Happy Canada Day Everyone

July 1st is Canada Day in….well…Canada. 

As you likely know, it’s six Canadians who run FreshBooks.  So…on behalf of all of us, play safe and have a great weekend.  We won’t be available Monday – we’re taking the day off (it’s a national holiday here) to enjoy the great weather we’ve been having and reward ourselves for all the hard work we do for you – our users.

For those of you who are Canadian FreshBooks users (that’s about 10% everyone), don’t forget to change your GST rate to 6% from 7%.  Levi and Daniel spent today adjusting our recurring charges to all our Canadian users.  So if you are Canadian, you’ll be getting a 1% discount from here on in – or at least it might seem that way

Again, have a great weekend.

GST Reminder

To all our Canadian users:
Before you head out for some fun this long weekend, don’t forget that the GST rate will change from 7% to 6% as of July 1st 2006. 

You can read instructions on how to update your system in my earlier blog post.
Have a great long weekend!

Mentos Mad Scientists on Dave Letterman

Fritz and Stephen, those talented experimenters from EepyBird.com, will be appearing on Late Night with David Letterman (along with Kate Bosworth and Broken Social Scene) tonight at 11:30pm ET.

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at the magic reproduction of the Bellagio Fountain they create with 200 litres of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints (3 minutes).

The two companies have responded very differently to the (free) publicity this has generated. You’ll find the video available right on Mento’s home page, but sadly nowhere to be found on Coke’s site – not even under the “Fun” links! Dudes, lighten up

Payment Gateway Popularity Contest

Since we provide an online invoicing tool that integrates with a number of payment gateways to help you collect credit card payments online, we often get calls asking for a recommended gateway to use.  Our answer is always dependent on the needs of the caller.  Our questions are usually:

• Do you process a large number of transactions per month?
• Do you want to accept eChecks or ACH payments?
• Are you based in the US?
• Do you already have an internet merchant account?

From these answers we can usually recommend someone to call for a quote.  Out of curiosity, I ran some statistics to determine who were the most popular credit card gateways (this excludes PayPal and 2Checkout):

Authorize.net is the clear winner in the popularity contest.  This indicates it may be the best payment gateway solution for a small business services company based in the US. 

For those of us based in Canada, PSiGate is the winner, although their only competition is a company that used to be called Paradata, but was recently purchased by Payment Processing, Inc.

Streamline Your Collections

As a follow up to a post I wrote about dealing with larger customers, once again Jim Logan in his Cash Flow Blog has some good suggestions for composing a good collection letter. With a FreshBooks system you can use his advice and have it sent automatically with the automated late payment reminders. Here is what he recommends having in each letter:

Clarity. The collection letter is no place for subtlety. Without being rude, you need to be clear. Clear on what the situation is, what is owed, what you expect, and what will happen if the addressee fails to respond. Nothing is to be implied and $5 words should be avoided. Simple, straightforward, non-interpretive language is all you need. You need the reader to get it.

Consequences. Heeding the need for clarity, you need to convey what will happen if you don’t get the desired response within the desired timeframe. Again, there is no place for being rude, just be frank. If action isn’t taken, there will be a consequence of some sort. Whatever the consequence, clearly spell it out and follow through at the stated time.

For any small business owner out there having trouble with their cash flow, I suggest checking out Jim’s blog, and of course getting yourself a FreshBooks system

PayPal Has Dropped the Ball

Only one month after the PayPal debacle with VeriSign payment services, PayPal is at it again.  The problem started yesterday, as mentioned by W. Newell and me in some comments here.  I started this cryptic error when trying to login to my VeriSign Manager:

The really annoying part is that I thought I had entered in the wrong password (which can happen a lot with me), and I spent five minutes re-entering the password. When I eventually realized the error was not a wrong password, I tried calling and was put on hold for 45 minutes and finally spoke to someone who said “an engineer is working on it”.

This happened yesterday, but I was eventually able to login.  This morning I am still periodically getting the error.

