Archive for February, 2012

Home Business Musings – I don’t miss this boss at all.

February 23rd, 2012

I love owning a home based business. And I love working for myself. One reason is I only had few bosses that I really liked – the rest were idiots. Here’s a quick story about one of the idiots, and a sneaky little thing he once tried to pull:

Years ago, I worked as a tech support person for a customer service company. People would call with computer problems, which were almost always the result of their incompetence, and not the fault of the machine. So essentially, my job was to guide people through double clicking the mouse and such. It was mind-numbing work, to be honest.

One time, this lady called, and felt I didn’t help her enough. She wanted to back up a 150 MB file to one floppy disk (1.44 MB capacity.) I told her (nicely) it couldn’t be done. She got angry, and insisted I was wrong, and that her brother (a truck driver) told her it COULD be done,  since he’s a “computer genius” (to which I replied “guess he just drives trucks on the side, being a computer genius and all.”)

Anyway, she writes a nasty letter to my boss (perhaps my sarcasm didn’t go over too well.) My boss gets the letter and calls me into the office. He shuts the door, and says:

“This is unacceptable. One more, and you’re gone. Now, this is going in your file, as part of your PERMANENT RECORD. It will be there FOREVER. In fact, in thousands of years, when archaeologists find this place, they’ll know that Dan gave lousy customer service!!! BWAAAhahahahha”   

Ok, I’m making the archaeologists part up. But my point is this – my action was so bad, so unforgivably terrible that it could never be forgotten. Ever!!!!

Sigh… fair enough. I was rude to the angry computer illiterate lady. It’s one of the lessons you take away from customer service – you learn how not to be rude. I guess I was still learning at that point.

But I learned quick.

Two weeks later, I got not one, but TWO letters saying what exceptional service I gave. I felt really good, because I really made an effort and tried to be nicer and better help people, and obviously, my efforts were paying off.

My boss beamed at me as he showed me the letters. Then he did the most underhanded thing in the world – he handed them to me to keep.

At first, that didn’t seem so underhanded, but I then remembered being in that same chair two weeks earlier. Then I thought about my reputation with the archaeologists and such. So I asked him “wait – can’t THESE be a part of my permanent record too?”  

Turns out, that’s not the way it worked in his eyes - only BAD things go in the file forever. Good things are given to you. Because the boss knows you’ll lose them. It also makes it really easy to fire you when your file has nothing but negatives in it.

Not a day goes by that I’m not thrilled I work for myself. The above illustrates just one reason why.

Posted in Fun Stuff, Home Business / Entrepreneural Stuff, Misc / Personal Stuff | No Comments »

A quick story showing the power of website conversion

February 2nd, 2012

This is excerpted from Do the Web Write (which I wrote), and shows the awesome power of website conversion. Truthfully, raising your website conversion rate even one to two percentage points can be huge for your business.

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A client once came to me and wanted me to help him write a few Google Adword ads – he wanted to bring more traffic to his site and increase business (he sold financial products). A quick chat about his site revealed that he already had exceptional traffic – he was getting close to 1,000 visits a day from interested prospects (he advertised heavily on Google.)

He was getting perhaps 10 inquiries a day, meaning he was converting at 1%. His goal was to get 20 inquiries a day, so he figured that if he increased his advertising enough to bring in 2,000 interested prospects, he’d reach that goal.

I looked over his site and recognized right away that I could help him by not increasing advertising, but by increasing conversion – his site was not very well-written, nor was it user friendly. So I told him “why not try and get more out of the traffic you already have?” We talked, and he agreed with my assessment and hired me.

I wrote up a quick plan for what to do: the first step was to change the page order a little, and get the most important information clicked on first. The second was to change the copy. Under my direction, he had his web designer do the first part, and then I rewrote perhaps 4 pages of copy. Then he put up the new site and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long – from the very first day, with the same amount of traffic he always had, he started getting 30+ inquiries. This kept up consistently for weeks, and then months. All told, his new conversion rate jumped to 3.5% – I more than tripled his business.

But here’s the really neat part – had he upped his advertising to raise business, he’d be paying increased advertising fees month after month after month.  But because I instead used the traffic he currently had, he instead had a ZERO increase in advertising.

Now, some of you may be saying “That’s great, Dan, but he had to pay YOU”. And yes, this is true. But my total fee was less than one month of increased advertising. So after the first month, that part becomes irrelevant. But it gets better – based on how much he makes from a sale, I actually paid for myself in one week. After that, it was pure gravy.

And here’s ONE MORE “even neater” part: This new conversion rate (3.5%) will almost certainly hold true even if he DOES decide to eventually increase advertising (as he obviously was willing to do before I changed things.) So he could feasibly be getting 3.5% on 2,000 visits if he so chose. ANOTHER doubling of business.

Nice little story, huh? And trust me, things like this happen all the time. Conversion is that powerful.

*****

To buy a copy of Do the Web Write, visit its page here on my website.

Posted in Copywriting, General Marketing, Uncategorized, Websites and Web Marketing | No Comments »