Service

How To Handle Refunders

Just read a thread talking about a guy who launched a product. He got a sale and within 30 minutes the buyer asked for a refund. I’m sure he made more sales but this topic is about refunds. One of his threadsters (think I just invented a word!) called the refunders “scum”. Calling refunders scum is a bit rich in my book. Sure it’s frustrating. You inwardly celebrate a sale and almost while you’re still punching the air, the refund request lands like a ships’ anchor on your joy. I’d guess that most refunds of easily consumed products like PDF’s… Read More »How To Handle Refunders

Beware: You May Get Slammed

The Internet is a funny place. People think they have license to do anything. Egos run rife. And ethical behaviour is often lacking.

Take a recent example.

I was surfing the web the other week and found a useful article. From reading that article I did a Google search and found the original article on a a great blog site. There were two articles that were great teaching tools so, rather than not attributing them as the original article failed to do, I included the article pretty much intact and quoted the source of the article with the link back to the original blog and article.

Compared to all the advice I receive (which is just steal the article and rewrite it a bit to make it your own) I believed it more ethical to attribute it.

So the owner of the original blog article leavesRead More »Beware: You May Get Slammed

Seagate in Australia

I’ve had a Seagate external hard disk drive for years and it still works well – the only problem I had was I accidentally threw out the power cable (doh!) and had great difficulty with the folk at Seagate to understand the product I had and whether they had a replacement cable.

Then I had a Maxtor One Touch III which still works fault-free today. I use it when I’m travelling to take a lot of my work files with me. It’s only 80gb (that was big when new!) but does the job.

Earlier this year I upgraded the external hard drive I use for backups to a 1TB Maxtor. And it’s already making a very sick sound. Searching the internet I decided to stop trying to make it work by hooking it up to other computers as this may be causing damage. So, in my travels IRead More »Seagate in Australia

Do You Know Your Target Market?

When I mentor new business start-ups, one thing always catches my attention. Newbies often know their product or service intimately. They usually recognise what they know and don’t know. What they normally ignore is whom they are selling to. If they do know whom they are selling to, often they’ve done no valid research on what that customer base needs or wants or prefers. Richard Branson gets the importance of this. He may not know his products or services deeply. He may nit know operationally how they run day-to-day. What he does though is to talk with end-users, customers, clients,… Read More »Do You Know Your Target Market?

Access Denied in Windows 7

Like a lot of people, I have found the security setting in Windows 7 incredibly frustrating. For example, I copied a lot of my data across to an external HDD to free up disk space and was always being told I had no permission to do anything with the files after that move. Each time I wanted to do something I had to go through the change ownership tedium each time.

Tons of posts abound about how to fix it but nothing worked – and I got nervous about downloading fix files and changing host files.

Then I learned one little trick in this post that made life a lot easier – tick the box that starts “replace” in the bottom left corner of the final screen. By doing that. you have permission for the entire folder. I kept changing permission for the folder to delete an old hotfixinstaller folder but it wouldRead More »Access Denied in Windows 7

The Customer is King

Seems not in the online world where ‘content is king’ resounds more strongly.

Had a great example of this recently.

I’m spending time with some young guns to learn more about internet marketing – there’s always something else to learn in this game. I’m paying a hundred bucks a month to access their knowledge, tools and lessons. So, as any customer of mine would expect, I’m expecting regular content and activity as promised in their marketing materials.

For ten days I’ve had nothing but sales letters from their autoresponder.

No updates to their site. No feedback from comments on the blog. No responses to questions. No new content. No feedback on ‘assignments’.

So I sent an email and queried this. For all I knew I may have been inadvertently disabled in their course system. I also pointed out it was a good lesson to learn – to keep in touch with your paying customers in termsRead More »The Customer is King