Get Your Business Failure Here! FREE!!
by Mike Banks Valentine
I want to yell at someone or give 'em a good poke in the nose
for
this! How could they do this to me? What gives them the right
to
blow off my best customers, to rob me of potential business
and
make my clients angry at me? How dare they do this!! I'm just
fuming and ready to explode! Don't get too close to me right
now!
Why I oughtta . . . what? Complain because a free
service isn't
available? Threaten to sue them for having troubles of their
own?
Why don't they have backup servers? Well, I guess it's possible
that *I* could at least provide a secondary free
service to cover
my assets. Those clients that planned to spend an hour of
their
valuable time to chat with me in the first place. Maybe I
should
have prepared for the worst so I don't have to go apologize
to
everyone when the free chat services suddenly became unavailable.
OK, so maybe I ought to upgrade that chat room to the premium
version, the one that costs a few bucks a month, the one without
the advertising banners, the one with the customer service
and
support. The one that WORKS when I've invited over 3,000 people
to come to a Grassroots Internet Marketing Forum and chat!
Maybe this will teach me that you can't rely on free services.
What does it cost me to fail to deliver on my promises?
The web has got us all relying on free services to run businesses
and expecting those freebies to be trouble free and convenient
at
all times. I upgraded from the free internet access when I
tired
of their glaring ads across my web pages. I upgraded from
the free
autoresponders when they stopped working during a major promotion
launched via press releases and direct mail campaigns. *That*
cost
the good-will of my clients that didn't get responses from
me as
promised.
I will now upgrade to the paid version of the chat room with
all
the additional benefits of a paying customer, including the
right
to complain and lay blame and threaten the provider because
they
cost me potential new business and lost me those existing
clients.
Take a look at the free services you use online and analyze
them
to see how a failure to perform would affect your bottom line.
How important are those free services you rely on? Are they
risks
to your business future? Note that 'Terms of Service' on the
vast
majority of free services online tell you outright that providers
have no obligation to serve your needs if there are problems
and
that you have no recourse should your business fail because
the
FREE service has it's costs after all.
We all have a budget to work within to operate a site profitably
but would it cost you more if that free web host went down
than it
would cost to pay for your web hosting? If your email doesn't
get
delivered because your free email account suffers from a system
failure, would it hurt your sales or customer relations? If
that
online fax service stopped working when you were waiting for
a
big contract from a new client, would you be better off upgrading
to the paid version of the service with more benefits?
We'll reschedule that chat, now that we've paid for it --
DOUBLE!
Whatcha want fer free? GRRRRRRRR!!!
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