Tips For Managing Upset Customers

One of the biggest keys to success in your business will be making sure that you know how to manage customers who are upset, or who have a complaint about the way they have been handled by you, your employees, or your company.

When an upset customer has a legitimate complaint, they can ruin a lot of business for you if they share their complaints with others, but when you are able to fix a situation with an upset customer, they will often be so impressed with the way you handled things that they will end up sending more customers your way!

Regardless of whether you feel their complaint is legitimate or not, the first thing you need to do is to acknowledge the problem; when you acknowledge that their complaint and convey that you understand the complaint, you will be on the right path to making the situation better.

Secondly, you should start taking steps to resolve the problem - but the mistake that many people make when trying to resolve a problem with a customer is that they allow the customer to dictate the terms of the resolution. It can be difficult to maintain the balance between keeping the power in your hands and still being helpful, but this is an importance balance to maintain - otherwise, you may end up with a customer who is not satisfied no matter what you do.

Finally, it is important for you to recognize the fact that some customers actually will not be satisfied no matter what you do; these are the customers who tend to complain with every company they deal with, and the best way to deal with such customers is to do the best you can and then send them on their way!

Managing upset customers is not always easy, but it is one of the most important aspects of keeping your business in good shape - and when you can start to do this effectively, you will maximize the positive news that customers spread about your company.

Tips For Making Money By Shopping At Garage Sales

When you start to keep your eyes open for opportunities to make money, you begin to realize that these opportunities exist in great abundance. And selling used items online is certainly at the top of the list when it comes to big, easy, profitable ways to make a bit of extra money. And while you might not have piles of useful used items laying around your own house, you can usually find great stuff for sale by others! As you start to frequent the garage sales and yard sales in your city or town, you will find that lots of items that would be great for eBay are being sold for "get rid of it" prices.

When it comes to shopping at garage sales to make some extra money, the first key is to start with a small-scale operation. Your eBay seller rating is important, so if you start out selling a lot of little items, you will be able to build a solid eBay seller rating early on. The optimal goal would be to make only a single, small investment in "product," and to let this investment pay itself back, after which you can use the money to continue buying new items. Start with about $50, buying lots of smaller items; you can double or triple this money, pay your investment back to yourself, and then use only this money for your garage sale shopping from that point forward!

After you have established your seller rating and begun to pile up a little reservoir of money, you should start to look for some items you can sell for a higher price. But remember, just because you think something will sell for good money does not necessarily mean it will; you need to do your research first. Instead of being reactive in your garage sale shopping, learn to be proactive, knowing what you are looking for even before you head out there.

Finding items that others want and making these items available for auction is really all there is to making money on eBay. And once your eye becomes practiced at spotting items that other people will want, you can start to seriously grow that small investment!

Bringing New Customers To Your Business

If you want your business to stay alive, the most important thing for you to realize is that 90 percent of your business is likely to come from ten percent of your customers, and because of this, you will want to do everything you can to show your current customers that you care about them and are loyal to them, as this will keep them around for the long run - but if keeping your current customers is the most important thing to keeping your business alive, the next most important thing is that you know how to bring new customers your way as well.

One of the best ways to bring new customers your way is to offer deals that will get these customers in the store; when you offer a great deal - running some sort of promotion for a few days or a week - you will get a lot of new people milling about in your store, and even though not all of them will become long-term customers, many of them will!

The way you go about advertising will also be a big part of attracting new customers your way; when you advertise, the biggest thing of all will be that you get the name of your business in the heads of potential customers, as planting your name in their head will make it that much more likely in the long run that they will turn to you when they need whatever it is that you are selling or providing!

And in the same vein as "keeping your current customers happy," you should realize that the greatest advertisement of all is word of mouth; when you keep your current crop of customers happy, they are far more likely to say good things about your company to everyone they know - and these people to whom they talk about your company will naturally be that much more likely to visit you down the road.

