In my translation and design service on PinoyTattoos.com, my customers order designs that are supposed to mean something. I would say the buyer anxiety is much higher compared to ordering a typical product. Getting a wrong or meaningless tattoo would be really bad. Some customers have expressed it’s taken them years to choose what to get inked. I myself took 10 years. I’m glad I waited, otherwise I might have been stuck with a barbwire armband or cartoon character.

To reduce (probably cannot kill it) buyer anxiety, I implemented a few simple things to my checkout page.

1) Paypal Verification seal
2) Contact info including a phone#
3) A Meebo Me widget that connects to all my IM accounts

I’ve had more than a few customers call me while they were on the checkout page needing assurance of the product or the checkout process.

Want more tips? My favorite E-commerce blog has more.

Image by enviied

April Fools Day is a chance for business to have fun without worrying too much about ROI. That said, there’s still some opportunity to make some money off April Fools Day. You will have to subscribe to the “I don’t make money from my site, I make money because of it” philosophy (I forget who said that).

Poking fun of web celebrities works
Smellr.com did good by featuring a who’s who on the internet. Kevin Rose, Michael Arrington, Scoble and the rest will definitely write about it, Tweet, Facebook, etc. Besides harnessing the web celeb power, they also did good by not trying to sell us their products. Their catchy Web2.0″ badge looked great compared to a generic About or Contact links. Check out sll the buzz on Google.

Missed all the tech April Fools day gags? Techcrunch has a list of the best.

As I was watching the Pete Sell vs Matt Brown fight UFC 96, I noticed a nice looking shirt Pete Sell and his entourage was wearing. I did what everyone who thought the same thing, Google Tokyo Five. The 1st 3 results are a band, photo blog, and a fashion blog (that has some screenshots). After tying a different keywords, I finally get to the official Tokyo Five site. Upon entering, I get an overlay pop-up showing their UFC 96 sponsored fighters Pete Sell & Gabriel Gonzaga (who both lost).

Once I “X” out of the advertisement, I’m taking to an under construction site. No photos of their products. Nothing! What a wasted opportunity. I’m sure it wasn’t cheap to sponsor two UFC fighters. People are perhaps looking to buy your products. There’s no excuse for not being prepared after a major media campaign.

Here are some basic things Tokyo Five Jeans should have done to better prepare even if they would still be under construction.

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Photo source

With the business environment to fragile, it’s never been more important to setup a website. It can be done with a very low budget and fast. While it’s now totally acceptable to use free web applications such as Youtube and open source programs such as Wordpress to run your business, here are some things to watch out for when setting up a website on a budget.

1) Bad domain name
This is probably the 1st and most important thing you need to do. If your company name is not available, find out why. Find out who owns it and try to get it back if you have a legit argument to do so. If you have to register a new domain name, try to stay away from THEyourbrand.com. Not only is it confusing to customers, people may miss typing THE in front of your domain. THEcoolapps.com sounds weird. Register a .com. Stay away from .info, .cc, .biz, and .mobi. You don’t need them unless your bigime and need to protect your brand name.

2) Hosting your site on Blogger
If possible, try to host your own site on your own server. Stay away from free hosts such as Blogger and Wordpress.com. These free services are not flexible enough if you grow your business. It may be difficult to implement ecommerce and other upgrades. Also, it makes you look cheap. These sites usually have a footer message “Get a FREE site”. If your still under a buget but need flexability of a self hosted package, check out Weebly.

3) Comment spam
Watch your comments. If your articles are overwhelmed with viagra and cialis ads, it looks like you don’t A) Have the proper technology to filter spam or B) Don’t care.

4) Inconsistent brand
Don’t do the Dr.Jeykle and Mr.Hyde with your online/offline business. If you have a professional tone offline, then you need to keep that same tone online. Would you talk in slang or swear in the “real” world? There should be no surprises when you lead visitors to your website.

Recently, I caught wind of someone talking smack online about my artwork on a couple of posts of a somewhat competitor. While this person is unknown in the online landscape, I take this seriously as a possible business threat. While I’m proud of what I’ve done with my PinoyTattoos.com project over the last year, I’m under no delusion that someone can knock me off the top.

1. Take screenshots of the offending content
It may come in handy if a confrontation happens or if they delete/deny it.

2. Do a SWOT (Strength.Weakness.Opportunities.Threats) analysis of your competitor
You need to see where this person stands in your industry and compared to yourself. Is this person a legit threat?

3. Don’t write a post about the situation or link back to them
It will very tempting to do so but you must hold back unless it’s necessary to do so. Linking back may give them Google juice.

