Member You - Internet and Businesses Online

Aspects of a Seminar - Target Market
Determining your target market is a must! You must define who will come to your event and who will purchase your products. Your target market will make it easier to determine a theme, which is also very important, and help when deciding on speakers, location, etc… Who is your audience? What interest and/or problems do they have? You want to bring products and speakers that will help your audience. If you don’t, you will not have a successful event. And you will also have people very upset with you! Some areas to think about when determining your target audience follow: 1. Industry/Niche What industry are they in? What niche do they fill? How can I help them fulfill this niche and grow their business bigger and better? This determines a lot! This tells you what type of speakers you need (ie: real estate, internet marketers, counselors, women, men, etc…) 2. What does your market expect? What kind of service and/or follow-up do they expect? How high are their expectations concerning the quality of product they would buy? Do they expect customer service? (I would hope so ?) You want loyal customers, who return. Therefore, you need to provide what your market expects. Don’t bring in a real estate speaker to an internet marketing conference. Or vice versa. 3. General Questions: I have listed some general questions you should ask yourself when determining your target audience. These are questions that will help you see who your customers are. The first two I have listed are very important! They are the overview of what you must know! The other questions can help you get to the first two, if you are having trouble. • **Who needs to learn your topic?** • **Who can benefit from your topi

ch as Netbanx who don't require you to have a merchant account so set-up costs are kept to a minimum, but their individual transaction costs are higher, so for me at least, this was a false economy. I also chose not to accept American Express and Diners Club cards yet, as they need a separate merchant account to handle each of them.

Finding an Internet Merchant Account

This is no easy task, currently there's a serious lack of any specific hard facts and figures on the internet on this subject. There are also no up-to-date comparison tools or lists that I could find, this may well be because a bank's charges can often depend upon how much they're already making from you for other services. For instance, if you already have a loan from the same bank they may charge you less for each online transaction cost. Ecommerce forums were equally disappointing, I found scant accounts from individuals with any personal experience there. Even on the individual banks' websites finding costs and set-up fees is often impossible. In fact I resorted to phoning various departments of HSBC Bank over the course of a whole afternoon where none of the staff could tell me anything about their own merchant banking fees! Merchant banking it would seem is deeply stuck in the dark ages, so they're all more than keen to waste time and paper by sending you their glossy 200-page merchant account 'joining pack' in the post. On the last page in small type you will invariably find these illusively secret figures finally revealed. However, even this was a partial waste of time, as by the time the last 'pack' (of six) arrived two of the banks had already restructured their fees. I was still none the wiser.

Customer Service Is About Establishing And Building Relationships.
Any type of relationship can be fragile. Your new business can only succeed if those relationships are guarded, protected and nurtured. You do that by treating your clients as if they were cherished friends. When you call a friend you probably expect a call back within a reasonable time. Your client also expects that call within a reasonable time too. If you e-mail a question to your friend or family member don’t you expect an answer as soon as they can? Of course you do. Try to answer your e-mail within twenty four hours and sooner rather than later if you can. If you can’t do it yourself get a staff member to do it. Isn’t it true that you would prefer a personal response rather than a canned response like “thanks for contacting us?” Treat your clients as you would like to be treated. It’s common sense.When you have good news don’t you rush to call your friend and also like to be updated with your friend’s good news? I’m sure the answer is yes. So if you have good news let your clients know. They really want to hear about your new baby, moved into a new house, new puppy and all your other good news. People enjoy good news about people that they like.When you get on the phone and ask a question concerning your friend isn’t it true that you would expect him or her to answer without attitude, with respect, and a gentle manner. If you got rude answers from your friend I’m sure that you would be hurt, upset and disappointed and even angry with him or her. So assume that your client expects the same courtesy that you would give and expect from your friend.Other elements of good customer service are the many moments that you have to compromise in order to keep that client happy. If you want relationships to continue you have to sooth ruffled feathers sometimes which include

Unless you're an experience-hardened entrepreneur, fear of the unknown is always going to be one of the most stressful things about starting up any new business. And with the wealth of up-to-date information readily available over the internet these days you'd be pretty daft to look anywhere else. So when I set out on the road to eCommerce fame and fortune for the first time I thought it would be plain sailing, followed by canap?s and caviar, alas not quite. However, this account of my own journey to accepting online credit card payments should allow you to avoid the many pitfalls and quickly point you in the right direction.