When it comes to attracting new customers to your business, there is no perfect formula, but when you follow these tips, you will be on the right path - which will place you on the right path for continued success!

Starting Out In Internet Marketing - The Basics

by: Mark Johnson

The most important aspect before you start out in internet marketing is to research the market place. This would include gathering information about your future competitors, the products they are selling or promoting, how they sell and promote and how effective are they. The biggest mistake that a lot of people make is to jump straight in and go down the affiliate marketing route. Most people will just try and post affiliate links on a variety of social media networking sites hoping that they will get a sale. Do not do this, it will not work.

Personal branding is key to your success in internet marketing. People do business with people and people do business with people that understand. So, first of all build a strong brand around the most important part of your business which is you! It does not really matter what you are selling or promoting, the fact is that people will not buy from you unless they trust you. The real value is in the brand and that value is you.

So, after you have found the right products to sell or promote you need to build a personally branded web site which will have personal information about you and the product or service you are promoting. Once you have done this you will find that it will be a lot easier to promote your personal web site or web sites instead of just promoting the product.

After setting up your personal bio sites and lead capture pages, you now need to think of how you can effectively drive traffic to these sites. Without traffic you will not generate any sales, so it is extremely important to use several methods available to you. These will include article marketing, video marketing and social networking.

Article marketing is extremely effective. There are numerous article writing portals available on the internet that you can join for free. As soon as you have written a quality article you can then post these articles and include back links to your web sites. With a few rich keywords you will be able to drive laser targeted traffic to your web site or lead capture pages. The more back links you get will increase your page ranking on all the major search engines and more traffic generated will undoubtedly increase sales.

Video marketing is becoming more and more dominant in advertising your business or product. The days of the long sales letter are nearly over, so marketing yourself effectively by this medium is very important. The videos you produce do not need to be a work of art or particularly very long. A short three to five minute presentation to get the message across to your audience is ample. Once you have produced the video content, these can then be submitted to video hosting web sites where you can again include back links in your member profile.

Social networking is growing at an incredible pace. The top social networking site now has over 400 million members. Believe it or not, you can generate an amazing amount of traffic using these sites and it is fun too. You can include back links to your sites in your member profile.

It all sounds too easy, but these are fundamental basics for starting out in Internet Marketing.

Mark Johnson, Internet Marketer, Business Coach and Wealth Guru.
"Empowering You For Online Success"
http://wealthcache.co.uk

Copywrite Mark Johnson 2010

Tips For Gaining The Respect Of Your Employees

It is easy to look at everything on paper when you are running a business - determining all the things you need to do in order to achieve success in a theoretical sense - but this approach can lead to a sort of nearsightedness that causes the business itself to fail (even though everything "on paper" looks right), and one of the main reasons that this can end up being the case is because looking at things on paper can cause you to forget about the people involved; if you want to achieve success with your business, it will be absolutely vital that you understand how to first gain the respect of your employees.

One mistake that a lot of small business owners make is that they try to be friends with their employees, assuming that if they joke around with them and are friendly, these employees will work hard out of a relative sense of duty, but this rarely ends up being a successful approach; if you want your employees to respect you, you will need to start out by establishing authority, even when this is difficult to do.

After you have begun to establish authority - setting yourself up as the "boss," and making it clear that work comes first - you can move onto the next step of being friendly with your employees, even being willing to joke around and have fun with them; at the same time, however, you will need to realize that there is a certain point of "true friendship" that you may never be able to achieve with your employees, as you will need to keep a certain measure of space between them and you in order to maintain a sense of "respect."

And of course, observing the proverbial "golden rule" of 'doing unto others as you would have them do unto you' will be important; at all times, treat your employees with respect - never viewing them as a means to an end, but rather, viewing them (and treating them) as valuable assets - and they will return this attitude to you.

There is plenty more that goes into the success of a business than just what is seen on paper - and when you learn to gain the respect of your employees, you will be one step nearer to this success.