4. Don’t leave comments on the offending post
Don’t even think about doing it under a false name. If you do, that means someone is listening and may add fuel to the fire. No comments is worst than a negative comment because that means that it’s possible nobody is listening.

5. Research about them on Pipl.com
Getting to know your competition is important. It may give you ammo if needed.

6. Be honest with yourself
Does this person have a point? If you have more than a few haters, maybe they are right and you should change or adapt.

7. Spy
Subscribe to their RSS feed. Pose as a potential customer….ask questions.

8. Take it as a compliment
Some folks need to try to drag people down to help them move up. It’s an old tactic. Talk crap about the top, get mentioned by them, and get legitimized in the process. There are a lot of haters of Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and PerezHilton because they are at the top of their industry.

There will always be someone that’s smarter and hungrier than you. If not now, there will be a time. Use this as motivation to create a better product. I’ll admit that it does bother me a little but it only added fuel to the fire. If I didn’t receive any smack talk, I wouldn’t have redesigned my site last month. Now I’m in the process of developing 2 now products. Take that!

With the economy in the crapper, it’s never been more important to know about modern job searching. If I were laid off, one would probably update their resume, ping friends/relatives, contact headhunters, and search/post their resume on a jobsite such as Hotjobs. That’s what I did when I was laid off over a year ago from Restoration Hardware. That process was considered Jobs2.0. With that process now being the norm, how does one stand out from the crowd? How does one go beyond the jobsites?

I believe employers want to hire people who are naturally passionate for the job.  The perfect employee would be one who would be “into” his industry even if they were not in the industry. If I was looking for a car salesman, I would look for someone who’s a car fanatic 1st and a salesman 2nd. It’s all about transferable personal interests. So how do you get employers to know what your passions are?

1st, let’s define the 3 stages of job hunting:

Jobs1.o – Pre-internet
Newspapers, agencies, friends, relatives, co-workers

Jobs2.0 – A connected world
Monster, Hotjobs, Craigslist, Jobster

Jobs3.0 – An OPEN world
Besides going through the Jobs1.0 & Jobs2.0 process, one must go to the next level as competition is tough. A resume will no longer cut it. Some of the new job tools are:

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1. Work your ass off – This one is obvious. No time for on the job training. Be read to rock day 1.

2. Don’t work too much overtime – Working too much overtime either means that 1) You can’t manage the work within normal business hours 2) Your milking it.

3. Don’t be a dick – Show authority in terms of leadership and knowledge but don’t be a Richard

4. Volunteer – Boss needs someone to cover the weekend or the holiday? Do it.

5. Show genuine interest – Good managers can tell their what their peeps are passionate about. If your job is out of your personal interest scope, look for a part of it that is. Be creative.

6. Research - Know the company and do your research – Have the knowledge of an old-timer. Go beyond Wikipedia.

7. A different world – You need to transform the environment into 2 worlds. The world before and after your arrival.

8. Goals - Make goals and send status reports to your manager every week

9. Beer - Have a beer with the people you work with. Don’t drink? Let them know and take one for the team you wuss.

10. Have a fallback job – Make the bosses aware that your looking for full time employment and that you have other opportunities. It will put pressure on them to convert you sooner than later or risk loosing you.

Obama won the presidency not only because of his message but how it was marketed. There was a clear difference between the Obama brand and the McCain brand. Here are some business ideas we can use in our businesses.

1) Use technology the right way
When Obama launched my.BarackObama.com, it was an instant hit. It allowed people to be part of the campaign by phone banking, donating, blogging, and etc. Obama had an iPhone app, YouTube channel, Facebook, MySpace, TXT, Twitter, and the list goes on. While the BarackObama.com probably cost loads of $$$, the rest is pretty much free. McCain launched McCainSpace late in the game. Additionaly, the name is so dated and out of touch.

Spend what you need to get your main website going but also work as hard enhancing your MySpace page. If you check Obama’s MySpace, you will notice how it’s themed the same way his site is. Think of these other sites as an extension of your main one. Use them to drive traffic.

2) Be consistent
Obama’s message stayed consistent since he 1st gained attention from his 2004 speach. He was disipline enough to keep that message through the primaries and the presedential race. This gave the voters a sense of dedication know how. McCain had a different theme every week confusing voters and distracting his “customers” from the real prize.

If your business has a clear and consistent message, your brand has a better chance against the competition.

