Why is it so hard for people in business to understand that once they have lost the trust of clients and customers, it is all but impossible to get it back?

Over the years, I’ve discovered the words of Luke 16:10 to hold true more often than not.

People tend to be honest, or dishonest, in both the little things and the big things. And it is foolish to believe that a man, or business, that has broken trust with you once, won’t break trust with you again.

Case in point is Kozzi.com, who decided to change the pricing structure of their media site, and terminated all paid subscriptions regardless of the time left for those subscriptions. Dan K only emailed us about it after the fact, after receiving complaints from paid members who were unable to access the media they had paid for.

This post is in response to the email I received today. [image]

Dan,

I entered into a contract with you March 27, 2012. On June 28, barely 3 months later, you informed me my account had been closed, because you were changing the pricing structure on the site. I responded with a demand that you honor the terms of our contract. Instead, you refunded my subscription price, apparently assuming that returning my money would “fix it.”

You assumed wrong.

I didn’t want my money back. I wanted the service I had, in good faith, trusted you to provide me when I entered into a contract with you by purchasing an annual subscription for the assorted media on Kozzi.com.

Nothing short of honoring that commitment would, or will, “fix it.” If you were a US business, I would have filed suit for breach of contract. I would not have been alone.

Your email dated today, August 27, 2012, is insulting.

People who paid for the service, and had that service terminated, were not “saddened that such an affordable stock site had ended its program”. We were livid. Livid about the breach of contract, and livid that a resource we had secured by paying ahead was being ripped away. It felt no different than if you had broken into our homes and stolen our property.

I further question whether you actually refunded everyone. I suspect you only refund those who complained.

You really blew it. All those people who had accounts in good standing would now be your strongest advocates had you honored your commitment to the end of the term we had prepaid.

Better yet, if you allowed us to continue to renew our subscriptions at the price we had signed up for until such time as we let them expired, you would have had a loyal force of customers who would be happy to recommend you to their friends and colleagues at every opportunity.

We like doing business with people we can trust. But your former premium subscribers do not trust you. Not the ones I have talked with, anyway.

How can we be sure that you won’t make further changes that put our businesses in jeopardy? How do we know that an image we purchased one week, won’t have a licensing change the next? A change that makes the use we purchased the image for, a use that was acceptable when we purchased it, a copyright infringement going forward.

And now you want us to trust you, and to give you more of our hard earned money, to purchase the same media on qualitystockphotos.com and affordablevideo.com that you also have on Kozzi.com!

The first question that comes to mind is, have you ruined the reputation of Kozzi.com so thoroughly that you feel the need to open new websites in order to ensnare the unwary?

I do NOT want to do business with you. I do NOT trust you. And I will NOT recommend you to anyone. Ever. Friend or foe.

There is a right way to handle the growth of your business. And there is a wrong way. Anytime you break trust with your existing clients and customers, and alienate them as Kozzi.com has done, you are going about it in the wrong way.

There will be follow up posts on this topic, with specific suggestions on how to make changes that help you grow your online business, and keep your existing customers happy at the same time.

Disclaimer: This post is based solely on my own opinions of the events that took place. The subscription purchase and later refund were made through Paypal and are documented. I have all the emails I have received from Kozzi, as well.

The newly formed chat meets every Saturday at 9:00 pm GMT, a time that is more convenient for our peers on the old world side of the Atlantic Ocean. The chat is hosted by our own Diva, Anita Cross (me), and runs for up to 4 hours.

How did IMC come about? Well, a lot of us hang out at another marketing chat on Saturdays, but the time is difficult for just about anyone who isn’t in the United States. A group of ladies, including a couple Divas, were hanging out in a Skype group, and one thing led to another… and International Marketing Chat was born!

Here are a few things you should know

• Men are welcome, too. Just because the room is hosted on IM Ladies, doesn’t mean only ladies can come to this chat.
• All marketers are welcome. Just because the time is convenient for Europeans, doesn’t mean you have to be a European to come to this chat
• We are Professionals. Chat can be a lot of fun, but as professionals, we try to keep our conversations ‘above the belt’, if not necessarily all about marketing.

When and Where

We meet every Saturday, from 9:00 pm GMT until 1:00am GMT. We always start on time, but we have been know to let out early.

To login, go here: http://www.imladies.com/conference.php

And while you’re there, take a moment to sign up for our weekly reminder. You have my promise that this list will only be used to send you reminders for this chat. We do have paid sponsors, and the email will include the link(s) to those sponsors under my signature.

