Business Alone

Today's solo business owners have an amazing array of tools at their disposal to share their story and their wares with customers compared to days bygone.

Now I'm not an expert in the use of this strategy by any means, but I'd like to mention to you one tool that is easy to put your hands on, and learn how to use, that will open the door to greater customer loyalty and put your web business in front of a growing audience.

I've always believed that business owners should stay on the leading edge of technology available to businesses in order to profit from new advances and efficiencies.

As a solo Internet home business owner you are most likely the webmaster of your own web site.

Unless you have turned that function over to someone else (like your girl friend, your 2nd cousin "Harry," or the six year old next door), you will be in charge of optimizing your site for key words, meta tags, and other little HTML goodies that tell the search engines what your site is all about.

Many of us are in business to make money (imagine that . . .) and we certainly don't want to spend time fiddling around with such trivial matters as web site coding and search engine optimization. Right?

In a previous post, we talked about what meta tags are whether they're important to the search engines. We're going to continue that discussion here and add a few other thoughts.

As the Internet has become more crowded with e-commerce sites, the race to attract traffic through the free search engines has greatly intensified.

In fact, today it's all-out war when it comes to competing for top billing: the rush to grab the very highest search engine rankings for competitive key words that drive tons of traffic to the winners.

Linking strategies for commercial web sites seem to be grabbing a lot of attention these days from marketing experts that claim in-bound links are critical to the search engine rankings.

There is a lot of on-going debate about just how important your links are to top rankings. I'm sure each of the top search engines has its own view of the subject. No doubt they give varying importance to this criterion.

Some claim also that the "page rank" (Google) or the importance of the site linking to your site also affects your search engine position.

But there are other reasons why you need links.

To tell you the truth, I'm having a hard time coming up with any reasons why you shouldn't absolutely consider having a forum at your site.

In the early Internet days folks would chat back and forth via email only. Some sites placed comment forms in strategic places around the site to encourage visitor input, but that communication was pretty much one way.

If the site owner wanted to answer a comment, it was back to the email station to shoot off a reply.

You will hear me very often say, "You are the business." The solo Internet business operator is often an individualist that would rather be creative, adventurous, and find his own way over joining the pack.

If you want to become such, you should execute your business as though it is an extension of yourself. Your company is built around the skills, knowledge, education and passion that make up your life.

So in terms of both subject matter, and executing the daily business operations, you are the business. Without you, the company is nothing.

Some business owners prefer to deal with problem customers by writing them off and shoving them out the door. They don't want or need to be bothered with further dealings or more headaches.

I think there is a better way, however, to attempt to appease and "soften" an irate customer.

Why not turn him 180 degrees around and convert him into one of your most loyal and valued customers?

You won't be 100 per cent successful with this strategy, but it will work often enough that you will soon understand the benefit to your business of this approach.

Often, new business owners figure the only way to increase sales is to put your product or service in front of more people.

Such a strategy usually means that you spend increasing amounts of money on advertising so you can extend your reach in to more and more markets.

Increasing sales by ramping up advertising is one way to pump up the bottom line. But there may be other more effective uses of your business operating budget.