My initial searches proved to be quite fruitful. If you're based in the UK and want to set up your own eCommerce website the general theory behind this is (sort of) straight forward. Here's the list of the essential processes broken down, in simple terms, to explain what's happening at each stage...

Shopping Cart eCommerce Software/3rd Party Service

This handles the various 'Buy' buttons on a site, and places items into the customer's shopping cart. When at the 'checkout' area of an online store, this is also used to gather the customer's name, billing address and credit card details etc, along with any items they've placed in the cart. The card details are then securely passed on to a payment services provider (see below). This can also be used to set up and automatically send out your company receipt to the customer, upon payment approval.

Payment Service Provider (also known as a 'Payment Gateway')

These people act as a middleman between the shopping cart software (see above) the customer's credit card issuer and the store owners Merchant Account (see below). Card details are checked for validity, encrypted and sent back and forth. If the transaction is approved the customer's shipping details and 'bought item' details are then decrypted and sent to the store owner for shipping to take place, and the customer will receive an automated receipt from the payment service provider.

Internet Merchant Account from an 'Acquiring Bank'

This is the service (offered by most high street banks) that actually carries out the customer's credit card processing and puts the money in your pocket. Simple in theory, but the longest and most expensive part to set up.

If you already have a 'Merchant Account' with an Acquiring Bank this will need to be changed over to an 'Internet Merchant Account' for any online transactions to take place, regardless of who the service provider is.

Okay that's all the theory out of the way. Of course you could avoid all this nonsense and save a lot of time and money by simply setting up a Paypal merchant accoun. Afterall, they now accept credit and debit cards without making your customers set up any sort of account with them. Unfortunately, Paypal still has a bit of an image problem (mainly due to it's Ebay roots). If you're selling home made mittens I'm sure this won't be a problem. But if like me, your potential customers are from other businesses, and you want to convey as professional an image as possible, it can send out the wrong sort of message. Also, in my experience, many businesses are notorious for regarding any 'new' payment methods with great suspicion, and many still find it hard to stop using chequebooks. However, I'm sure Paypal will be viewed differently in time, so to cover all eventualities, I chose to implement it on my own site in addition to the more traditional 'merchant account' method for accepting cards.

Finding a Shopping Cart

Beyond this first bit of research I was hoping to find forums full of real life accounts and experiences of the above mentioned services which would quickly point me in the direction of the best software available. On the subject of 'shopping carts' the problem seems to be one of volume. There are a lot of people recommending a lot of different products, so you end up not seeing the wood for the trees, and they range wildly in price. All the big names in this area are PC based, so if you own a mac you may need to also consider the extra cost of either buying a cheap PC for the job or, if you're pushed for space, Virtual PC emulation software.

I read a few times that ecommerce is in it's infancy, but after 2 weeks of studying these "easy" software solutions I was frankly shocked at how dismal these offerings are for normal people like me. Most of them expect you to know some sort of programming language, PHP scripting and spreadsheet inputting. Now I regard myself as being above average when it comes to most things technical, but in this particular area I was quickly left feeling like the school dunce. My personal feeling is that if I've just spent ?300 on a piece of eCommerce software why on earth do I need to know anything about any of these areas, surely that's what the shopping cart software is for? In addition to this my personal experience showed that many are firmly aimed at the US market and are often incompatible with UK payment service providers. Not surprisingly, I had to grudgingly give up on this area of research and spent a week worrying about the future of my site.

All was not lost however. There is an alternative to becoming one of the heavy-metal t-shirt wearing brigade and emerging yourself in the joys of Perl scripting. Third party providers offer 'Remotely Hosted Shopping Cart Software' which again varies enormously in price and also in how the costs are structured. To cut a long story short I found www.mals-e.com recommended enough times to catch my eye which has an easy to use 'admin page' system. After you sign up you get issued with a small personalised line of code which you add to the HTML of all your 'buy' buttons (which can be either text hyperlinks or images of your choosing). Log in, and start customising the comprehensive list of admin settings (accepted currencies, taxes, postage etc, etc) that's about it really. It's simply priced too at ?13.60 ($24) for 3 months or ?49 ($86.40) for 12 months service. Apart from the reasonable price, the ability to also use the service for free if you only want to implement Paypal on your site is a great way of testing the service first before you pay for the credit card accepting 'Premium' service. And so far I have to say I've been very happy with the way it works.