About Paid Sponsors

We will have one or two paid sponsors each month. These are companies or individuals who are interested in earning your business and have agreed to pay a minimal fee for that exposure.

Would you like to be a paid sponsor? Just send me a quick note via the Contact page, and I’ll let you know what the price and availability are.

See You There

We are all looking forward to meeting you. So stop by and introduce yourself, and stick around for the discussion. See you there.

It’s really hard to take such emails seriously. If you’re walking down the street, and a homeless man begs you for a dollar or two to buy something to eat, you might feel some compassion for him, and hand over a couple of bucks. Maybe.

On the other hand…

Imagine if a clean and sober man were to approach you and asked you to drive him to his job interview tomorrow, in another state–oh and, by the way, he can’t afford to pay you for the gas. Would you even consider it? Remember, this is a total stranger.

Here is the gist of the email San received:

I found your website through your YouTube channel while researching how to find a good niche for Amazon products. Are you an Amazon Associate, and are you making any money with it?

I want to see if I can earn a little extra money every week by building a number of mini stores around a niche.

What do you use for keyword research? What do I need to do for SEO to rank well with the search engines and so on.

I would appreciate this for free, if you could, as I do not have any extra money to get started.

He then said how very much he appreciated any help she could give him, thanked her for her time, and went on to say he was looking forward to a response from her.

I don’t know what her response was, aside from the fact she did respond and directed him to her blog. However, his email hit a nerve, so I wrote a response of my own to share with the readers here.

Dear Sir,

I wish I could help you for free, however, I do not have any extra time I can afford to give away. While you are looking for a little extra money each week, I support myself and my family by being paid to help others get started with their businesses online.

I will tell you this: Any successful business requires a commitment of time and money. The less money you have to invest, the more time you will need to invest, as you will be doing for yourself what you cannot afford to pay others to do for you.

The answers to your questions are all available for free online. You just need to do the research, which you’ve demonstrated you can do, as you found me while doing research.

People who make their living online are not going to be willing to hold your hand for free, but many of them have posted in forums and have blogs, where they post the very information you are looking for.

But make no mistake, getting started online will require an investment of money, as well. Each website will required a registered domain name, and you will need to pay to host your site(s) on someone’s web server.

That is the least you can expect to pay, but there will be other costs as you go along.

It will take much longer to get your online business going, when you don’t have the money to hire some help, but it can be done.

I wish you the best of luck.

Sincerely,

Now, the fact of the matter is, that advice is dead on. The people with the skills to succeed online, are people who have worked hard to learn those skills. They’ve made their share of mistakes, and learned from them. And they won’t take too kindly to being asked to share those skills for free, no matter how politely.

Not that the successful are stingy with that information. Anyone interested can find out whatever they need to know by doing research on Google. Successful online entrepreneurs will be active in one or more forums, most likely have a blog or two, may even have interviews posted on authority sites. And, of course, many will have videos on YouTube, like our own Diva, Cenay Nailor.

So if you are one of the many who want to try your hand at an online business, you should be prepared to invest both time and money into your new business. And don’t expect one-on-one hand-holding… er, coaching… for free.

There are those who will tell you that all you have to do is believe, create a vision of what you want to achieve and the universe will bring it to you on a silver platter. Hmm. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve told myself, “this is the day my lottery numbers come up”, but as of today…

Zilch!

However, belief in yourself and knowing that you are going to be successful does a couple of things.

Focus

It focuses your mind on the end goal. Very important if you want to avoid the pitfalls of jumping from one shiny object to the next.

Some people will never be successful no matter how hard they try, or how long they try for. Why? Because they don’t give themselves a chance. If it hasn’t worked after a couple of months (or in some cases even just a couple of weeks), they’re off looking for something else.

If you are too easily distracted from working on your business, you can’t claim to be interested in building it up into a successful venture. Don’t tell me you’ve tried and tried, when all you’ve really done set up a website and then surf the forums, or post some spammy comments on some spammy site.

Focusing on your business is a full time committment.

Action

Funnily enough, once you realise ‘this is going to work‘, you get excited about doing all the stuff you never wanted to do before. It’s no longer a chore to build links, create content, network with other marketers, produce videos. Not only that, but your quality standards go through the roof.

I used to be quite happy if I wrote an article of about 400-500 words. Hey, that’s all they wanted so why waste my time giving them more than they asked for? Except, that when you want to create a successful business, you realise that the best way to do that is to always give people more than they want.

