If you are not sure whether your product is appropriate for selling on a mailing list, here are some useful criteria to check:  

1. Easy to Understand – The value of purchasing your product is immediately clear
2. Unique – It is unlike anything else on the market
3. New – It has only recently been released and needs exposure
4. Problem Solving – It has a new solution to an everyday problem
5. Simplistic – It only has one main function and solves the problem entirely
6. Aesthetically Pleasing – It is nice to look at and will display well in catalogues
7. Durable – It will not be easily damaged during shipping
8. Year-round Appeal – It is not a seasonal product with limited appeal
9. Safe – There is no foreseeable danger to consumers
10. Wide Appeal - There is a sizeable target market for the product
11. Quickly Manufactured- There is no long production process involved
12. Affordable – Sub $100 products sell best in catalogues
13. Mailing – Standard size products are easiest to ship in bulk
14. Patented - You need to have some sort of copyright to protect your idea

A few days ago I wrote a post about listening to your customers before you sell your product or service. You may be able to make someone buy your product/service once, but for your customers to come back for more you need to do more.

No matter how good your are at selling, no matter how smooth, slick and high-pressure you are, the fact remains you can’t make someone buy. The only way is to solve peoples problems. Which problem does your product and/or service solve?

• Easy-to-run online accounting software;
• do the job in half the time;
• lose weight while you sleep;
• easy-to-prepare gourmet meals;
• cut overheads.

You get the picture - the best way to sell is to solve. This will tell you that bombarding clients with facts about megabytes, speed, number of cylinders and so on, is not what is needed. Find out what problem your customer has, then talk about the benefits and solutions your product/service offers for the problem - that will get you a sale.

If solving is selling, what are your solutions? Let me know. ST.

It always amazes me to see how many businesses still charge by the hour - it is a business killer. How do you like it if someone comes to quote for a job and then tells you he/she is charging you by the hour. You will have all or at least some of the following thoughts:

• How many hours will it take, can I afford this?
• I don’t know this person, I don’t know how good he/she is at what they do?
• Great, I am taking all the risk here, he/she can take as long as they want and I’ll have to pay?

The truth is that charging by the hour is terribly customer unfriendly and is therefor very bad for your small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants.

By charging by the hour you are creating so many barriers to doing business that your chances of securing the order is very small, if you are competing with someone who offers fixed pricing you have virtually no chance of getting the order. So if you work in an industry that charges by the hour and you need more work you know what to do.

In my experience you can charge more, if you charge a fixed fee and get organized. I believe that more accountants and solicitors loose work because they charge by the hour, the client relationship sours and then break down altogether.

Get rid of your timesheet - fix prices and bill your clients upfront - your customers will love you. ST.

Have you ever wondered why people buy products and services from you or anyone else for that matter? Why do people love an iPod, why do they buy a Rolex watch? The reason is always the same, it makes them feel good. It helps people to feel calm and secure, or superior - these feelings are deeply satisfying to all of us.

Is that the only motivation why people buy, I don’t think so. The other reason is to avoid feeling bad. Feeling bad may have to do with feeling pain, losing money, loosing business, being hassled, feeling guilty and so on.

Bottom line? If your product and service does not do one of the two, you may have a problem. ST.

Many worries in a small business are centered about sales and the need to earn money in order to pay for over-heads like rent, wages and so on. Especially in a technology driven company this can often be a problem. Often you try to sell to your clients as if they are industry insiders who understand exactly what you are talking about. While in reality they are customers and don’t know what makes this widget so special.

You need to sell the benefits of the widget, that is what customers want, benefits. Know who you are talking to, if you are talking to an industry insider, tell him all the technical details, because he understands enough of the technology to understand the details, and then work out the benefits for himself/herself. If you are talking to a customer who wants to use your service or product to gain a benefit from using you, let him/her know what the benefit is.

One word about not being able to show a benefit, I would openly say to my client that there is no benefit from using our product, you may not get a sale, but you will get someone who will respect you and come back, because he/she trusts you. You may also get referrals this way.

By the way, woman are far more benefit talk driven than men. Or as my wife will say to me and my son, talking about the latest gadget, stop talking “klingon” (the star trek species)! ST.