Finding a Payment Service Provider

If I want to find the cheapest electricity supplier, the cheapest mobile phone contract, or buy the cheapest pair of tartan slippers for Father Day there are loads of websites that will compare these things at the touch of a button. And it's pretty simple business sense that in order to remain competitive your overheads should be kept as low as possible without quality of service suffering. With this in mind my first port of call was the Business Link's 'product and cost comparison service' at www.electronic-payments.co.uk (click on the 'Use The Tool' button) which aims to compare the services and costs of various Payment Service Providers.

Initially you're put through the annoying and totally unnecessary hassle of registering with the site. After this dodgy start you are presented with a simple form asking you to put in 3 figures, 'annual turnover' (actual or estimated), 'average online transaction value', and your 'business borrowing/overdraft rate'. All sensible stuff. From there another 4 pages of forms come up 'Transaction Bands', 'Acquiring Costs', 'Payment Method Split' and 'Compatibility' where you can enter more detailed information as you feel necessary before finally being presented with your personalised results. Overall the experience is a bit clunky in places but if you bear with it you find it's a fairly invaluable service.

The cheapest/best 'Payment Service Provider' I found at the time was www.secpay.com. They deal with 10 of the 13 available Acquiring Banks in the UK and (most importantly) their system is compatible with mals-e.com mentioned above. Charges are as follows: an initial ?50 set-up fee (?58.75 with VAT) and ?10 per month thereafter (?11.75 with VAT). Each transaction is charged at either 1.9% or 39p of the sale price (the choice is yours), and the money from the customer will generally take 2-3 days to appear in your business bank account (which is a lot quicker than some). Apparently they also offer an online 'virtual' swipe card facility for telephone orders at no extra charge, but I have yet to test this out myself.

I should also point out that there are a small number of operators such as Netbanx who don't require you to have a merchant account so set-up costs are kept to a minimum, but their individual transaction costs are higher, so for me at least, this was a false economy. I also chose not to accept American Express and Diners Club cards yet, as they need a separate merchant account to handle each of them.

Finding an Internet Merchant Account

My First Online Business, Travel Plan Online.Com
Well, I felt that quality over anything else should lead to success so I made sure everything on my site worked properly and established connections with reputable people to help guide me through this learning experience. Looking at the competition (Orbitz, Travelocity, Cheaptickets,etc), I felt that I would be lucky to scratch even a few sales. Interestingly, when I checked prices I found that I actually compete very well. My confidence grew and so my journey began.(Free Advertising,learning experiences) Ok, well this one is interesting because I've had mixed results from many attempts at growing my business. The first thing I tried was free advertising. I filled out countless classifieds adds over a period of several days and many, many hours. I do not think that was incredibly effective, so I turned to the FFA sites. I submitted to thousands of FFA sites, I found free link sites, free link dumps. Anywhere I could post my link I did, and I still do. This strategy has, if nothing else at leasted boosted my confidence, but produced few visitors to my website.(Continued strategies of Free Advertising) Now I was ready to submit to various search engines. This seemed endless and boring. I submitted by hand to many search engines, indexes, etc, but this job seemed endless because it seems no matter how many search engines I can submit to, I can still find more to submit too....I thought well I must submit to the most popular ones, Yahoo, Google, etc., so I did. This has helped and I've also learned that international search engine submissions are also an excellent avenue to go down.(Free Advertising/Emailing) (Emailing co-workers, people I knew, or had some contact with) Being a teacher it was relatively easy to email other teachers about my business. I emailed around 600 t

>This is the service (offered by most high street banks) that actually carries out the customer's credit card processing and puts the money in your pocket. Simple in theory, but the longest and most expensive part to set up.

