Month: April 2008

Apr

2008

Is Perfectionism Your Problem?

Every so often I get an email from someone telling me how important it is to do this or do that if I want to make my business better.

However, in many cases what they’re actually telling me to do is based on their opinion and not on actual facts.

So what if occasionally I forget to do something because I didn’t put it in my plan, and I get picked up about it by a customer a couple of weeks later?

Oops!

That’s just me.Â I’m not perfect and I accepted that fact a long time back.

Now I prefer to get something done and out there, and then pick up the pieces afterwards.

One of my mentors calls it “Ready, fire! Aim” and that’s not a negative thing, it’s a positive.

If I waited and waited and dotted every i and crossed every t then maybe I wouldn’t be running a profitable business.

Maybe this is what’s been happening to you?

It’s more important for you to get something out there, make your mistakes fast, and then correct them later.

Making everything “perfect” and endlessly thinking about what could happen doesn’t result in any income generation for you.

What will work for you is when you get your product out there and get the odd complaint.Â Then you can think about what you’ve done and try to fix things for future products.

99.99% of people won’t care enough to comment on what you do wrong.

But if you don’t get it exactly right next time either, it’s no big deal.

Show me the person who’s never made a mistake and I’ll show you the person who’s never done anything.

-Frank Haywood.

Apr

2008

What The Spammers Have Done To YOU…

…and what you can do about it.

You must have had at least one of those conversations where someone says to you “didn’t you get my email?”

Or maybe you’ve had an angry email from a customer saying something like “SECOND REQUEST: Why haven’t you answered my email?!?” and when you check, you find you have answered it, and several days ago too.

Well, it never got there thanks to their ISP spam filters.

It’s a real problem now, and especially since about October / November time, I’ve noticed a sharp increase on the number of emails that don’t get through either to me or back to my customers.

I’m pretty sure I know why this is. The increased number of spam emails containing images is causing a major problem for the ISPs.

This is what happens. Even before an email arrives at your email account – so this is even before your own spam filter gets a chance to operate – the mail provider you’re using has already applied its own filters.

Now imagine you’re the ISP, and you get a million emails a day through your network, and they’re all about 6k in size. 750,000 of those are spam, and it’s a burden. I’m making these figures up by the way…

As an ISP, every bit of network traffic costs you money. So all that spam is costing you money with no benefit to either you or your customers. Almost no-one wants it.

(Yes, some people click those links, enough to make it profitable, otherwise the spammers wouldn’t bother. They’re the ones who are really to blame.)

The next thing you know, the spammers are now sending email with images inside, bringing up the average size of an email to 18k. So suddenly, you now have to deal with 3 times as much traffic on your network as before.

What would you do if you were an ISP?

Well as a result of this increased bandwidth usage through junk mail, they’ve had to tighten up on their network filters.

And now you might be thinking “So why do I still get spam?”

Well the spammers are professionals. They’re constantly looking at ways of getting emails through any filter at all. And that’s what they’re good at.

But you and me are just ordinary people trying to make a living off the net.

We don’t stand a chance. Any stray combination of words may trigger a spam filter, we don’t know what might cause it, and so we lose out.

Now apply what I’ve described above, happening to you in a business situation where you have customers you’re trying to hold a conversation with.

It’s a disaster.

This is why my support desk software Ticket Desk Pro is now more useful to me than email.

Any ticket raised gets answered, and even if the automated notification message to my customer doesn’t get through to them, they’ll still see their reply when they come back to check up on what’s going on.

So if you want to beat what the spammers have done to you, grab a copy of Ticket Desk Pro now, and set your business running smoothly again.

http://www.ticketdeskpro.com/

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2008

A Must Have Service

Every so often I come across what I consider is a “lifeline” service or product.Â It’s something that is so important to my business that I can’t consider being without it again.Â It’s rare, but it does happen about once or twice per year.

You may have noticed that here on my blog I’ve said a few times that it was getting harder and harder to get email through to my customers.Â That’s one of the reasons for having developed and released Ticket Desk Pro.Â (Well, it’s in pre-launch anyway.)

Bu using help desk software, you can communicate with your customers, and even if the email doesn’t get through you know that they can just go back to the ticket they raised and read your reply.Â Communication problem solved.

Or is it?Â It still doesn’t solve the problem of when I want to make sure an email gets through.

One of my developers, Paul, has found a new lifeline service for me that solves many email issues.

It’s called AuthSMTP.com.

What it does is offer an SMTP service you can use with your email client, or even your scripts such as Ticket Desk Pro, SmartDD and the Nickel Script to make sure your email gets through to your customers.

Well…

You still can’t be absolutely sure, but it now looks to me as if 99% of my email is now getting through.Â I still get the odd bounced email come back to me, but it’s far better than it was a few weeks ago with many emails failing to get there.

I’ve been using it for 3 weeks now and I’m very pleased with it.Â On Saturday I upgraded to a bigger price plan, but it’s still only a few dollars for a LOT of relief that my emails are getting through.

With a whole range of pricing plans starting at $24 / year, I felt it was something I’d like to share with you.

You can find out more details of the service here:-

http://www.authsmtp.com/

-Frank Haywood