Business Alone

One of the major challenges and struggles of most beginning small business owners is grasping and understanding what is going to be required to stay on top of the company's financial position.

It would seem critical to me that a solid financial management system be put into place prior to anyone beginning business operations.

Now "solid" doesn't necessarily mean expensive or overly comprehensive or complicated.

Small online businesses don't need to have the level of sophistication in a management system that might be found in a large corporation.

What is needed, though, is a management system that meets the needs of the business owner, is not too complex as to be unfriendly, and one that will allow for some scaling as the business grows through the coming years.

I recently came across some information that should be of interest to all solo Internet business owners.

It was entitled: "Search Engine Marketing: Search Users and Usage"

It was authored by David Hallerman, Senior Analyst at eMarketer. I would encourage you to get the whole report and study it. I hope the link is still live when you read this. Here it is:

http://www.emarketer.com/Products/Products.aspx

I was especially intrigued with the satisfaction survey that was offered as it gives you a feel for how users or consumers view the major search engines as well as the field of Internet marketing and advertising.

You should be able to gain your own "take aways" from what the articles describes.

Call it what you will ... keeping the books, financial management, accounting, doing your taxes, crunching the numbers and on and on ...

Many have called it names that I won't repeat here!

No business activity strikes fear or disdain in the hearts of small business owners like this one!

If you're going to be in business, you must accept the duty and responsibility of doing financial management - it "goes with the territory!"

Of course, some will have the means to outsource as many accounting functions as possible. Doing so may be the best alternative for solo business owners that are not adept at tracking and recording details.

However, even if outsourced, accounting requires the discipline of keeping and recording income and expenses on a daily basis ... not something that many folks are used to doing in their civilian lives.

It's a nasty name, "swipe files," but it's an idea you should implement immediately if you haven't already gotten yours started!

If you're like me, you run across great little ideas and tidbits on the Internet every day.

But if you don't record that idea, or web site, or reference, or "how to" hint for later recall, you will have forgotten that even existed within a day or two.

If you've been involved in copywriting, direct ad creation, web site development, graphics creation, email headlining, and any number of other online business tasks, you've probably heard the term "swipe files."

That's kind of a nasty or unpleasant term, but the concept is smart and the results of you building such files will be significant as you venture into your new information business.

If you don't know what a "swipe file" is, or you're not convinced you need one (or several), read on.

Creating a new business is like preparing for a wedding: there are a thousand details that must be planned and executed.

It's easy to overlook some of the steps that are important to a business - especially when they are often perceived as being distasteful, expensive, and sometimes purely nonsense.

So it is with securing the necessary permits and licenses to make your business legal, keep you out of hot water, and legitimize your company.

If you are serious about starting a small solo business, there is no greater lesson to learn than how to apply the principle of maximum leverage to everything you do in your business operation.

Your survival, and ultimately your success, will hinge on how well you grasp the concept and make it your slave.

It's a difficult lesson for many, partly because most of us rarely practice applying leverage in our own personal lives. We tend to get complacent and accept low output and/or maintaining the status quo as our daily M.O.

I know, I know, we all use the term freely and without much thought.

But it really is wrong. A virtual business can't have assets, employees, products and customers.

The term "virtual" means a realistic simulation; of such effect that something appears to be real even though it's not.

Well let me tell you, Internet business is the real thing. It is a different kind of business because of the way it's operated and delivered; but it is as real, legal, and legitimate as any other physical business.

Digital information is not unlike written information, except that it exists in the form of little data bits that consist of "1s" and "0s."

Every character and many symbols that we use in our language can be represented "digitally" and transferred electronically over wires and cables and even through the air waves.

Those characters are developed or "written" in software programs like MS Word and others but are "saved" as digital files which can then be transferred to other media and output types.

First, think for a moment about a traditional physical business.

Choose any store down the street you like or think about your favorite shop at the neighborhood mall.

