Archive for October, 2007
Tuesday · Popularity: 41% · business, cs
Are you running a business? Then you should answer your email. Period. There was a recent article post called, Treat Your Blog like a Business, where Ben made some very good points about how you should run your blog. I want take that a little step farther and state the obvious. You should treat your business like a business, and one of those steps is to answer your email, in a professional manner no less.
This will probably not be the most popular post in the world, after all, we all get to much email, and some we just don’t want to mess with. I am speaking about the necessity of answering your email if you are in business, but this includes those who run a small home based business, or someone that sells their services online as well, large or small.
If you are online just purely for personal reasons then, answer it, delete, do whatever you want, but I think this applies to personal accounts as well if you want to be successful online. It seems to be common place now to not answer your email. It is the easiest means of communication to ignore, and takes a lot of time.
So if you want to stand out among the others, respond to those emails.
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Monday · Popularity: 7% · stars
Looking back over this past week, it was overwhelmingly dominated by posts on the Page Rank update.
It seems everyone found some way to be touched by this in one way or the other, even if it was just to read the rantings and ravings about Google’s Page Rank update. Especially over the weekend when page rank updates seemed to be just flying in every direction.
I did try to read as many of these posts as I could, and I even contributed to the mayhem myself in, What Happened to My Page Rank, Another Goal Reached?, when my Page Rank actually went up to my surprise. Being at a PR0 I didn’t have any place to go but up, so a PR2 was a welcome thing to me.
One of the funniest posts I have seen so far was posted over the weekend, Google PageRank algorithm leaked, it is certainly worth a quick read, and was quite funny.
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Sunday · Popularity: 19% · google, milestone, pagerank
After all the posts I read this week about the page rank update I told myself I wasn’t going to post anything about the topic. I thought it had all been said enough (and that is still probably true), until I noticed my page rank actually went up. [A little disclaimer here, before last week I had a PR0 and now I have a PR2. So, I had no place to go but up.]
There are other examples surfacing now that also show increases in PR’s like, PageRank update in process, this time for real, where AdesBlog talks about a few of his sites that have increased their page rank. Another recent post from ProBlogger also touches on several of these current topics in, The Google Page Rank Pendulum Swings…. Again, and if you are still interested, there are hundreds (if not more) of posts on the Page Rank update.
Some PR’s Are Going Up, Some Down
In a recent post I did on the goals of this blog, Reaching a Set Goal and Working on Others, a the Page Rank was not even listed as one of the top ten because I thought it was pretty much out of the question for the age of my domain, and the fact that I was still trying to build quality content on the site. Little did I know, all I needed was an update to Google’s Page Rank system.
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Friday · Popularity: 46% · contest, off topic
Do you like the different contests that some bloggers use on their sites? It can be a good way to network with other blogs, increase traffic to your site, and increase traffic to the winning site as well. The only question I have is how the big G sees “contests” and how it ultimately effects your traffic or rankings. There seems to be some speculation that it is harmful to your rankings. In a recent post, Should “Weekly Top5 Sites Contest” continue?, a drop in page rank is starting to ask the question as to the relevancy or helpfulness of “contests” on your blog.
I am going to leave most of that is for a different post, so in this post, who cares, everyone likes to win something, sometime, right? I try to keep this blog on topic most of the time, and since my stated tagline is about eCommerce and online business, I did want to point out that you can take this approach with your online store as well.
About Coupons and Door Prizes
Our company has run many different contests, for years, and found them to be very effective tools, in person, or online. On a recent group my wife, DK, is running, she decided to do a give-a-way in the manner of door prizes. Her group went from a few hundred members to end at over 2,000 before she closed the group. The prizes are given away weekly, and most of them were donated by other members of the group, so she didn’t even have to supply the door prizes.
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Friday · Popularity: 24% · amazon, dropshipping, ebay
Are you tired of competing with a drop shipper or drop shipping company that does not ever touch the product, house, or package the product, seems to sell more, and make more money than your competing businesses? You probably are if you are a company that spends time finding wholesalers, buying inventory, cataloging, indexing, valuing, packaging, and all the normal business practices that go along with running a business that carries an inventory based product.
I received an email this week from a “buyer” on Amazon. He purchased one of our books and the subject of his email said, DON’T SEND PACKING SLIP OR INVOICE PLEASE, in all caps, but it was his email to me that told me the story:
Would you mind sending this package without a packing slip and/or invoice? I would really appreciate it. Also, please use delivery confirmation, if possible - I only make this suggestion, as the USPS is far less likely to lose the package.
[item sold and order number was inserted here]
If this item is a different condition (used/new/etc.), binding or media type softcover/hardcover/tape/disc/etc.), edition or version (international/etc.) or differs in any way from your listing, please refund this order immediately.
You don’t need to respond to this email unless there is a problem with the order.
Besides the fact that Amazon requires you to send a packing slip with each order, the shipping address was completely different than the email name or company, so it was obvious to me that this was a drop shipper and we were now the fulfillment company. This email was automatically generated and I had no choice at this point other than to just ship the order.
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