To Make Money OnlineStart By Giving Away The Farm Success Key Three

So the third key to making money on line is service before during and after the sale.

Quick, Friendly and Responsible Customer Service before, during and after the sale is every bit as essential online as it is in your brick and mortar local hometown business.

Responsive Customer Service is something that is sorely lacking online. I have several resale products that I offer whose product value is of unquestioned quality, but I dread having anything go wrong because dealing with the genius behind the product or their poor excuse for a support staff is a total nightmare. If I personally did not have the skill to handle most customer service issues myself, I would simply no longer offer these products. To me, it is not worth risking my reputation to rely on an unreliable service provider who does not live up to a decent standard of service provision.

The Internet is full of people that are old enough to know better and young ones that I (in my little old lady way) not-so-fondly refer to as techno-brats. They are thousands of products out there offered by brilliant freelance programmers, old direct marketing geniuses, and young computer whizzes who were skilled or smart enough to start and operate a business online, but arrogant or socially inept, or morally challenged enough to forget that any success they have depends in the long run on the good will of their customers. The kids you can almost understand, many of them are young and still learning. The older ones should know better, but surprisingly many either do not know or do not care; because unfortunately, the Internet also makes it very easy to shut down shop in one place one day, and reopen under another name the next day.

Think about it, how often have you waited days or weeks for an email response to a query that should have take an hour, or even 24 hours at the most. Good customer service may go unremarked, but it seldom goes unnoticed. The online retail giant Ebay, had to almost completely restructure the way they did business because of scam artists and people that just plain offered lousy customer service. Bad customer service is remembered and talked about...and online that can mean everything from a full blown “I hate So and So” website, to a disparaging blog post.

Unfortunately, these tactics can also be used to harm an innocent business by an competitor. In many ways the Internet is still everything I said it was nearly 14 years ago when naming my first online venture Spun Silk Web Design, in fact it probably more so.

Why Spun Silk?
"Lions, and Tigers, and Bears...Oh My...
Spiders, and Webs and Silks...Oh My"
...The Internet is in many ways, is not unlike the mythical Land of Oz, a strange and wondrous place filled with strange and wondrous sights...a place of beauty and adventure where good and evil abide. A place where chaos occasionally reigns supreme, and hopefully a place from which we all return safely and somewhat wiser for the experience....

Today it is actually probably more like the Wild West than Oz. On some days it seems like the White Hat Sheriffs are few and far between, and the Black Hat gunslingers are running rampant in the virtual streets.

So Good Customer service both before, during and after the sale is one thing you can do to stand out from the crowd. It is something that the legitimate—here to stay—online business entrepreneur cannot afford to ignore. My niche is Internet Marketing products for the beginner, and I cannot tell you the number of people who have written me and been absolutely amazed just to receive a response. As a result I have a more than a few loyal customers from several different countries who have come to trust me, and return to me again and again for their IM needs, or even just advice about other products from other online merchants. You can have that too, if you just remember that the person at the other end of that email or that chat dialog or contact form is every bit as important as they would be if they were standing across a display case, or sitting across a desk from you in your home town.

And that is what is truly, sorely lacking on the Internet. Quality and respectful human interaction. In a way that is what the Social 2.0 like Facebook and MySpace are all about. Back before there was an Internet there were dial-up computer bulletin boards systems(BBS)where people posted messages and information and other people responded to them. They operated a lot like the forums you see today. Facebook and MySpace are just teched up, colorfully illustrated versions of those same old BBS boards. People, finding ways to connect online.

One of the hottest touted technologies today is the wonders of audio and video—and admittedly that's cool—however the problem is they are simply jazzy forms of one-way communication, and the only way to truly build a lasting relationship with your customers is honest-to-goodness, good-old-fashioned two-way communication.

Of course, all of this assumes you have a product of your own to sell in the first place. If you do not have a product of your own, then you want to read my article on affiliate marketing, which teaches you how to use the word free and the "Giveaway The Farm" tactics to make money online, at very little or almost no overhead cost to yourself by selling someone else's product! Or you can read my article “Your Online Business-Multiple Streams of Income and Where To Get Them”


But... for the final part of the puzzle, see the last installment...
To Make Money Online...Start By Giving Away The Farm Real Life Examples

****
It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to
be generous, frank and independent.
– W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) Of Human Bondage, 1915


To Make Money OnlineStart By Giving Away The Farm Success Key Three - To learn more about this author, visit Teresa Bohannon's Website.

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