Committment

Sometimes you just wanna have fun right? The beauty of being committed to your business is that it is fun. You get a helluva lot more pleasure from taking your business one step closer to success than you ever will from watching an episode of your favourite TV show.

Who needs drugs when the adrenalin rush from waking up to find money has mysteriously appeared in your bank account overnight is enough to power the next space rocket?

Committment to being successful means you don’t need to worry when things go wrong. You just set about putting them right and move on. While failure to succeed might not be an option, failures along the way are going to happen.

You will make mistakes. Learn from them and then get over them. Fast.

Motivation

The driving force behind your success. It’s your reason for doing what you do, for getting up in the morning, for picking yourself up whenever you fall down, for building the biggest, baddest, best damn business in the world.

Do you know what it is? I very much doubt it will be money. So many people think they want to be successful so they can ‘be rich’. In reality, money is rarely a driving force behind any successful person. If it was, they’d quit once they’d accumulated more money than they could ever possibly hope to spend. Yet they never do. And neither will you.

Figure out what your motivation is because that is what is going to keep you going when times get tough.

Sounds really easy, right? Not so much.

Well, at least it didn’t used to be. Now, thanks to a tool put out by Wordtracker, you can find the top 100 questions people ask at the search engines, using your primary keyword. It lists the questions asked, in order and shows exactly how many times that question was asked.

So, in addition to the great insights into your target market’s mindset, there is also some fabulous content ideas embedded in the list. Just take a look at a quick search I did with the keyword eczeme.

It lists the top 100 results down the page (the image only shows the top 15) and many of them could have been articles, using the question as the post title. Others point to product ideas that your target market is already looking for.

Need a little help deciding your next blog post or article? Want to know exactly what your ideal customer is looking for? Check out the Keyword tool at Wordtracker. With a free registration, you get 20 searches per day at their Keyword Questions tool.

About This Diva

Cenay Nailor is an Online Marketing & Blogging Coach with mad technical skills she loves sharing with Videos and How To Articles. Naturally, she loves connecting with other online marketers and potential Divas. Feel free to contact her for help with your projects.

Alas, links are what makes the Internet go round. Think of them as kind of like the ‘loose lips’ of the Internet. Gossip Mongerers, telling us about everything that’s happening out there in the big wide world.

Without them, how would we ever find anything? How would the Internet find us? (Ok, that makes my brain hurt. Forget I asked that.)

Suffice to say, that if you want anyone to find you, or your website on the Internet, then you’re going to have to get some links on some other websites, that point back to your website.

This has two benefits:

1. People visiting the other website learn about your website and might come visit you.
2. Search engines visiting the other website learn about your website and will come visit you.

Let’s deal with people first.

People and Links

Ever turn on your computer to kill a few minutes while you’re waiting for dinner and then find yourself still there several hours later? Yeah? (I’m so glad I’m not alone)

Wanna know how it happens? It’s pretty simple really.

You visit your favourite website, maybe it’s YouTube, maybe it’s Mashable, maybe it’s your local car dealership… doesn’t matter which one it is. The chances are that while you’re there, you find some interesting snippet of information, but you have to click a link to read the rest of it.

So you click.

And when you click, you end up on another website. Which also has some interesting stuff on it. And more links.

And all these links lead you to all these places you’ve never been before. And then, BAM, dinners cold, and you’re in the doghouse for spending so much time ‘messing around’ on the Internet.

Search Engines and Links

Unlike you, search engines have nothing better to do than follow links all day (and all night) long. The more links they can consume in a day the better they feel. They don’t have to stop for dinner, or spend time with their families, or sleep, or eat, or, well, anything really.

Of course, search engines aren’t human. So when it comes to deciding whether a particular link is good or bad, they have to resort to geeky stuff. Like algorithms.

Nobody knows for sure (except for the folks who code the algorithms) exactly how each search engine’s algorithm works. And they ain’t telling.

When they find a link they run it through their algorithm to decide if t’s worth including in their search results, exactly where it should appear in those results, and for what keyword(s).

Quality or Quantity

So you’ve built your site and now you want to start building links so that everyone can find it. Do you go out and build a hundred links a day, using whatever automated spamming tool you can lay your hands on?

Or do you focus on finding high quality, related websites and linking manually from them?

Or do you mix it up and do both?