Undoubtedly, it will have walls, a roof, carpet, employees, opening and closing times, products on the shelf (or some type of service that can be purchased), a cash register, counters, aisles, lights, bathrooms, advertising in the window, dedicated or shared parking outside, and many other things that all businesses have . . . or do they?

Try to imagine an alternative type of store with a single owner but no employees, no walls, no roof, no carpet, no bathrooms, no cash register, no counters, no aisles, no lights or other physical attributes.

There is a critical business principle that you need to learn and implement in your solo Internet business that will serve you extremely well. In all digital businesses it will become either an invaluable friend or a nightmare of an enemy.

Some stay in business for years and spend a lot of valuable daily time on managing this area of their business, while others adapt and implement an automated system that does almost all of the manual work for them.

I'm talking about implementing and operating a system of records and data keeping that will aid you in maintaining your business and your customers.

Businesses have to communicate in a variety of ways, but I've noticed that many of the online businesses (that I assume are run by solo owners) these days provide no address or telephone number for the company.

I am guessing that the business owners of these web sites have full time employment away from home and just figure that since they can't be around to answer the phone, it's better to just not list a number.

I won't deal with businesses that don't allow contact. Do you?

Depending upon the type of solo business you operate, and the needs that your business has to communicate with the "outside" world, you may want to consider setting up a private area on your company site.

I'm not talking about creating a forum, chat room, or discussion board as is commonly done among niche community web sites.

I'm not talking about a private membership site either. In both these models, your web site is open to the public and you attempt to recruit members (paying or otherwise) that have to identify themselves before entering by submitting a user name and password.

In a lot of online business situations, email is the lifeline between you and your customers and suppliers.

You don't have face-to-face contact and you may never converse over the phone.

Since your emails are so important, so critical to your communication with both customers and vendors in the business world, it is very smart to pay particular attention to both the substance and presentation of your emails.

All of us get in the habit of becoming lax in the business "chores" that are commonplace and routine. Email is no different.

Have you ever noticed a shopping cart full of groceries sitting next to the checkout stand at the supermarket?

I've seen it happen a few times and usually figured that someone simply left their wallet or purse at home and would be back soon to claim their abandoned goods.

It's not a big problem since most stores are accommodating about the oversight.

But online, shopping cart abandonment is a huge problem! No one really knows the extent of this loss to e-tailers, but I have seen some estimates that suggest fifty percent or more of all online sales processes are never completed.

The ways an auto responder can be employed to automate your business tasks are many. Here are just a few of the typical business uses of an auto responder:

- if an email address is no longer valid, a message can be sent from the mail server that the email is now "undeliverable,"

- if the business changes its email address or URL, a new forwarding address can be sent to those that send mail to the old address,

- if you go on vacation or are otherwise unavailable for a time, your auto responder can alert customers to your absence and when you'll return,

Every new technology faces the same uphill battle when it comes to public acceptance and dispelling people's fears that something bad will happen to them as a result of some unknown or unanticipated problem.

Many people say they are hesitant to make a purchase online because the either fear the process or they fear that their money will be lost forever because the seller will "take the money and run."

I'm too young to remember the early days of inventions like the car, the radio, and the telephone, but there were great fears among the public about what these new devices would do to society.

Many people were slow to adopt and embrace change. It wasn't until they actually saw and understood the advantages and noticed other folks were using the inventions without harm that they decided to give them a try.

Here are a few additional suggestions of practical things you can do in your business to gain the trust of your prospects by calming their fear of purchasing on the Internet and dealing with an unknown company:

6. Be very clear and precise about what the customer is getting with his purchase. Don't leave anything unclear or in doubt. If anything, be overly specific and descriptive so the customer doesn't wonder what his dollars are actually purchasing.

7. Make the actual buying process as easy, straightforward, and intuitive as possible. Don't ask for more personal information than is necessary. Now is not the time for a customer survey. Explain each step you ask the customer to take. If the buyer is going to be taken away from your web site (for instance, to have a credit card transaction approved), explain to him why he is leaving the site and how he will be returned automatically.

