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This is the third part in a four part series of articles on customer service.

In part one we looked at a example from Starbucks customer service, where a simple free beverage voucher left a lasting positive impression on me. You can read this article here - Reputation Management: Starbucks Offers A Simple Lesson In Good Customer Service.

In part two I walked you through the typical “growing pains” of a solo entrepreneur running an Internet business attempting to deliver personal customer service and how often as a result of success, things start to fall apart. You can read this article here - Growing Pains: How To Manage Customer Service As A One Person Enterprise.

In this next part of the series, as promised, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes tour of how I handled customer service through various different Internet projects I’ve owned in the past eight years. My system today is far from perfect, but it’s definitely much better than what it was. My current set-up allows me to have time freedoms and still look after my most important constituents (most of the time anyway!).

Starting From The Beginning

To fully put this into perspective we have to take a trip down memory lane way back to the beginning of my Internet business timeline (still one of the most popular article series on this blog and overdue for an update to add the last couple of years).

My first true success online was my popular Magic card game site, MTGParadise.com started in the late nineties. I created that site as a true newbie. I learned how to FTP, code HTML, create basic graphics and spent countless nights changing my website.

To start with I wrote content for the website myself and learned some basic Internet marketing techniques to bring in traffic, which pretty much amounted to link exchanges and regular participation in popular Magic newsgroups (this was a LONG time ago, back in the Usenet heyday when newsgroups were the Internet).

My site grew slowly, but with no benchmarks to really compare against I was happy enough with my few hundred daily visitors, adding another ten or twenty new readers per month, treating the project purely as a hobby.

Eventually I started to receive guest articles from other people who played the card game, which helped lesson my writing load. I spent most of my time back then struggling to make HTML do what I wanted to do and did not write nearly as much as I do now as a blogger and information product creator.

My Magic site didn’t become a big success until I added a forum to it. I made the decision on a whim because Magic players, at least in Australia, were used to using email newsgroups to communicate with and spent the rest of their time reading static websites. There wasn’t a forum out there at the time for Australia magic players because they were content with newsgroups, which had a critical mass of users.

I didn’t exactly see this as a business opportunity at the time. What I was interested in was playing with the forum script and seeing if I could get it to work (I was a real glutton for punishment back then, wasting time trying to make technology work when I wasn’t a coder). I certainly did not expect what would happen next.

My First Taste of Success

One of the reasons I enjoyed Magic had nothing to do with playing the game. What I loved was to trade cards. As an entrepreneur at heart, sometimes I preferred the act of performing commerce rather than playing the game, so I did see the potential for my forum to become a hub for card trading. I just didn’t expect it to become THE card trading site for Australian Magic game players - but it did.

Within a few months the forums began to really take off thanks to the increasingly active card trading community.

If you can create a site that is based on user generated content fueled by a strong hook - a reason for people to come back to the site every day - well, then you have struck gold in Internet business terms. Many multi-million dollar web business today are based on this principle (think eBay, Facebook, YouTube).

My Magic site did not become a multi-million dollar business, but it did carve out it’s own little corner in a very specific niche. As a result my traffic grew to over a thousand visitors a day, which I joked was probably the entire online population of Magic players in Australia (it’s a popular card game, but Australia doesn’t have a large population). I made my first real online income thanks to advertising sponsors on MTGParadise.com.

If you are interested to learn more about how I made money with my Magic site, see - How to make money from your website using advertising.

The Empire Starts To Grow

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In my previous post about Starbucks reputation management we looked at how a few good customer service systems can be used as a marketing strategy to encourage word of mouth and result in a competitive advantage.

In the case of people like me and many of you, my readers, we operate Internet businesses that largely are a product of our own personal brand. We are entrepreneurs, bloggers, consultants, contractors or freelancers, and much of the customer service responsibility rests on our shoulders.

Being an independent operator or small business owner does not mean you can let the ball drop on good customer service. In this case reputation management is just as important since your business lives and dies on your ability to deliver what you promise and leave a lasting impression.