I haven’t heard of anyone having problems processing their transactions, so I am hoping it is just the online VeriSign Manager that is not working.

Google Adwords Teleseminar

Join me this Thursday at 1:00 PM for a tele-seminar with Andrew Goodman of Page-Zero Media.  Learn how to effectively manage a Pay-Per-Click Campaign on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and/or MSN AdCenter.

Go here to find all the Google Adwords Teleseminar details.

Goal! BrandMurder Wins an Award

Cheers to Portfolios.com, who awarded the BrandMurder site bronze in its “Web Design” category.

“The Portfolios.com International Awards Show, honors excellence in Illustration, Photography, Graphic Design, Web Design and Advertising throughout the world of individuals and companies.”

We used BrandMurder to let everyone know we were rebranding from 2ndSite to FreshBooks. It was a fun project that we put together to help educate our users about the upcoming name change and why we were doing it.

The link to all of the award winners will be posted on the Portfolios site in the first week of July.

What is RSS?

Do these logos look familiar?

Are you very confused about what they are for? I can help.

If you see these logos on a website it means that it supports ‘RSS’.

What can RSS do for me?

The main benefit of using RSS is that you will be notified when a webpage is updated. 

Examples of this include, someone posting a new entry on our blog, someone updating content on our website, or even someone posting new topic on our Forum.  Basically, RSS allows you to find out when new content is added to a website.

Normally, if you were interested in determining if a website has been updated with new content, you would have to visit that website over and over again.  RSS solves this problem.

How does it work?

When you see those logos in image above, they are usually linked to a webpage or file.  This URL is sometimes called a feed or RSS feed.

Examples of feeds or RSS feeds:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/IntersectionOnline/
http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_tech.rss
http://www.loudthinking.com/index.rdf

The website that provides the RSS feeds will update their feeds every time they update content on their website.

Next, in order to use this RSS feed, you will need a RSS reader.  What a RSS reader does is checks the feed several times per hour.  Instead of you checking a website many times for updates, an RSS reader will check for you and notify you if there is any new content.

There are a number of RSS readers to choose from.  Some of them are installed to your computer and some are run online.

I recommend FeedReader for beginners, because I found it easy to use and more importantly, free.  You may also want to consider using Bloglines if you want to keep track of your RSS feeds online.

Here’s a more extensive list.

How do I set it up?

1. Every website that supports RSS, will have a logo that links to a URL (or feed)
2. Copy this URL and add it to your RSS reader.
3. Once you have done that you will be subscribed to that feed.
4. Your RSS Reader will notify you when new content is added to the webpage.
5. You can read the new content in your RSS reader, or access the content directly on the website.  The choice is yours.

Review:
1. Websites that support RSS will provide you with a URL.
2. Add the URL to your RSS Reader.
3. Your RSS reader will notify you when new content is available.

Please post any questions you have regarding RSS feeds below.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog.

Generate more referrals for your business

Earlier this week Michael spoke with John Jantsch, author of Referral Flood, who has great advice about how to generate more referrals for your business. I listened to the call and took notes – here they are in point form.

How to generate more referrals for your business
Michael McDerment & Jon Jantsch – free teleseminar
June 15, 2006