As part of our OnlineOffice we offer web-services like web-hosting, email, online shop, online file-store and a wordpress blog. Blogging is most certainly the most inexpensive and direct way to communicate with possible customers, you can

• blog about your products and services; explain certain aspects better;
• blog about your company and your business mission;
• blog about your industry, comment on development and differentiate yourself;
• blog about case studies to do with your product and services.

In other words communicate with others on the internet and market your small business. There are many hosted services out there, which are more or less easy to use. Our approach has been to make the blog a plug-in to the basic web site you can setup without any IT skills. With our free 24/7 live support we can help with any issues, should you have any. problems.

For me blogging is a bootstrapper technique to attract new business without having to spend any more money. In the mid-ninties I used to tell people to get a web-site, today a web-site should be standard for any small business and a blog a must if you want to succeed in the future. You may believe that blogging is all about attracting global audiences, when in reality you can use blogging for very local markets, too. It certainly beats sending out leaflets and it is better for the environment.

If you have a story to tell, tell it - nobody else is going to do it for you. ST.

When you sign up to WinWeb’s free LiveNet - still in public beta - you can also use our useful and FREE RSS Press Release service.

While LiveNet is an online marketplace for your services and products, which allows you to promote your business to others and find others to help you with work you need to have done. It is also a great place to make new business friends and share experiences.

The PR tool has been around for some time and we have registered this RSS feed with many different search engines and news sites. Using this free service will give your small business web coverage, sometimes even the old media picks it up.

Give it a go - it’s free - and that makes it a great bootstrapper tool. ST.

You may speak more languages and have market segment knowledge about a certain product or service. That is a great basis for a small business startup, two scenarios spring to mind:

Virtual Export Assistant: You may know, or can find a business which has a great product, but they don’t export yet. You could offer your services for a particular country and become their Virtual Export Assistant for that country. You use your language and local knowledge skills and open up a new market for this small business.

Virtual Import Assistant: You could source - using your language and local knowledge skills - products in other countries for retailers in your country of residence. Or you could help the foreign business to import into your country.

But remember you are working with small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants, you need to keep the price low for them. To do that you can offer your services to ten or twenty businesses, each paying you a retainer of about $200 - 400/£100 - 200, this makes it affordable for them and low risk, while presenting them with sales opportunities. If they pay you a small commission on top, you are generating a nice little income for yourself.

For this kind of service it would be advisable to get a low cost telecom service for your calls abroad, sometimes you can get fixed monthly subscription pricing for unlimited calls - have a look around.

Other than that your setup cost should be low, if you have computer, ADSL, and telephone. Monthly cost including telephone could be as low as $90/£45.

You can work from home, have your work-life balance and do it on a shoe-string - these are the business ideas I like. ST.

NOTE: If you have any problems with setting something like this up, give our 24/7 live support a “click“, they can help you.

I joined Twitter.com, well I have been signed up for some time now, but with a friendly push from Shama, I’m using it since yesterday. It allows you to stay in touch with colleagues and friends while on the move or on your desk.

It is an electronic messaging service, that works on the web and on your mobile via SMS - you get charged your standard SMS rates - so if you have an unlimited package, this is a great service.

On my new iPhone - I’m an Apple junkie, with occasional supply problems - I can use the ThinCloud web-client for Twitter, thanks to O2 for free, that is really good.

It could be a great marketing and networking tool, that is the idea anyway. I found some friends already, Stuart Jones is “Focusing on the important rather than the urgent!”, or at least he was on Oct 15, 2007.

The jury is still out on how much of a business tool this will be for me, so we’ll see. You can twitter me anytime, I’ll try to be as twitter-able as possible. ST.

For me this question has a simple answer, and it goes like this:

• 90% sales and marketing
• 10% product development

Let me quantify that a little. Before you start in business, and the clock is ticking, sort of speak you should have a two things:

• at least one order for your product, to see if someone will actually buy it, preferably more orders if possible and
• the product to sell, which you will have produced in your spare time, while still having an income.

But from the time you launch your small business or start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants, you need to spend most of your time on selling and marketing, because that is what brings the money into your business.

Many thousands of businesses go bust every year with a “perfect product”, but no sales. So get a product out there and sell, sell and sell. If you then have time develop your product further or develop more product. By now you will have had some feedback from your clients and they will guide you as to what they would like to buy from your next.

That is the bootstrapper way of doing it, in my mind the only way to do it with the least amount of risk and on a shoe string. Remember the aim is to make money, not to spend it. ST.