Handling the Negatives, Part II

Last post we covered :

1. People want instant access to solve problems

2. People want to get off your mailing list

Today we will talk about other factors that you will need to plan for to minimise the impact of things going wrong in your online business.

3. People want refunds

In the “normal” world, people expect that products they purchased can be taken back to the store for refunds. As an online marketer, this is an expectation that you will need to meet or confront at the time of purchase.

There are two ways that you can deal with this situation:

a) Highlight near your payment button the terms and conditions of purchase. You may have a 30 or 60 day money back guarantee.

b) If you absolutely do not wish to allow refunds on a product, you must say so near the payment button.

However if you look closely at your merchant agreement e.g. PayPal or Clickbank, the fine print indicates that you must provide a refund if requested, within a certain date. The only way to avoid refunds is to highlight NOT to purchase if refunds are desired.

The way you manage refunds is crucial to how your customers will perceive your integrity and honesty.

4. What to do when your website crashes or you run out of bandwidth

If your website becomes unavailable during a promotion, you will need to quickly mail everyone using your autoresponder, letting them know the circumstances. It is also good practise to mail them briefly once again when it comes back into service.

Note that if your autoresponder is run on your own host, and your host goes down, you will be unable to mail your list and your communication will be totally cut off. This is one reason why using a professional autoresponder is essential to your survival as an online marketer.

If you are running a promotion and run out of bandwidth, this will cause a significant amount of frustration with your customers. Your bandwidth requirements will depend on several factors, including:

a) size of graphic images – aim to keep them below 15kb

b) size of pages – aim to keep total size below 50kb

c) number of pages being loaded

d) number of people accessing your site

e) files that are downloaded from your site

f) number of days of your campaign

For example, if you expect 10,000 people to visit your site and load 20 pages that are 50kb each, then without downloading any files your (minimum) bandwidth is 10 Meg.

If your campaign runs for 10 days and each person downloads a 100kb file (for example, a gift), then your bandwidth requirement for the event would be around 10 Gig. Make sure this doesn’t exceed your monthly bandwidth as provided by your host!

To overcome disappointment from having your website shut off the air due to lack of bandwidth, you can look for host providers that offer “unlimited” bandwidth, or upgrade your existing hosting account as required.

5. Backing up your MySQL databases

One often overlooked area of site maintenance by website owners is the continual backup of MySQL databases. If you are using PHP programs on your site then it is of vital importance to backup your database, else in the event of a site crash your databases may not be restored properly.

A site crash can cause a loss of functionality of your site, lost data records, links and program blocks that don’t work, etc.

There are companies that can provide you with a backup service, or you can perform database backups yourself using database management programs that you run on your site or from your PC. Without backups you are leaving your site exposed to huge risk, which will mean a lot of extra rebuilding work for you if things go wrong.

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copyright (c) 2006 Bradley Smith www.EasterJVgiveaway.com Bradley Smith is an online businessman with a desire to help young starters develop their online business.

This article may be freely distributed as long as this resource box is attached to the end of the article with a clickable link back to the site.

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