ll be subcontracting work out. If we did that - we wouldn’t be a plumbing service, we’d just be middle men, and we’d lose control of quality.Â
As for additional services - we don’t want to copy some of our larger competitors. There seems to be so many national companies springing up now, who offer these jack of all trade services. They sound professional, because they have a lot of money to spend on marketing, but the reality is, that most of them are just call centres who pass work to random tradespeople all over the country.Â
Affiliate Reviews: Google Adsense
July 18, 2007
Here’s a review on Google Adsense for anyone thinking of starting an affiliate marketing business, or those who already have a website and would like to increase their earnings.
What is Google Adsense? It’s contextual pay per click advertising.  The webmaster puts Google Adsense on his/her site and Google displays adverts that match the site content.
How much can you make from Google Adsense? This will vary depending on your website content and the number of people who visit your website, and the amount per click that the particular Google Adwords publisher is paying. My earnings per click vary a lot from several dollars per click – to the worst – only a measly 5 cents per click on a new blog.
Some people say that Adsense doesn’t pay as well as other affiliate programs.  For example John Chow mentioned recently that Adsense is paying him not much more than $800 dollars per month on a website which earns him in excess of $10,000 per month.  Others, including as Darren Rowse of Problogger claims that Google Adsense is a big moneyspinner for him. Tim Carter of Ask the Builder earns an impressive $30,000 a month from Google Adsense.
Is Google Adsense easy to set up? Yes – even for the most technically challenged, Adsense is easy to set up.  It’s just a matter of choosing the colours you want for your site and highlighting and copying the code.  Choosing whereabouts on your site to place Google Adsense involves a bit of trial and error, but Google have some great tips to help you out on the Adsense site. What are the Pros and Cons of Google Adsense?Â
Advantages:  Easy to set up, can be used on a free website or blog unlike many other affiliate programs, varying ads without having to change anything yourself, can be a huge money maker once you’ve built up a reasonable amount of traffic to your site.
Disadvantages:  Takes visitors away from your site – once they click on your Adsense ad they’re taken to the advertisers website; not as lucrative as many other affiliate programs; Google have strict Adsense rules and some claim that they have been banned from the Adsense affiliate program without explanation.
Do You Use Google Adsense?  I use Google Adsense on a few sites – even on our local Kwik Fix plumbing website.  We get traffic there from all over the world, and although we intend to expand our services and site offerings we only offer plumbing services in our local area for now, so for us, this is a great way to make additional income. Â
To me, Google Adsense is a great way to make additional income for your website, but as with any other affiliate program, it should not be relied upon as your only source of website income.
I don’t worry too much about Google Adsense taking visitors away from my sites, as they have to leave at some point – nobody is going to stay on your website for ever, so you may as well make a bit of money through them leaving.
To conclude, I would recommend the Google Adsense affiliate program to anyone wanting to make a bit of extra money from a website and I would advise Adsense users not to get discouraged to begin with.  Your earnings may be low initially, particularly if your website has a low amount of traffic, but it’s exciting to see the money you make from Adsense increase rapidly, and very little effort is required once you’ve set it up.
Tips to Make Money Online as a Writer
July 18, 2007
Do you want to make money online as a writer? Non fiction writing can be an extremely lucrative business, if you work hard at it, and online writing is the easiest way for a beginning writer to get a break.  Althought the money may not be great, in comparison to writing for offline publications, online writing can open the door to many more lucrative opportunities. Just be sure to follow these tips to avoid the mistakes that potential online writers make.Â
Do provide clips of previous work, or work samples. I have received elance bids from people with no samples of their writing at all. That tells me that they have probably never written anything worth putting on my website.
Make sure your writing samples are free of typos and gramatically errors. It’s easy to run the spelling and grammar check on Microsoft Word, but you would be surprised at the number of samples I have received that are riddled with errors. If you struggle with grammar read the writer’s bible.
Do expect to do your own research.  I recently received an elance bid, which said that the writer was able to do bid a lower amount of money because I would be doing the research for them. Research can often be the most time consuming aspect of online content writing, and if I was going to do the research for the writer, I might as well write the content myself.
Sign up with Elance to bid on writing jobs. Also, send queries to sites you would like to write for and join Writers Market to find new opportunities. Don’t just dash off a quick email - or worse still, send a mass email to various webmasters. Plan your query carefully, and make it compelling enough that your chosen webmaster will want to read more of your work.
Don’t use duplicate content. Whatever you do, if you use a website to showcase samples of your work, don’t include content that you’ve written for other people’s sites. If you do this, both your site, and the site in question could be penalised for duplicate content. Instead, use unpublished samples of your work and provide links to pieces you’ve written on other sites.
Consider writing your first few articles free of charge. This will not only give you experience, it will also enable you to build up a portfolio of clips to show potential webmasters. Many writers argue that you should never work for free, and I don’t agree with them. Good writing takes a long time to learn, and professional writers write every day anyway, so doing a few free jobs will help you build up a decent portfolio and give you plenty of writing practise at the same time.
Don’t churn out poor quality work. Generally, you will not make as much money writing online content as you would writing for offline publications, but it is a great way to get your foot in the door. Most webmasters won’t be as fussy as magazine editors, so you have a greater chance of having your work accepted. However, this is not an excuse to submit shoddy work. Your articles could be searchable online forever, and if you have poor work in circulation this could hinder your chances of writing for the more lucrative print publications in the future.
Choose a niche and try to get as much experience writing in that niche as you can, before branching out into other writing topics. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it will save you time on research, as you will be able to use the same research materials and sources for many articles. Secondly it will help establish you as an expert in your field, ensuring that you not get more lucrative writing work in the future, and you chances of having a book published at a later date will be much greater.
Make sure you take time to learn your craft. Consider taking a writing course, and read several of the excellent books available on Freelance Writing, including these ones:
Six Figure Freelancing
Damn! Why Didn’t I Write That
Writers Digest Guide to Making Money Freelance Writing
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