1. Most small businesses are built by word of mouth.
2. Most people are held back from systematically generating word of mouth referrals by fear: fear of seeming rude, of begging.
3. People who make referrals a part of their business all have a referral mind-set. They believe the best way to provide value to their clients is to help their clients be successful.
4. People who are referred to you make better leads because they usually require less time to get them to understand what you do, since they’ve already been informed by the person who sent them to you.
5. The biggest motivation to refer: to look good; to be seen as the resource, the person in the know.
6. When setting out to generate referrals, have a very narrow niche target market in mind so you can do a good amount of business with a small amount of clients. Often the first thing John gets his clients to do is to cut their client base down, to focus only on certain areas.
7. Find a way that clearly differentiates your business.
8. Referral ground rules:
1. Expect referrals – your job is to introduce the concept of expecting your users to refer you. (You need to follow up with them, to makesure they are.)
2. Look for moments of truth. For example, the night you stayed late and helped a client in a big way. Remind the client of that so theyremember you are worthy of a referral, and they can also use that story when talking to other people about you.
3. It’s helpful to be easy to refer, e.g. put a list of firms in front of your client and ask them if they can introduce you to a person at one ofthem; write an introduction letter and ask a client to send the letter to the firms you want.
4. Give a lot of referrals (which also helps client relationships).
9. Five steps in a referral system:
1. Create a referral target market of people or organizations that are valuable to you. These are in two groups:
• Existing client base
• Other organizations that are also aimed at your target market (geographical or subject area), and create strategic marketing partnerships. For example, if you’re a graphic designer, a print shop might know 1,000 other small businesses. Tell the print shop that if they do your business cards for free, each time you design a new logo for someone you will send them to the print shop to get their business cards & stationary printed.In John’s opinion this is a more powerful strategy than using existing client base.
2. Formally design your referral education system. This can be a piece of paper that says:
• This is our target market
• Here’s what we do that’s valuable
• Here’s what we do when you give us a referral (call them, give them a free thing, etc.). It’s important to make this clear to the people you’re asking to send you referrals so they know you’re not going to call their friends at dinner time with a sales pitch. This says you have a sophisticated approach to the contact names you gave us.
3. Have a referral offer that is creative enough to get attention (ideas below).
4. Have a conversion referral strategy – what are you going to do to educate your referral (to convert them to a sale)?
5. Have a referral follow-up strategy. How will you thank the person who sent you a referral? Educate them – you sent us this referral which was great, but that referral isn’t exactly the type of client we’re looking for. Make them feel appreciated and continue to educate them.
10. Creative offers
• Good if you have a new business, have just moved to a new area where no one knows you, or have a small client base. Identify your client group, go to an association that serves your client group, and identify a person in a leadership role. Tell them “This is what we do, we’d like to do a project for you for free. If you’re thrilled with what we do, you endorse us to the association (e.g. write an endorsement letter)”. (You’d be surprised how many of your clients would be thrilled to write you an endorsement letter – ask them.)
• This is a strategy an accountant firm uses: the 100% refund strategy. Would you like your fee to be 100% refunded? Give your customer 4 cards. For each of the cards that come back, the customer gets 25% off, up to 100%. The firm is now known as the “100% refund guys” – what was a referral strategy has also become their marketing strategy.
• Partner with worthy causes. When you try this, 10% of your fee will be donated to that. This might also be a motivator for the charity to use your organization.
11. Creative partnerships
• A graphic designer creates a copy shop’s logo and the copy shop refers the designer to other small businesses looking for design work.
12. Seminars & workshops
• Who else serves your market? Imagine it’s banks and accounting firms. Go to an accounting firm and say you’ll do a seminar for their clients for free. Now go to a banking firm and say you’ll do the same seminar for their clients for free. Now you’ve got your target market – accounting and banking clients – at the same seminar, and it’s also a marketing/networking/opportunity event for them.
13. Conferences/networking events
• Have a powerful benefit statement to answer the question “What do you do for a living?” E.g. not “I work for a company that creates software for billing”, but “I save people time”.
• Have something that you can give them (not a business card), like a card that sends them to a landing page that talks about referrals orgives them something for free.
14. How to track referrals
• John uses ACT, CRM software. Build activities into your system/processes that remind you to, for example, send referral letter number four outtoday.
15. Lead generation
• How do I sell my story to the press? To generate positive press, become a resource for media sources. E.g. drip-feed them information from ablog/article you found, before you ever request they write about you.

Links:
Duct Tape Marketing
Referral Flood

Sign up for the next teleseminar
Mike will be hosting the next free teleseminar on Thursday, June 29, 2006 at 1pm EST with Andrew Goodman, author of Winning Results with Google AdWords.