The solo business owner has many tools and resources at his disposal that can leverage his time and automate his business so that he can accomplish much more by himself than would ever have been possible prior to the Internet.

Most business owners that utilize email will tell you that its low cost and "free" fast delivery are the main advantages of using it. But in my mind, at least, there are some other very important reasons why email is the communication medium of choice for the solo business owner.

If you are not using of these email advantages, why not give them a try? They may even be more important resources for your business than the low cost of contacting your customers and prospects.

Many will say that the wealth of resources we have in the United States has allowed this country to step to the forefront of new product development.

They speak of the financial, educational, and natural resources found in the U.S. in abundance as the reason for our world leadership.

When you think about the young age of this country (230 years) compared to other geographically large countries throughout the world, it's quite amazing that the U.S. has taken such a leadership role.

According to a recently released study, over 50 percent of U.S. annual GDP growth (gross domestic product) can be attributed to increases in our innovation.

We've all heard the "knock" about web surfers - they stay at a site long enough to quickly glance or skim the home page "above the fold" and they're gone in seconds.

Is it five seconds, seven seconds, twelve seconds? Who knows?

The point is, the web site owner is granted only so much of the surfer's time online and he'd better make a good impression during that time or the prospect will most likely never return.

Of course there are a lot of elements to making a good web site impression. I'm only going to talk about one small piece of that puzzle right now: page load time.

The web site owner is granted only so much of the surfer's time online and he'd better make a good impression during that short time or the prospect will most likely move on to the next site on his list never to return.

Of course there are a lot of elements to making a good web site impression. In this installment we're only talking about one small piece of that puzzle right now: page load time.

That's the length of time, usually measured in seconds, from the instant a viewer clicks on his mouse to head to a particular web site until the point at which that web page is fully loaded in the viewer's browser.

Just a few years ago, solo business owners took advantage of the fact that they could market their goods and services online all across the continent.

They lauded the fact that a small time business owner could now effectively compete with other businesses around the country because the Internet removed their geographic boundaries.

But in today's economy, such thinking limits the opportunities you have coming at you from all around the world. Because Internet business is still in its infancy, it's not too late to at least start thinking about gearing up for global business, even if you're just a Lone Wolf working from home.

I was asked this simple question in a roundtable discussion of business owners recently, and to my utter surprise, a very lively dialogue carried on into the night as the group of us debated the challenges and opportunities that affect small business today in comparison with "the way it used to be" just 10-15 years ago.

My opinion, and that of several others that specialize in online business, was that indeed, small business has changed dramatically for those that have discovered and subsequently embraced the new technologies that empower the small business owner.

I've often asked myself this question. It seems that when I was younger no one talked about individuals owing and operating a business without employees to help share in the work.

Here's what I've come to conclude: solo business is possible today because of the tools and resources we all have at our disposal to leverage the workings of the business.

Said another way: The business owner of today can leverage his personal time and effort in running the business (through automation of tasks) such that, by himself, he can accomplish the cumulative tasks of all the other business employees of yesterday.

Did you know there are ways to see what buyers are looking for at any given time online?

The information is free. Smart marketers and product developers ought to keep an eye on the buying public and their wants. Understanding "demand" is one of the pillars of Internet marketing and product creation.

CNET's Download.com is a library of free and free-to-try software programs and applications for Windows, Macintosh, and handheld devices. It began 10 years ago with 3,000 titles and today has over 30,000 potential downloads.

The folks over at the Better Business Bureau commissioned a study in 2007 of the adult online shopper's most important issues.

It seems that approximately 60% of those surveyed are primarily concerned about two things: (1) that their personal information could be stolen and sold online or reused by someone else, and (2) that their credit card information could be hijacked by some unscrupulous operator (59%).