Finding a Shopping Cart

Finding a Payment Service Provider

Finding an Internet Merchant Account

Small Business Start-Up: Easy as A-R-T
Starting a small business can be challenging, but it's easy to do if you look at the process as an art.The word art, according to Webster's Dictionary, is a "skill acquired by experience, study, or observation...a branch of learning...the conscious use of skill and creative imagination esp. in the production of aesthetic objects."It is an act of creation--the physical production of a visualized work, or the process of achieving a desired outcome. Like composing a symphony, or painting a portrait, or baking a cake, starting and running your business requires the same combination of Action, Resources, and Timing, or ART.Similar to the artist who sculpts a statue or writes a novel (action) using chisels or pen and paper (resources) in a specific sequence (timing), you apply certain techniques, using the tools of your own trade, in step-by-step processes, to start or grow your company. Every aspect of business essentially follows the same pattern, from start-up through expansion to retirement.First things first. To realize any accomplishment in life, whether business or personal, you first have to define your goal. This may sound simplistic, but the reality is: You can't get there from here if you don't know where "there" is. You need to be specific. If you want to work with children, are you going to be a daycare provider, an elementary school teacher, or a pediatric nurse? If you want to expand your existing business, are you going to add a new item to your product line, or write a book on your subject, or start a consulting business to complement your retail operations? Use laser-like precision to focus on your true goal because your desired end result will dictate the ART needed to accomplish your mi

imes that ecommerce is in it's infancy, but after 2 weeks of studying these "easy" software solutions I was frankly shocked at how dismal these offerings are for normal people like me. Most of them expect you to know some sort of programming language, PHP scripting and spreadsheet inputting. Now I regard myself as being above average when it comes to most things technical, but in this particular area I was quickly left feeling like the school dunce. My personal feeling is that if I've just spent ?300 on a piece of eCommerce software why on earth do I need to know anything about any of these areas, surely that's what the shopping cart software is for? In addition to this my personal experience showed that many are firmly aimed at the US market and are often incompatible with UK payment service providers. Not surprisingly, I had to grudgingly give up on this area of research and spent a week worrying about the future of my site.

Finding a Payment Service Provider

Finding an Internet Merchant Account

Take 7 Baby Steps Toward Powerful Marketing
In What About Bob, Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss), a respected psychiatrist, has a best seller out -- Baby Steps, which is all about taking problems a little bit at a time. On the Dave Ramsey Show, the chief financial guru takes baby steps into real life with Baby Steps financial counseling.Now, what if you could use a Baby Steps Marketing Method to achieve your marketing goals?It often takes seven points of contact to influence a sale; therefore you’ll need all 7 Baby Steps toward Powerful Marketing. In Baby Steps Marketing you will work systematically backwards through the seven steps that lead to credibility, trust and acceptance.In Baby Step Marketing your highest goal would be Number 7, your most comprehensive and therefore largest (in dollars) offering.In your Baby Steps Marketing System you will start by creating your most comprehensive (and therefore costly) service and putting that out there. Now you will work backwards in taking your client through the baby steps necessary for them to trust and want this ultimate product or service from you.Baby Step One—You might direct your interested party to your website where they can download a free copy of tips and articles, results of a poll or research study, filling their need for more information and demonstrating that you are trusted source for this information.Baby Step Two—You might offer a free subscription to your ezine, newsletter or blog.Baby Step Three—You might offer free downloads of your e-book, white paper or case studies, filled with how to’s, results and reference material from you and other trusted sources in your affiliate marketing program.Baby Step Four— You might offer tickets to your speaking engagement or an industry event where you can meet.Baby Step Five— You might

Finding an Internet Merchant Account

Management: Dealing with Difficult People
You know, this would be a great business if it weren’t for having to deal with people all the time…OK, so maybe I’ve exaggerated things a bit, but we’ve all certainly heard that saying before. Why does that sentiment ring true for so many folks? Obviously it’s because of all the people challenges we’re presented with in our business. Virtually every one of my clients over the years has brought up the subject of dealing with difficult people. There’s no escaping the fact that they come into everyone’s lives at one time or another. Sometimes they come in the form of an unhappy or hard-to-get-along-with client, customer, or co-worker. Sometimes they’re a person we report to or someone who reports to us. And sometimes they’re just someone we happen to come in contact with like a store clerk. Whoever they are, they can cause anxiety, frustration, concern, or anger in us and can even cause us to become like them – someone difficult to deal with.Sometimes the best way to deal with a difficult person is to avoid them altogether – give them wide berth. But often we don’t have that option. The difficult person is someone we simply have to deal with. Most people would say that in those situations, we have three options. These options are: 1) Try to change ourselves, 2) Try to change the other person, and 3) Resolve to tolerate the situation – basically decide to put up with them. I’d like to suggest that there’s a fourth, very effective option as well – perhaps the most effective of the four options. Let’s spend some time discussing these four options.1) Try to Change Ourselves Your first instinct might be, “Why should I be the one to change?” In fact quite often you’ll find that to be an appropriate response! Often there is nothing about what we do or say to cause the other pers