For a small business with a limited marketing budget, good customer service resulting in an above average reputation in the market, can result in acquiring new customers through existing client referrals - a “free” form of marketing.

During the start-up phase you have limited funds and one of the best strategies to survive this period of business growth is to use your existing clients as a marketing tool to bring in new clients (actually - this is a good strategy at any stage of business growth).

The cornerstone of achieving that outcome is good customer service, since your existing clients will not be willing to help you, nor will they feel compelled to talk about you and refer you to others, if they are not significantly impressed by - and benefit from - their interaction with your business.

Good customer service combined with a superior product can evoke a sense of reciprocity from your customers. They genuinely want your business to succeed, so much so that they go out of their way to endorse you. People like to spread things they consider valuable because in turn they enjoy the perception of being valuable as well. Most humans desire recognition from other humans - it’s a core human drive - and if you can loop your business into this motivation you have tapped the secret of word of mouth marketing.

Growing Pains As A Solo Business Owner or Blogger

I’ve worked independently all my life. Most of the first five years of my business experience were completely solo because I had the mentality that I needed to do things myself in order to save money.

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I’m in Hawaii now having come up from Fiji on my way to Canada. I’m presently typing this at a cafe on the top floor of the Ala Moana shopping center - the largest mall in Hawaii.

Typing on the third floor of the Ala Moana Center in Hawaii

In response to my recent blog posts written from places around the world, many people expressed a strong desire to emulate what I’m doing now - traveling and working in a functional and balanced manner (just without getting sick like I did!).

I’ve also had a couple of people email me explaining how they are also traveling the world and running their Internet business and how they believe more people could do the same, if only the knowledge of how to do so was out there.

In the spirit of helping others realize their dream of the traveling lifestyle, I’m going to present some tips to help you travel and run a successful business at the same time. I hope these ideas motivate you towards actually beginning the process of planning your trip, rather than constantly dreaming about it and putting it off until you have “more money” or “more time” or whatever belief that holds you back.

I don’t have a family traveling with me and I realize for many of you there are spouses and kids to consider too. Just remember your loved ones are variables you need to accommodate, they should not be reasons for not going, assuming the family are happy to come along.

It’s acceptable to hold off travel until children are out of school or independent, if you don’t want to disrupt their life. However the tips I’m about to present can certainly be applied to summer holidays and most of them apply just as well to any person who runs a business and wants more freedom.

Let’s get to it…

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Recently I was the willing target of several audio interviews. The topic of course, was blogging, however as is customary, most interviews begin with a little background study of the person in question.

As a result of telling my recent business history I found myself reminiscing about some of the ventures I was involved in during the previous 8 years or so. Most of them were online enterprises, but there was one experience where I was running a start-up based in the real world, an English tutoring school called “Aussie Tutor”.

If you dig into my earlier archives you will find several posts and podcasts were I mentioned my English school. It was an interesting time in my life, which taught me many lessons about business and in particular what I want from a business and what I don’t want.

Working 9 to 5 by Choice

While in charge of my school I came to fully realize what I had always known - I do not like having to be anywhere nine-to-five, five days a week.

Before I avoided a full time job specifically because of not wanting to be anywhere for such long periods of time to work for someone else. Not surprisingly, despite working for myself, I still did not like that I had to be somewhere during working hours.

Unfortunately, as a business with a physical premises, the English school demanded my presence every day unless I was willing to forgo any possible patronage that might walk in off the street. Ironically, despite my immaculate attendance, many days my English school was empty and I spent the time working online.

It didn’t take long for me to realize, despite my passion for the idea and my entrepreneurial spirit, my tutoring service was not going to work unless I made a significant commitment to it. I would need to either shut it down, or invest money and time and treat it like a true start-up.