3) Stay positive
Once thing that turned me off with the McCain & Clinton teams was the negativity. I believe all the terrorist talk turned off many voters. Most people are not that stupid.

Be positive about your products, industry, and competitors. People generally want to be around happy people. If you have a blog for your business, talk about the highs and lows but always try to leave it at a high note. Depressions doesn’t sell products.

4) Crowdsource
Obama started grassroots and ended grassroots. Starting with little money, he was able to raise record breaking funds. The Obama team was able to people to work for him for free because they believed in him. People were making their own campaign videos, exposing the competition, creating banners, calling undecided voters, registering new voters…..you saw them in the streets and online.

Your business should be trying to create passionate customers. These folks will work for you for free and bring more benefits than any paid employee could.

5) Be transparent
Obama ran an honest campaign. It was great to hear him say that he didn’t know everything and would need help. That was a stark contrast to McCain wanted us to believe that he had all the answers due to his time in the senate. Sarah Palin pretending she knew wha tthe Bush doctrine was. If you don’t know, admit it.

If you have a product defect and it’s been called out in the comments or forum of your site, admit it and tell your customers what you will do about it.

The Obama campaign manager should write a book on his experience. Look out Seth Goodin!

I recently had the opportunity to hear famed designer, Patrick Robinson talk about his philosophy on designing. He said design for yourself. He noticed that a lot of his associate designers under him were working on “personal projects” and not presenting them to him. Their said that they did not share because it was nothing serious and didn’t meet the end customer needs. Patrick gave them the advise that they should share those “personal projects” because they themselves are the customer. Don’t think of yourself as too good or even different from the end customer. You are your customer.

With the free flow of information, cultures, and ideas – we are truly starting to become “one”. His comments are very relevant to technology companies. No longer are you in the elite crowd just because you subscribe to RSS feeds or have your own website. While digital divide is still very much existent, it’s getting smaller everyday.

In my personal experience, I thought that there would only be a few people interested in Baybayin (pre-Filipino Script) but when I setup the site, I’ve had the opportunity to meet hundereds of people who share the same interests.

Woke up this morning and saw an email form one of my webhosts:

Good morning folks,

As of about 9:08 AM EST, Fused Network went offline due to a networking issue at the facilty our infrastructure resides in. At this time we don’t know the full details of the outage however all systems do appear to be go at this time. We will be issuing a full statement on our status blog as information comes available about the nature of the outage, what is being implemented to prevent similar occurrences in the future and what we’re doing here at Fused to ensure communication continues even during massive problems (despite how infrequent they are).

In the past we had made moves to decentralize our blog, community and status systems onto separate servers so that we could easily move them off to external networks during extended outtages to keep information flowing. We’ll be moving them to completely external networks during the next week to ensure even in the worst of scenarios that we’re able to communicate with you.

As always during issues — updates are available on our status blog at http://status.fusednetwork.com
We’ll have a specific write-up regarding this event there for your perusal and additional updates will be posted to it as they become available.

Thank you for your time & patience.

David McKendrick
Fused Network
1-888-282-0003 / support@fusednetwork.com

This is great customer service because it’s pro-active and honest. Most of their customers probably did not notice the outage (like me) but would like to know if there was one.

Here are some transparency tips for a 1-man small business that’s bound for unintentional screw-ups

1) Set the expectation with your customers
Be clear as to what the possible issues could be with your service or product.

• Item may look slightly different from what is photographed.
• Larger items take longer to produce and will lead to longer fulfillment time.

2) Get your customers to trust you
If they know and trust you, they will be have more compassion when things go wrong. Keep a blog about your business & some personal activities.

• Your a single dad and this is your side business that you only work on during the weekends or late nights.
• You were sick for a week.
• Photos of yourself. Gone are the days of avatars. Show your mug even if your not a supermodel.

3) When sh!t hits the fan, be honest
Like what FusedNetwork did, explain what the issue was and your steps to prevent it.

• Communicate to your customers as the issue is happening. You may not have all the details but acknowledge the issue and advise that it’s being addressed.
• Once the issue is resolved, provide non-technical root cause analysis to your customers. Provide a statement of the issue, business/customer impact, root cause, and prevention action items.

3) Take feedback and treat it like bling
Ever receive feedback and just archive it in your gmail account without doing anything about it? I have….we should be at least be responding with a personal email.

• Design your feedback form to have key fields that you can use for analysis. Don’t just have a free form field. Create specific categories like “Product Suggestion” or “Bug”.
• Import all your feedback into Excel to breakdown percentages. Better yet, sign up for an online feedback analysis service like Kampyle.