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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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You have to love the Internet marketing world. There’s a certain amount of jaded bitterness that surfaces when you sell something that presents a make money online opportunity. Every time I promote a product related to marketing or online income generation, there are those people out there who have adopted the belief that all marketers are liars and their products are more sales than substance.

Some might argue that it’s the hype - the language used to sell Internet marketing, in particular the long sales page format, that elicits the snarky comments or the sighs of “not again” from a handful of viewers. The disdain is palpable from some people and as much as I understand where they are coming from, it would be nice to only deal with satisfied customers.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time and everyone has a different experience and mindset, which isn’t always positive. No matter what you sell, there are people who will take issue with what you do and how you do it to the point where they feel the need to publicly state their disapproval.

I’m a bit tired of negativity, so today I’m going to relay to you three “golden nuggets” from three products I purchased from Internet marketers who sell Internet marketing products - the prime targets of the naysayers.

I spent at least $1,000 on each of these information products and they have all had a positive impact on my business and returned more than their cost in increased income and resource savings. Note these ideas - the nuggets - are just a sample of what I learned from the products and as anyone successful knows, it’s the two or three really powerful ideas that make a big difference.

Here are three examples -

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One of the biggest advantages of building an authority blog in your niche is you start to get the attention of the big players in your industry.

This is a HUGE advantage - In fact it can be the difference between operating your business in obscurity and struggling to convince anyone to promote your product, to becoming a big player yourself when you have A-list joint venture partners promoting your work.

If you don’t have an authority blog there really is only one other surefire way to get on the radar of the guys and girls with the big email lists and the big blogs - get in their face at an event.

You see this photo?

That was taken at Rich Schefren’s Strategic Profits event last year in February. It features Rich on the left, me in the middle and Mike Filsaime on the right.

If you don’t know these two guys, it doesn’t matter, but what does matter is the size of their email lists and influence. Rich just won the StomperSMARTS affiliate competition, so he sold more of that course as an affiliate than any other and it’s safe to say his email list is way over 150,000 people now - probably over 250,000.

Mike is known for his viral marketing power and his goal to build the largest email list. I have no idea how large his list is now, but I suspect it’s over 500,000 subscribers, which is insane, and he’s constantly in the top 10 of affiliates for the Internet marketing niche.

The reason I mention these two guys is that thanks to attending an event I put my face in their sphere of attention. Since then we have met again and spoken over email and on calls. To put it simply, these two guys are now willing to promote a product of mine assuming it is quality. Just having Mike and Rich on board as affiliates is enough to launch a business and these are two of the most valuable relationships I have.

It all started after attending an event.

Rich’s Next Event In Disney World in February

If you currently operate in the Internet marketing, business or social media industries then pay attention to this. Rich and his Strategic Profits business are putting on their next event coming up in February. It’s called “New Beginnings” and it’s in Disney World!

If you want a chance to meet some of the best of the best and begin relationships with people who could become A-List partners for your next launch, this is an event worth attending. You can check out the full details at -

http://www.strategicprofits.com/live1/

There are various levels of price, but you can get a ticket for under $1,600 if you just want to attend the main event for 2 1/2 days, February 24-26 2008.

Here’s the spiel I just received via email…

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Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link.

Download the MP3 [ 19 Minutes - 5 MB]

Yesterday I was sitting at my computer facing a few too many emails and a rather large list of things to do and I could already feel my head start to hurt.

So what did I do? - I went to the park!

I decided if I was going to continue working I would probably be in considerable head pain by the end of the day, so I dropped everything and went to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mt-Cootha and hung out with the birds.

I had my iRiver MP3 player with me and was listening to some podcasts, which created a desire to make one of my own impromptu rambling podcasts. My little iRiver has a built-in microphone, so I was itching to see how good it was - and wow, I’m impressed. The audio quality is not bad I’m sure you will agree, though I hope you like the sound of birds in the background :-).

The podcast is a short one about a whole range of Internet business topics starting with social marketing, moving on to email lists and then finishing with a little note on keeping perspective.

Show Notes

1. Yaro talks about the recent Rich Schefren Attention Doctrine and StomperSMARTS launches
2. A look at how the Internet marketing focus is shifting to social marketing
3. How Yaro is using email lists with his blog to make money
4. Why it is important to focus on intrinsic values and not just money

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 19 Minutes - 5 MB]

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It’s Monday morning in Australia and I’m about to have a group meeting at my house with my team to begin work on something new.

For most of my Internet business career I worked solo - and I really mean solo.

I built my website myself, created marketing materials like flyers and posters, promoted my websites, located and managed sponsors and provided customer and sales support. The only thing I didn’t do was actually provide the services, I had contractors do the editing when it came to BetterEdit.com my proofreading business and I had writers write the content on my first successful online venture, MTGParadise.com (although I did a lot of writing myself on that site too).

It’s amazing how far your enthusiasm and work ethic can take you in business. I’m proud of my achievements as a solo entrepreneur and I’m amazed at what I did manage to get done by myself. However after about 7 years of working without any support I realized that I couldn’t keep it up for ever, plus there was another pressing reason to get help - I had reached a ceiling point in my growth. Your business can only get so big if it’s just you doing the work.

With typical timing, it was around this time that Rich Schefren came to town with his first ground breaking report, the Internet Business Manifesto. I read Rich’s report and found myself agreeing with everything he said. I wasn’t exactly shocked by the revelation as some Internet marketers were when they first read the report. I knew I was working too hard and doing too much by myself, my problem was lack of action to change the situation.

Things finally did change in 2006. With my blogging business growing and my cashflow increasing I knew I could realistically outsource tasks to other people. With a looming trip overseas I decided I to do two things -

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