AAAGGGHHHH! Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Actually, the decision isn’t that hard to make. Or it shouldn’t be.

Quality wins every time. Just as it does with your content. Nobody likes crap. Search engines know this, so crap links don’t hold much weight with them.

You’ll do much better with one high quality link from a relevant, authority website, than you will with a hundred crummy forum profiles.

I’ll let you into a little secret.

One of my niche sites recently recieved a link from Cracked.com. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. If I did, I’d be out there rinsing and repeating like it was going out of fashion.

But Cracked is a very reputable, high ranking site. As a result, my site jumped up in the rankings overnight and recieved a month’s worth of visitors in less than 24 hours.

That’s the power of a good quality backlink.

Besides, we’ve already discussed the fact that linkbuilding is boring. So the less links you have to build the better as far as I’m concerned.

Outsourcing Linkbuilding

Just as a final note, be very wary of outsourcing your backlinking efforts. In 99% of cases, you’ll find the backlinks they build are done so using automated spam posting software, the links will be nothing more than profile links on crummy forums that nobody has ever heard of (including the search engines).

If you’re lucky, all that will happen is you’ll lose some money and your website will occupy the same position in the search engines as it did previously. If you’re not so lucky, losing the money will be the least of your worries!

Yeah, right. And when the moon’s full you can still see the cabbage patch I was born under.

Luckily, there really isn’t much to learn. And you can find everything you need to know for free. You just have to be willing to put in  a little bit of time and effort searching for things, and then get down and dirty by actually trying them out.

Successful Internet Marketing comes down to knowing just a couple of things  and being able to do them well.

Drive Traffic

Whatever you’re selling you need to be able to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Doesn’t matter how great it is if nobody sees it. Doesn’t matter how badly folks want it if they don’t know where to get it.

As an Internet Marketer you have to know how to get people from where they are, to where you want them to be. Not always as easy as it sounds. The Internet’s a pretty big place and there’s lots and lots of places where folks can get lost.

Convert Traffic to Sales

Unfortunately, just getting folks to the right place isn’t enough. (Damn this Internet Malarkey). You then have to know how to convert them into paying customers. Why should they buy your blue widget when Jane Smith is selling the exact same widget for half the price?

You might not like to think of yourself as a salesman, but deep down, that’s what it all comes down to. The trick is in understanding that the salesmanship starts way before anyone actually arrives at your sales page.

The Conversion Myth

There are lots of myths in the world. Some of them, like dragons and tooth fairies are pretty harmless. Some of them, such as becoming an overnight millionaire from Internet Marketing, are downright destructive.

And then are those which fall somwhere in the middle. The conversion myth is a prime example. Ask any IM expert and they’ll tell you that in order to increase conversions you have to be constantly testing and tweaking your sales page. Change the headline, change the font, the colour, tweak the copy… and so on and so forth.

That’s all good stuff.  It’s important stuff to know and a little change can make a big difference. But it’s getting ahead of the game. Tweaking and testing your sales page comes after you’ve made sure you’ve optimised your visitors to the max.

In truth, improving conversions starts with improving the quality of your traffic.

If you get the right visitors, you’ll need fewer of them to make sales.  It’s good, old fashioned common sense. Do you think a golfing fanatic would be interested in your latest, breakthrough car racing game? How many fashion conscious teenagers would be likely to snap up your latest deal on bathroom accessories?

Get the picture? It wouldn’t matter a damn how good your sales page was, or how much you tweaked your headline. You wouldn’t make any sales because the people looking just aren’t interested. Period.

Plus, you run the risk of ruining a perfectly good sales page trying to make sales to the wrong people. (been there, done that, … not good )

Internet Marketing 101

Get the right offer in front of the right people. (We’ll assume you’ve got the right offer because it goes without saying (or it should) that you’ll be a lot more successful marketing a good product/service than a crappy one).

Rinse and repeat.

There are lots of things you can learn about Internet Marketing. You just can’t learn them altogether or all at once. Get the basics down first before you move on to the more advanced stuff.

And don’t be tempted to move ahead too quickly. Yeah, those bright, shiny, ‘must have’ tools look good, along with the latest ‘all in one’ course that promises to hand you the keys to the Internet bank vault on a silver platter.

Trouble is, the folks selling them have already figured out that the new kids on the block (that’s you btw) are exactly the sort of person who is likely to buy them.

Yup. Thought there’d still be a few of you out there.