At the time I had a growing Internet based business demanding my attention that was profitable (BetterEdit - an online proofreading service I sold in 2007). It wasn’t too hard to decide what to do next. I closed down Aussie Tutor, broke my lease and went back to working at home.

A Web Based Life

I am very thankful that I grew up during a period where the Internet also grew up. My very first casual job was web based (crafting websites for the business school at university) and my very first self created income stream came from the Internet too.

I can’t remember what life was like before the Internet, but I know it wasn’t nearly as good as it is now.

Tomorrow I hop on a plane and fly to Fiji. I’ll be there for 5 days before I board another plane where I’ll head to Hawaii. I’ll spend a week in the land of aloha, before jumping on another flight, this time to Vancouver, where a week of fun awaits. I’ll then make a short flight to Winnipeg, visit my grandmother, before settling in Toronto for 5 months. I intend to visit the USA for conferences and other fun things during my time in Canada too.

In Fiji I will be in a hotel but during the rest of my travels I’m staying in rented apartments with kitchens, private double beds and all the usual trimmings, at two thirds the price of equivalent standard hotels (I’m practicing a little 4-Hour Work Week accommodation hunting). I’ll have ample time and funds to do what I want and it’s all thanks to the World Wide Web. There’s not many occupations today that grant you this much freedom.

Ever present during this trip will be my laptop. My computer that connects me to the online world will serve as a communication tool to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues. I’ll blog, create content, work on products, market, network and effectively live a very similar life to what I usually do at home in Brisbane.

The scenery might change, but the purpose and lifestyle doesn’t - and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Live the Stereotype - Laptop on the Beach

We all know the archetypical image of the entrepreneur sitting on the beach with their laptop, logging on to check how much money they made during the previous night and then settling back to a day full of sun, sand and sleep - a perpetual holiday.

I’ve already written about my disdain for the traditional non-working holiday, however the gist of the laptop on the beach image is definitely something I appreciate because it represents fantastic freedom. A business that can function - and even grow - despite your absence or location in the world, and the freedom to choose when to work, how to work and what to work on, is a great business.

This is a far cry from waking up at 8am to open the doors to a 3rd floor English tutoring school.

How To Build a Framework for Life Portability

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We’ve almost nutted out the bugs with the new design and I must say I’m very happy with how everything looks. I’ll talk more about the design process (and reveal who did my blog design) in a later post, now I want to tell you about a little free report I’m giving away to my RSS subscribers as part of the new blog design launch.

My First E-Book (unreleased until now)

Several years ago around early 2006 I had just begun blogging seriously and had spent the previous six months pumping out some of my early pillar articles.

At this time my proofreading business BetterEdit was my main focus (I sold it in 2007) and I was not a professional blogger. I don’t think I was making much, if anything from my blog yet, but my other business was doing well and I made a good living from it.

Those who have read this blog from the beginning might remember back during the early days I talked a lot more about entrepreneurship, setting up a business and general passive income strategies - and not so much about blogging (though I was starting to write about it even then).

It was around that time I decided to write my first e-book. I had no idea what I would do with it, but I felt with the several years experience running a few different businesses and I had enough content to produce a short book.

How to Start an Internet Business by Yaro Starak

Over the course of a couple of months I wrote a 50 page report detailing some of the key lessons I learned about starting and running my business and what I felt were the foundation principles necessary that all entrepreneurs understood and practiced.

The end result was a book I titled “How To Start An Internet Business…and stay happy doing it“.

For the new release today, I decided to change the tile to something a little more appealing to most people’s desires -

“How To Start An Internet Business…and make your first $1,000 online“.

The book is not about basic tutorials on the practical aspects like setting up websites, choosing domain names, etc. It talks more about mindset and business strategy, although I include 12 steps necessary to start an online business at the end which are quite practical.

The book is a companion to this blog. You can read it and gain a grasp of what you need to do and how you should think when starting your Internet business, and then use the content from within this blog to find information on the finer details about Internet marketing.

Create A Passive Income Business

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