Surveys show that 85% of success in life relates to your communication, human relations skills, and "emotional intelligence”.

Joe Batten, an American motivational speaker said: "Before you tell, ask; before you talk, listen; after you listen, relate; and always show that you care. When you can translate care, people will want to do business with you and details will not get in the way."

From a business viewpoint you also have to build relationships and get customers to trust you. To do that you have to:

1. Be Reliable

• Do what you say you're going to do
• Do it when you say you're going to do it
• Do it right the first time
• Get it done on time
• Under promise and over deliver

2. Be Responsive

• Be available
• Be accessible
• Be willing
• Be helpful
• Be informative

3. Solve problems

• Solve customers’ unique problems and they will continue to be your customer.
• Put yourself in the customer's shoes and feel what they feel.
• Does this mean that all your marketing and advertising needs to be “touchy feely”? No. You can still create calls to action that increase sales whilst observing all these principles. For example: Tell them about a price increase! People want a 'good deal'. If prices are going up on a specific date, let your customers know. They'll want to buy before the price increases.
• Offer a trial period trial periods are a great way to get new customers.
• Offer a special deal, extra service or a lower price during your trial / introductory period.
• Offer a Guarantee: people want to know there's no risk involved if they're not satisfied.

You can download a PDF version of this article here.

Is your site optimized?

Organisations need to optimise their search engine marketing organic listings, general advertising and pay per click) to acquire more customers or members, sell more online and for many other reasons.

There are nearly 1 billion people with Internet access. Almost 550 million searches are conducted worldwide on the Internet every day. A searcher is proactively requesting information. They are already looking for what you offer. They are a live prospect. When looking at the search results page, most users look for a number of specific items, at least one of which must be present to capture a click through.

These items include the key phrase in the title or description, product information and trusted brand names and vendors. Nearly 60% of users have a search engine of preference, but will use another engine if they're not satisfied with the results from the first engine. So, although users may give Google as their engine of preference, they may actually use another engine, such as Yahoo or MSN, for a significant percentage of their searches. There are a number of things that are very important in search engine optimisation:

• Optimized page text. Every page must be optimized for a few key search phrases. These are phrases that people actually use when searching for information related to that page. Writing a unique and compelling title for every web page and including target phrases in each page's title, description and keywords meta-tags are also important.

• Crawler friendly navigation. Making sure a crawler can easily navigate your entire site. This is often accomplished by providing a secondary text-link navigation scheme or site map. Reducing variables in page URLs is very important for dynamic sites.

• In bound links from important sites. Links to your website from important sites (such as the most popular directories and other relevant sites) will boost your popularity ranking.

• Search engine friendly website design. Excessive use of design features that can cause problems for crawlers (such as flash, frames, and dynamic content) will negatively impact your search engine visibility, as will ‘heavy’ pages that do not call scripts etc. or pages that use languages (e.g. JavaScript) that search engines cannot read.

Once a site is optimised it needs to be refreshed and changed and kept up to date. In general search engines like ‘new’ content so continuing optimisation is essential. The optimised site can now serve as the basis for an effective Pay Per Click campaign as it will have helped to generate the relevant keywords and phrases to be used. For a PPC campaign the following approach is essential to optimise results:

• Audience – who are they? What would they use to search on? What keywords / phrases would they use?

• Offer – what can we do to distinguish our offer from the competition? We have a maximum of about 30 words in which to make the offer, so it has to be good and state what’s in it for the searcher?

• Product – what is better about our product. See the constraints in offer above.

• Creative – there aren’t any pictures in PPC so how else can we be creative?

All of this however is wasted unless an EBusiness optimised site backs it up. This means:

• Thinking of the customer – and thinking how they think

• Making finding product and price easy

• Making terms clear and payment simple

• Ensuring in stock and short delivery timescales

• Making communications clear – mail, phone, EMail

• Testing on an ongoing basis - test, track and try, test, track and try

You can download a PDF version of this article here.

The Creative Person

Much of the thinking done in formal education emphasizes the skills of analysis, teaching students how to understand claims, follow or create a logical argument, work out the answer, eliminate incorrect paths and focus on the correct one. However, there is another kind of thinking, one that focuses on exploring ideas, generating possibilities, looking for many right answers rather than just one. Both of these kinds of thinking are vital to a successful working life, yet the latter one tends to be ignored. But in a world where success now depends on doing the right next thing, not just the next thing right creativity is an essential skill. In his "Introduction to Creative Thinking", Robert Harris states that the characteristics of creative people are that they are:

• curious
• problem seekers
• people who enjoy challenges
• optimistic
• able to suspend judgment
• comfortable with imagination
• able to see problems as opportunities
• interested in solving problems
• are able to see problems as emotionally acceptable
• willing to challenge assumptions
• hard workers, don't give up easily, persevere.

The cost of loyalty?

It has been said that many businesses find that 80% of their business comes from only 20% of their customers. Those loyal customers who purchase regularly. Although it is vital for any business to attract first time and occasional customers, it is usually much more beneficial to turn the ones you have into loyal customers. Why? If you have 1,000 customers who buy 1 product each year, you will sell 1,000 products a year. If you have 100 customers who buy 10 products each year, you will still sell 1,000 products a year. But which is likely to cost less and make more in both the short and long term? Maybe a simple example with 1,000 customers helps:

Which customer group would you prefer?