Tag: clients

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business clients

Small Business Acquisitions

Acquisitions are nothing new. Your lawyer will call my lawyer or leave a message on my machine – or something like that. The problem starts with smaller acquisitions, where lawyer’s service would cost just as much as the cost of acquisition itself.

Last couple of days I was involved in the sale of my client’s web site. He sold his Russian food web site to another entrepreneur who already owns a brick and mortar store plus couple of related web sites. Obviously I cannot disclose the amount, but let’s just say it’s not large enough to think about involving lawyers.

The way the sale was proceeding was a good example of lack of knowledge on the part of small business owners. Small business owners don’t quite realize what is being sold and bought during the transfer of rights to the web site and it’s domain name. Some people think that the actual CD with web site code and database is the object of sale. Some think it’s a domain name. Some think it’s the login and password to administration area of the web site.

In either case while being the web master for the web site in question I became a third party who revised the contract, got the CD with latest back up of the web site code and database, passwords to admin area and e-mails.

Domain name and hosting transfer are still pending, as the client who bought the web site doesn’t clearly understand the difference between the two.

Categories
internet

Browser Wars – More Analysis

Browser Wars 2 - Small Business, Marketing and Web Design Blog As I was looking a the chart in my previous post (Are You Tired Of Browser Wars?) I realized that even this skim on data can provide enough for cheap marketing analysis. Since we’re not presenting a case study here let’s look at possibilities that small business can extract from data they already have at their possession.

The chart on the left presents the browser shares for this blog. The picture is very different. Internet Explorer has got only 56% of visits with 41% belonging to IE 7 (dark teal piece). Only 15% of you, readers of this blog, hadn’t update your Internet Explorer to the latest version, keeping your version 6 (green piece on a diagram). You are exposing yourself to much more vectors of attack then those who have IE 7. Total share of all Firefox visitors is a whopping 40% (dark orange piece of pie). Of course the picture is a bit skewed by my own visits, since I write posts via WordPress admin. But 40% looks too damn impressive. The little salmon-colored piece is a representation of Safari users – 2%. Opera – less then 1%.

What looks interesting to me is that while this blog is all about small business, most people who read it are much more computer-savvy then visitors to our client’s web site from last post. If you a starting entrepreneur just by looking at your stats you can learn a lot more about your audience. If your audience is computer savvy – you can talk more technical to them, use more sophisticated online selling tools and techniques. If your audience looks like the picture from previous post’s diagram – then you should resort to simple and proven methods, like simple contact form, phone contact, direct mailing and so on.

On the other hand – this may be your chance to find out that despite your efforts the audience that looks at your web site is just the wrong crowd.

Categories
business

Not Another Dumb Customer

Retail store - Small Business, Marketing and Web Design BlogDealing with customers who built their businesses in the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar retail stores and offices has its advantages. You get to learn from professionals how to build your business based on personal touch, attitude and having a feeling of your customers. It’s amazing if you think of it. Almost all the marketing techniques that we use on the internet came straight from offline world. But that’s not what I am getting at here.

The downside of talking to such business owners is that not many of them truly realize what internet can offer to them. For example, one of the prospective clients I get to talk to recently denied almost any attempt to build their store’s internet presence on the grounds that the one they already have built for them earned around $1,000 for last year. That’s for a store that sells merchandise priced between $10 and $300 dollars per item!

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