Toilet Paper Entrepreneur ‡

Since its after Christmas, and you are probably flush with a bit of holiday cash, and you are ready to start on a new business endeavor…how about about spending some of that money on a book? The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur is small book (175 pages) that cover a lot of ground about starting a business.

Ok, before I start, why might you ask would I review a business book on a tech site?  Two reason: first, most computer books are boring, you probably wouldn’t want to read them even if they were ‘good’. Second, this book is peppered with tips about how to use tech to help run your business on a shoestring budget.

The book’s primary focus is small ‘bootstrapped’ start-ups. If you are  planning a $5MM venture round, while some of the techniques in the book could be useful, you are probably not the focus of this book. On the other hand, if you’ve got an idea for a small business, or you are running small business this book may be for you.

The first two sections of the book cover motivation, and creating a vision of where you want your business to go, while the second part deals with a more nuts and bolts approach to running your business.  If you are just getting started running your business, or trying to decide where you want to go with a business,  this book could be very helpfull to you. Be warned, the author, Mike Michalowicz uses some crude language, so it’s not for the under 16 set, but its very easy to read, and he is able explain concepts well.

Here is the tech tie in, throughout the book there are gray boxes with TPE TIPS, a good number of them deal with Internet tools to help you run your business. Its like a getting an extra bonus in your book.

Whether you get the book or not, the author also has a blog that’s worth reading.

Buy this book at Amazon‡

Sometimes the Internet can open up whole new markets for you. I had the opportunity to talk to a gentleman who runs a small  company that provides hand’s-on training for specialized industrial equipment. He sets up training classes all over the country. About 3 months ago he decided to jump into web based training. He hired a company to  make high quality  training videos, and a programmer to initially setup his site. He priced his classes at a very low price point, and after just one month of being live, he is thrilled with the outcome. In that time he has gotten more new customers than he gets in 4 months for his traditional classes. He told me that he has been able to reach a whole new demographic of customers, (younger, more computer literate). Because of his low price point (under $50.00), if his customers can’t get their employers to pay for the class, many are willing to pay out of their own pockets.

What’s the moral of this story–If you have a business that’s not web based, stop, look around, and see if you can expand  your business with web based technology. Technology that was very expensive just 5 years ago is now very affordable. Technologies like web 2.0, cloud computing, and video are high quality and easily within reach of almost any business. Take a few minutes today and think about what you could do for your business, and then see if you can make it happen. Its probably cheaper and easier then you could ever imagine.

One great thing about the Internet is the wide variety of information that is available at your fingertips. The bad thing is that anybody can publish anything (look at me), so you have to make sure that the the site has something of real value, and is not just a rehash of old dated information.  On the subject of marketing, there are two sites that I feel would be valuable to ANY small business owner. These sites consistently provide quality, timely, and useful information.

(OK, this site is called Irunabiz:Technology, and these sites are about marketing, so how do I justify this post. First, They are on the Internet, that’s technology, isn’t it? Second, sometimes they talk about technology subjects like Twitter and Facebook. Third, this is my blog and I can write about anything I want to, so there!)

• Copyblogger. While ‘blogger’ is in the name, this site is about a lot more than blogging. Its about good writing, with a focus on persuasive, and engaging copy. I pick up great tips almost every time I go to it.  It’s also organized very well, so it’s easy to get lots of information on a specific subject.

• The Duct Tape Marketing Blog. This blog is written by John Jantsch (who also has  books and related media on this subject). His blog has a lot of cutting edge information on marketing in general with a focus, lately, on Internet and social media marketing. I think I have referenced material from his blog more than any other. He is well worth reading regularly.

Take some time to let me know about any site you think are worthwhile below.

Related Posts

• Figuring out Twitter when you can barely figure out email.
• Fast Read: Sales and Marketing

The following article was written by the president of my one of my marketing partners:AWebber Communications‡

Written by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

————-

AWebber Communications provides email follow up and newsletter delivery tools and services–Click here to find out more ‡

An Entrepreneurs’ Guide To Public Resources A good list of resources from Forbes.com

“entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”
(entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity).–Occam’s razor

Given that I write a blog, I spend  a lot of time reading other blogs, both on general business subjects and on blogging business. Over the past two weeks I read (and commented on) two posts that really got me thinking about social media.  The first post was on the DuctapeMarketing  blog. It was an post about creating a special role or position in a company for the person that handles Social Media (“Adding a Chief Conversation Officer” ); I got into quite a rant on this one. The other article was on Graywolf’s SEOBlog, where he discusses the fact that Social Media is so complex that its not possible for there to be experts on the subject (“Is There Really Such a Thing as a Social Media Expert“). After reading both these postings and ruminating on the subject for a while I came to a realization– Social Media isn’t new, and its mostly hype.

What we call social media on the Internet has existed in some form since the  the beginning of time. Since the invention of printing with movable type, there have been newspapers and letters to the editor; since the 1960’s there has been some form talk radio; since the late 70’s there have  been call in TV shows. Twitter is the Internet equivalent of a cocktail party, where you can get involved in  conversations on different topics with various groups of people. In the late 80’s and early 90’s people wrote books about ‘networking’ at these types of events, there were even (and still probably are ) seminars on how to ‘network’. Facebook, Linkedin, et all, are quite similar to regular social or business luches with friends or colleagues. Before Digg, if you wanted to know what people were reading, you could check out your coffee shop, or hotel lobby, or even a park at lunchtime. The big difference between non-internet versions of ‘being social’ and the new Internet ’social media’ is access and speed.  The concepts and skills manage these activities have not changed much.