And of course, you’ve all been told you’re crazy. There’s no such thing. If there was, then everyone who set out to run an online business would succeed and be filthy rich in no time at all.

Well, far be it for me to disagree with all those experts out there. But I’m here to tell you that not only does it exist, but that magic bullet can be found closer to home than you think.

Mind Mastery

If you’re not master of your own mind, you’ll never be master of anything else.

The good Lord gave you a body that can stand most anything. It’s your mind you have to convince. — Vince Lombardi

It’s not just about self discipline, not just about forcing yourself to work when you’d rather be off partying with your mates. It’s about realising that you have a choice. You can either be successful and achieve your dreams. Or not.

Once you make the decision that you are going to be successful you will find yourself doing what you need to do in order to make it happen. Thinking isn’t enough. Dreaming won’t cut it. Visualising it is a step in the right direction. But we all know that one step doesn’t get you very far.

Think of it like this.

You want to grow roses. Are you going to go out and plant poppy seeds?

Once you’ve planted your roses, do you think dreaming of how beautiful they are going to look will be enough for them to grow? Or do you think maybe they’ll grow better with a little nurturing?

The thing is that once you decide you are going to grow roses, once you let your mind govern that decision, you will find yourself spending every waking minute doing whatever it takes to grow the best damn roses in the world.

One of my all time favourite videos is Will Smith being interviewed about his ‘I Am Legend’ movie.  Watch the video and then ask yourself, ” Are you willing to die on the treadmill’?

Loading Your Bullet

The great thing about magic bullets is that you can use them over and over again.

Want to know how to build a website? Load a magic bullet into your mind and pull the trigger?

Want to become a video master? Just reload that same bullet and pull the trigger again.

“Victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay it’s price.” – Sun Tzu

I used Weebly to create my very first ever website. It was a very simple, (and I might add, very ugly) squeeze page. But it worked like a charm. I used it to sign up over 300 subscribers to my list in just a few weeks.

If you don’t have a clue about HTML, and are left totally bamboozled by WordPress, then head over to Weebly.com, sign yourself up for a free account, and set to creating whatever type of website you want.

I promise you can have a website up and running in about 15 minutes. In fact, you’ll spend more time trying to decide which design to use, than you will actually putting the site together.

Of course, you may not believe me. (Ouch, I’m wounded) After all, there’s an awful lot of hype out there in the online marketing world. But that’s ok. You can watch the video below and see for yourself.

See? Hardly rocket science is it?

If you’re going to be doing any sort of marketing online, you really will need a website. And when you’re just starting out it’s kinda hard to figure out how to build one. Now you don’t have to.

Which means you have no excuse for not getting started right now.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the PLR pack consists of the following goodies:

• One 800 word article on the subject of Article Marketing.
• One e-cover that you can use to offer the article in PDF format.
• One DVD cover that you can use to offer the article in video format.
• One background graphic to be used to create a PowerPoint presentation.

The graphics all match and are all left blank for you to input your own text. This will obviously depend on what you choose to call the article when you rewrite it. Notice, I said ‘when‘ you rewrite it, and not ‘if’.

PLR is a great resource for Internet Marketing, but only if you take the time to use it right. Using it ‘as is‘ won’t do you any good at all. And, in fact, is likely to hurt your website and your reputation if you do. So don’t.

Okay?

Good.

What To Do With PLR

First of all, you need to rewrite this article. Because it’s free and no optin is required, (it’s not an ‘ethical bribe’ in other words), you can bet your bottom dollar there will be a zillion copies of it all over the place. Using it in it’s present form therefore won’t get you anywhere fast.

Use it for ideas for other articles, break it up, add to it, take away from it…the choice is yours.

Now, because most people will stop at just using the article then here is where you get to truly benefit.

The graphics I’ve included here aren’t just there to take up space. You really should be making all of your articles work harder for you. And that means using the content in other ways.

Converting articles into a PDF, video, audio… doesn’t take much time and the increased backlinks and traffic can be devastatingly powerful to your site. Even more so since Google’s Panda update in February.

Editing Graphics

You don’t need fancy graphic software to edit these graphics. There are several free resources you can use. If you don’t know how to use the graphic editing software, then you can watch the video below.

I made this video after creating some free e-book covers for my mates over at the Warrior Forum, but you edit these images just the same. And by the way, if you want to grab the e-book covers, you can get them at this link.

So, now that you’re done watching the video and you’re ready to grab your PLR pack, just hit the link below, save it to your computer and put it to use.