Often a web site privacy policy is overlooked, thrown together in haste, or altogether omitted as the site owner is anxious to move on to more glamorous and creative aspects of developing a business home on the Internet.

Privacy policies are sometimes akin to the "fine print" of most lengthy legal documents - something to be tolerated and considered, but probably there only in the extreme case that the user really cares about such things.

I believe, strongly, that the site's privacy policy is very important and something that can greatly enhance the visitor's sense that the site owner really can be trusted - that he/she really does care about the confidentiality of the visitor's personal information.

The type of fraud I'm referring to is credit card or payment fraud as opposed to things like embezzling, tax evasion, or product scams.

The Internet presents a special environment for payment fraud because transactions take place all over the globe often without one or even two parties being physically present to inspect or insure that everything happens as it should.

Anonymity enables dishonest people to become bold and brazen.

Credit card numbers and individual identities are stolen everyday by the unscrupulous.

Web sites and shopping carts are hacked in every industry.

Abuse of the payment system is commonplace nowadays.

I know there has been a lot written about Google's Page Rank "rating" system. Yet most folks I speak with don't really know what it is, how to increase the rank for your web site, and whether or not page rank (we'll call it "PR") really is that important to your web site and business or not.

The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PR process has been patented by them. However, the patent is actually assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University.

The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million according to Wikipedia.

Here is Google's own explanation (or definition) of Page Rank:

I found a great online resource that I'd like to share with you. It's an online service that "grades" your web site.

It can be used as a tool that will help you to see and understand what deficiencies your site may have. Of course, the idea is to then work on fixing those details.

The site allows you to type in your URL (like "www.mydomain.com"), press a button, and a few seconds later your grade pops up. The grade is a number between 1 and 100.

Just like a test in school, the higher your grade, the more your web site conforms to all the things that make a web site good. To see all the variables that are tested, you will need to go to the web site itself.

I just graded my web site at Business Alone and was given an "89." I'm doing OK, I suppose, but there is certainly room for improvement.

When it comes right down to brass tacks, I would say every Internet business owner should consider herself or himself an information publisher.

It seems to me that all business web site owners need to be publishers of:
a) website information;
b) sales letter copy;
c) site content in the chosen niche;
d) products in digital or hard copy form;
e) blog content;
f) email communications;
g) customer service responses;
h) advertising / marketing copy;
i) articles and press releases;
j) probably other things I'm forgetting about ...

My point is, whether you consider yourself to be an info marketer or not, you really need to pay close attention to your publishing (i.e. putting it out on the net or in emails) and how it can affect your overall business.

There are several usability issues, methods, and procedures that you need to consider when designing and developing new business web sites, regardless if you hire a professional for the design or attempt to build the site yourself.

Most important are issues relating to ’upfront’ decisions such as setting clear and concise goals for your web site, determining a professional and smart set of user requirements, ensuring that the new site meets user’s expectations, setting usability goals, and providing useful content within the niche you've chosen.

To ensure the best possible outcome, designers should consider a full range of user interface issues, and work to create a site that enables the best possible user experience.

The latest research suggests that the best way to begin the construction of a web site is to have many different people propose design solutions (parallel design), and then to follow up using an iterative design approach.

This requires conducting the appropriate usability tests and using the findings to make changes to the Web site.

Web sites should be designed to facilitate and encourage efficient and effective human-computer interactions.

Designers should make every attempt to reduce the user’s workload by taking advantage of the computer’s capabilities. Your web site prospects will make the best use of you site when information is displayed in a directly usable format and content organization is highly intuitive.

Prospects also benefit from task sequences that are consistent with how they typically do their work, that do not require them to remember information for more than a few seconds, that have terminology that is readily understandable, and that do not overload them with information.

Your site visitors should not be required to wait for more than a few seconds for a page to load, and while waiting, they should be supplied with appropriate feedback. Prospects should be easily able to print information.

In addition, designers should never ‘push’ unsolicited windows or graphics to users.