Once you get past the hype, and objectively look at social media, you will see that most of the skills you use to be social, will work with social media too. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are technical nuances and issues that you will need specialists to help you with, but the overall strategy and tactics have been around for hundreds of years. Just look at Martin Luther, who nailed a listing of his criticism’s of the Catholic Church to a church door, perhaps he was one of the earliest bloggers. And if you want to know how to drive traffic to your blog, spend some time studying the tactics that Benjamin Franklin used to increase the circulation of his brother’s newspaper.

Here’s a great post that it short and to the point: The Secret of How to Sell Anything

I have started a few small business in my lifetime. Currently I am running a part-time home based business business that consists of this blog and a consulting business. Since this blog is about getting value from technology in a small business, I want to show you how I use technology to run my business better. 

Starting the business

Instead of paying a company to incorporate my LLC, I got on to the Georgia Secretary of State’s website, printed the forms and followed their directions to incorporate my LLC. This saved me about $100 in fees from a registration website. It may be worth your while to get to your states website and see if you can do this yourself. (I think you can only do this yourself if you register your corp. in the state you live in, but I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice.)

Internet and hosting

I use ATT DSL (So there’s no money saved there ). I registered my sites with GoDaddy.com‡ They usually have a good deals on website registration. While there are some free web hosting services, I also use GoDaddy‡ for my web hosting. They are very reputable, and since a good deal of my business comes from the web, it worth paying for hosting. GoDaddy has applications that you can install for free on its paid hosted sites, and I use a one of those, a blogging platform called Wordpress  (So I didn’t pay for that at least). In any case I have  2 websites for less than  $120 per year  including annual registrations and monthly hosting fees. (Thats about $10/month !!!.)

Applications

I use both OpenOffice.org (a free MS office like office suite you install on your computer) and Google Docs for my Wordprocessing and Spreadsheet needs. Since both are free is saves hundreds ($250) compared to shelling out the big bucks for MS Office. For email I use Google mail (gmail). It allows me to consolodate my 5 email addressed (blog, consulting, 2 personal addresses, and one address that only my inlaws use) into a single location. Its easy to use and pretty robust for a web based email client

I do pay for my accounting software. I use Quicken Home And Business. But to save money I don’t upgrade it each year, I take about two and a half years between upgrades. I strongly belive that if it works, there’s no reason to upgrade (if you have to pay). I upgraded this last time becase they said that they were shuttng off my online bank access.

I think that, on average I have saved about $400 over the life of my business by making smart technolgy choices. 

I’m thinking of moving entirely to “the cloud” sometime soon so I’ll probably let you know how that goes.

Your customer is the life-blood of your business. The better you know your customer the more you can grow your business. You need to constantly profile your customers so you know how to focus your promotions.

For example, I was talking to a friend of mine who is selling his house and he was lamenting how few people have looked at his house due to the bad housing market. I asked him about the house, This house is a mid priced  ranch (not a starter but not a luxury home either) house in the  Atlanta market. He also told me that the the people who have looked at the house (seriously) tended to be retired or near retirement. We bounced this  information around for a while, and realized that what these folks had in common is they probably already owned a home outright, and didn’t have a lot of pressure to sell that home (or pay two mortgages) before they could  buy a new one. And since the house was a ranch it would seem that this type of house (no stairs) would be a good fit for someone who is retired. So perhaps this house could be marketed to well off people, near retirement who already own a 2 story home, and want somewhere they can retire to. It also illustrates how profiling your ideal customer can give you insight into how to market your products or services.


Below is a partial list of questions to ask when profiling your customers. Always keep an open mind when profiling your customers, you don’t want to write off new markets because you ‘think’ you know your customer; do some real research to confirm or refute your beliefs. Also remember that not every area listed below will be part of your customers profile– look for areas in common.

1. What are your customers demographics ?
   
• Age
• Income Level
• Whey they live
• Marital status
• Etc.
  
2. How did they find out about your product/service?
• Advertising
• Referrals
• Ratings
  
• Location
  
3. If you sell multiple products or services what combinations are most common ?
   
4. How much to your best customers spend ?
   
• The ones that spend the most money
  
5. What is the average amount your customers spend ?
   
• In other words,how much money do most people spend
  
6. Where else do they shop ?
   
7. What do they like most about your product or service ?
• Try a survey to find out the information in questions 1,6-10.
  
8. What caused them to decide to buy your product or service ?
   
• It may not be what they liked most.
  
9. How many customers are repeat customers vs. new customers ?
   
10. How much do they know about your company, its products and its services ?
    

Copyright 2008 Solutions4Stuff, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sometimes you need to explain to someone how a business works. Below is a link to a simple (stick figure) graphic that shows the basics of a business and how each important player participates in the process.

How Business Works Graphic

Copyright 2008 Solutions4Stuff, LLC. All rights reserved.