Finding an Internet Merchant Account

So I took a step back, and started again from a slightly different angle. I phoned Secpay asking if they recommended any particular acquiring banks, and they helpfully suggested using either EuroConex (which is the Bank of Ireland/Alliance & Leicester) or Lloydstsbcardnet (Lloyds/TSB) if I want to keep cost to a minimum. From there I called EuroConex (based in Ireland) and had to tell them my predicted annual turnover, and average transaction amount. Based on this, they would charge me a one-off set-up fee and a percentage cost per transaction on credit cards (they had a sliding scale from 1.9% to 2.5% at the time), and 24p per transaction on debit cards. They also have to see your website in order to check that what you're selling is 'ethical'.

A month later, after further research, I finally decided to go with EuroConex, so phoned them up before filling in the forms. Their prices had soared, now there was a ?150 set-up fee (instead of ?100) and 3.46% per transaction on personal credit cards (instead of 2.4%). This basically meant that their prices were roughly the same as all the other merchant bankers, and was beginning to see how they'd earned their entry in the dictionary of Cockney rhyming slang. There were two more blows to follow though, this hike in costs meant that I would have to wait for them to send me a new 'joining pack' with the new figures, and (and this was my oversight) that I would need to already have my own 'Business Account' set up before being considered for an internet merchant account, grrr! Being entirely new to this, I had naively assumed that because a 'Merchant Account' is just a different type of 'Business Account' that alone would be fine, and hadn't allowed for this level of banking pedantry.

After further research, and much gnashing of teeth I finally chose to set up my very first business account with the Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank, due to their offer of a permanently free business current account with internet banking, and also because of their connection with EuroConex (which I thought might help to speed things up a bit). There was a fairly straight forward form to fill in and two types of photographic identification along with verified signatures were required (authorised by two separate officials, e.g. police, teachers, postmasters etc), before finally being accepted 2 weeks later.

Once the business account was sorted, the merchant account joining pack could finally be filled in. Even though this account was essentially with the same bank as my newly granted business account (Alliance & Leicester), yet more identification and verified signatures were required by them. Two weeks passed before Euroconex emailed me saying that their underwriters additionally needed 3 consecutive months of statements from Paypal. Never having used my Paypal account for anything other than buying stuff from Ebay I was very concerned that, at this last hurdle, I was going to be refused an account.

Three long weeks passed before I could take no more. I phoned up Euroconex to find that my fears were unfounded. After 3 months of research and form-filling I was now officially ready to accept credit cards over the internet. Who would have thought that such a prospect could be such a relief!

Conclusion Well it's no easy ride and the caviar is still on ice, but if I'd found an article like this in the first place it would certainly have saved me a great deal of time and stress. Essentially I ended up with the following services which work well together and represent great value for money:

Shopping Cart - www.mals-e.com
Payment Service Provider - www.secpay.com
Internet Merchant Account - www.euroconex.com
Business Account - The Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank Business Builder Current Account

Having read this article it's my hope that you'll have a better understanding of the process, even if some of the information may become out-dated over time you'll still have a good starting point to base your own research upon. Best of luck in creating your own eCommerce site, and consider sending me some canap?s in the post when you've made your fortune.

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No competition?! Is this naive? Wishful thinking? A load of bunk? Not at all. As a coach who has consistently defied conventional wisdom as to what makes a successful coaching practice (NOT built on coaching other coaches!), let me share with you what I have learned along the way and what saves me EVERY SINGLE TIME I start to get overwhelmed or lose my business focus.

Risk Management is the process of measuring, or assessing risk and developing strategies to manage it.

As an author and professional speaker, I often meet audience members or readers who point out something so insanely obvious; I wonder how in the heck I missed it.

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