Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Startup Checklist for Small Businesses

As we know, most business start out small. Starting a business is a very busy time in an entrepreneur’s life. So busy that many critical steps are often overlooked. In an effort to help those small, but soon to be large, businesses identify critical areas for success, we have put together a short 10 step checklist to make sure you are covering all of your bases.

Top 10 Checklist:

1. Research the Product or Service You Seek To Sale.
2. Create a Business Plan.
3. Determine Your Capital Budget.
4. Choose and Register Your Business Name.
5. Decide on the Legal Form of Your Business.
6. Open a Company Checking Account.
7. Determine if you need any state or local licenses/permits.
8. Obtain a Federal Employer Identification Number.
9. Set up a business website and business email address.
10. Research various trust products in the marketplace to help you fast track your credibility with your potential customers.

As you may know, there are many more factors that determines a small businesses success; however, if you were to ask me what are the top 10, then you the ones above are it.

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Make Me A Clown Now! While You Are At It Teach Me What to Expect When I Start Selling Online Part 2

This is the second part of the two part posting about starting to sell online. You can read the first part here.

Yes, you can be a clown and you can start selling online pretty quickly. You can even be a clown while you are selling online. The trick is to make sure you do not act like a clown when you get set up to start selling online. This post will cover some key items that every person who wants to take their business online needs to think about as they get going.

Test, Test, Test

It is painful, but you must be constantly testing changes to the website. The tests should not be wholesale changes, but should be controlled. So many people focus on getting the product line-up just right, or the purchase flows streamlined or the website to have the ideal color. The truth is you need to keep testing changes to your website. Nearly every component should be tested to see how visitors to your website interact with the website. Controlled testing is key. That is commonly known as A/B testing and here is a great summary of A/B testing. It basically means you show a change to the website to only 50% or so of the visitors and 50% of the visitors do not see the change. The analysis that is so valuable is what happens to the other 50% of visitors who see the changed website. Do they convert at a higher rate, do they stay on the website longer, do they click the new link that you added etc. This is the value of testing and more testing until you optimize the various areas of your site, but even then continued testing will help you as shoppers’ habits evolve.

Be Flexible

This may be the most important of all. To be a seller online, you need to be flexible. You may think that customers and shoppers will respond a certain way, but you need to be prepared to expect the unexpected. Inflexible folks just can not make it as merchants online.  Even better, if you are flexible and are addressing your customers needs that will create customer loyalty with your business.  Remember customers like to deal with businesses that listen to them and also take action on customer feedback. This flexibility can also lead to your customers being your best advocates through word of mouth recommendations about your business and products.  All of this from just listening to your customers and acting on their feedback!

These are just a few of the things to keep in mind. Do you have any lessons learned from your experience selling online that you want to share?

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Make Me A Clown Now! While You Are At It Teach Me What to Expect When I Start Selling Online Part 1

Yes, you can be a clown and you can start selling online pretty quickly. You can even be a clown while you are selling online. The trick is to make sure you do not act like a clown when you get set up to start selling online. This post will cover some key items that every person who wants to take their business online needs to think about as they get going.

Website

There are many ways to approach your website. Many people just jump in a buy a ready-made template from a website template company. Be careful of doing that too quickly. The trick is that before you actually dive into buying a template or building your website, you must take the time to plan out a few things about your website. Take some time to review websites that sell similar products that you are going to sell or are in a similar industry so you can see different looks and feels for websites. After you have done this, sketch out the pages of your planned website on a piece of paper. This will help you visualize your website and better inform you when you get to the point where you are considering different options for templates or designers that will design your website. The key is taking a few minutes to plan out the vision of your website. If you do that, the process for building your actual website will run a lot smoother. Too many people just skip this step and go to the template or design stage and do this on the fly. You can do this, but it will be a much bigger challenge than if you planned it out.

Your community

Customers…..Who are going to be your customers for the products that you sell? Figure out who are the customers, but go one step further and try to think about the influencers for the customers. That is the community that you want to build for your website and your products. For example, a seller of athletic equipment like wrist wraps and weights are selling to customers that want to use this equipment to get healthy. But other influencers for this can be athletic clubs and personal trainers. As the seller of the equipment thinks about building a community through a blog or other forms of social media, the seller should aim to serve the greater community of customers and influencers in order to build a community of followers.

Tracking and Interacting with Customers

Once a customer has purchased from you that is not the end of your relationship. Now as a seller online, especially where shoppers have so many options it is imperative that sellers maintain a relationship with the customer. Part of this is selfish because only the customer can give you feedback about their experience with the products that you have sold them. But more importantly, the customer’s feedback before, during and after the purchase experience will give you important feedback that will help you improve your customer experience. Without it, you are literally flying blind. So how do you interact and track customers. There are a number of customer tracking applications that will help you work to interact with your customers. These include Kampyle (feedback tracker), SugarCRM (customer relationship manager) and CrowdSound (feedback widget). Not to mention, you can always just pick up the phone or email the customer to get feedback. This may be the most underrated way to interact with customers because most sellers just do not think about doing that. Call your customer! You will not regret it, but be prepared for the feedback because it could be brutally honest.

Stayed tuned for Part 2 of this post tomorrow.

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

Who Do I Trust? Who Do I Trust? Me, That’s Who!

Trust. It’s essential to any purchase. It’s also a big deal to Tony Montana (aka Scarface). Why do I bring him up? Because, in addition to giving pop culture the famous quote above, Tony’s business had to deal with trust issues. In the beginning, he was a small business – working much harder than more well-known “entrepreneurs.” It was only after years of building a large customer base that potential buyers knew he was a trusted source of “product.” And only then could Tony take a little time off, buy a big mansion, fly off into paranoid coke-fueled fits of rage and get into a shoot-out with 40 gunmen. Tony’s story is every small business’ story. And we here at KikScore want to help you build your business’ trust factor up quickly – so you can get going on that big mansion and violent death.

Your mom was right — Appearance is Everything. Offering a low price, without a professional looking website, business contact information and customer references – well, it’s like getting a letter from a Nigerian princess who will double your money in 60 days. It just sounds too good to be true. Too many people have been burned by other “great” deals. Low prices alone won’t cut it. Spend some time personalizing your site, give people some details on you and your business, make sure there is a support email, get some customer references. Include on your site what you would like to see if you were shopping on an unknown site (with an awesome price on a TV).

Don’t be a Wall Flower. Communicate with potential shoppers via a corporate blog (you’re reading this…I’m sure consumers will read yours…unless it’s boring…but then again, so is this and you continue to read this…whatever, write a damn blog already). Log on to Meetup.com, attend some local functions, and discuss your business. The more people you communicate with, the more people will know (and will write about) you. This will increase shopper confidence that you’re not a Nigerian princess…unless you actually are.

Take Care of the Football. So you’re a legitimate business, with a professional looking site. Heck, you even write a well-known blog. Business is growing, life seems grand. That is until some bad guy steals your customers’ credit card and personal information – because you didn’t keep that information secure or have encrypted transactions. After that, you’ll have plenty of customer contact…via their lawyers. Take information security seriously (and let your customers know what you are doing to keep their information safe).

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Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

KikScore.com – Online businesses check us out!

Welcome to the first post for Kikscore.com. This is the inaugural post.

If you read this blog……..all of your dreams will come true. This is the first post for the KikScore blog. Here is a brief introduction of the people, the company and the product.

People

We are 8 of us from Virginia to Washington DC to Denver that have come together to launch KikScore. This entire product was launched on nights and weekend work while working our day job so we are all pretty darn proud of pulling this product launch off. We have different skills sets from product development, business development, engineering and technology, scoring model development, legal, operations, watching movies, rooting for football teams that perpetually let us down and wanting desperately to act in a Jean Claude Van Damme-Karate movie. Watch out for our video ads….the last skill/wish may just come true!

Company

The people mentioned above make up the company the Interactive Security Group. ISG owns KikScore.com. The official movie of the company is SuperBad and Blades of Glory. For the science fiction lovers on our team, ok they get to say Star Trek is an officially movie of our Legal department.

Product

Online merchants have always had a trust problem with online shoppers. Which merchant should a shopper trust? Which merchant is a lying, stealing, mustachioed, tank-top wearing, jack booted thug that is going to steal a shoppers identity or ruin the shoppers credit. This perception of shopping in the dark has cost online merchants billions of dollars a year in lost sales.

Merchants now have the solution to the problem of showing that they are trustworthy. They also get to use public information about themselves to demonstrate that they are trustworthy to shoppers. KikScore takes a vast amount of information from multiple sources and provides it in one place for a merchant to show their shoppers that they are trustworthy. Even better, the merchant will have all of this information scored into a trust score or the KikScore. In one place, merchants will be able to demonstrate trust so that they can increase their sales!

People.Company.Product = KikScore.com

Tell us what you think……because we are here to stay.

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