A good internet business profile will attract and engage customers to a business, whilst a poor presentation will bore them or drive them to your opposition.

Internet users have a very short attention span and also have many other offers in front of them, so your internet business profile should be  brief and to-the-point yet intriguing . You must entice prospective customers to quickly understand what you offer, to understand about your businesses’; mission, products, services, people and unique competitive advantage.

Try to write your profile in a style that gives readers an idea of the business’s personality, minimizing the use of industry jargon and eliminate large words that others don’t typically use.

Don’t edit someone else’s article as you risk your page or site being downgraded by search engines for Duplicate Content. If you must use someone else’s ideas, then at least rewrite it, rearrange it and rephrase it and add some unique substance to it.

Set out the article in clear sections with bold headings so that readers can quickly drill down to the issue that interests them most.

Internet readers need to be able to figure out what you offer in an instant. You also want to entice them to read more, so start with a compelling hook that not only indicates what you offer but intrigues them to read more. A powerful hook can have several forms such as; a provocative question, a thought-provoking quote, a funny anecdote, a surprising or interesting statistic, or even an enticing image.

You can infuse some personality or hint of the businesses culture into the profile by telling of the founder’s unique road to the businesses’ development, or by mentioning any special awards and honours a company has received, or of the donations or volunteer work it’s staff have provided to the community.  Try to give the reader a grasp of how the firm is unique, special or different from competitors.

Details of the education, training, credentials or experience of key staff can excite some prospects and help them identify that the business fits their own standards and beliefs.

It is critical to spell out the reason why they should deal with you instead of another, by stating your unique competitive advantage. The benefit or reason why your product or service best meets the consumers needs.

Finally it’s important to actually invite or ask people for their business.

Different businesses need different variations of content however the following sections should be at the core of most business profiles:-
1. Introduction with a hook and brief description of what your business offers in products or services,
2. Detailed products or services description,
3. What’s special or Unique about your products or services,
4. Introductory offers or discounts,
5. Prices or charges if appropriate,
6. History of the businesses development,
7. Key Staff member’s backgrounds,
8. Summary emphasising your businesses uniqueness and unique competitive advantage and an invitation to try your products or service.

Selected coastal Thingz Gifts stores in WA are now offering a great new range of wooden coastal design decorative accessories. Their new collection includes the cool blue coloured designs of the Lazy days collection in photo frames and on a sailboat as well as a lighthouse tealight and decorative balls.

To complement this collection they have some all white products like the cute pelican on a mooring pole, some starfish adorned items and also some scallop shell designs.

More wonderful waterfront theme decorative accessories from Things Gifts. Excellent new giftware products.

Whilst there are retailers and wholesalers already struggling to get through a tougher year in 2009 and concerned about the selling season ahead. The switched on core of the industry will be concentrating on being better focused and better organised to fine tune their efforts and their retail sales results. 

Retailers, if you’re thinking about planning your summer 2009 gifts and homewares products retail sales, it’s always better to start early. 

Those serious retailers, particularly that huge slab of Australia’s retailers that are just a day trip to Homebush, will be already planning their trip to the inaugural July Home & Giving trade Fair at The Sydney Showgrounds in Homebush NSW. 

Retailers know that the better performing Importers and wholesalers who are again bringing in new products for the 2009 summer season, those wholesalers that always have new stock that sells well, will be among those exhibiting at Sydney’s July Home & Giving Trade Fair. They will be changing with the right strategy and exhibiting in Sydney, the biggest Australian retailing hub, instead of backing off with old stock and low confidence or sticking with a provincial fair in Brisbane that continues to shrink. 

February Home and Giving Fair surprised a lot of participants who expected a bigger slowdown, when in reality we still have high employment in this country. The RBA and the IMF are already saying recovery will be better and/or sooner than initially expected. 

Retailers that don’t plan and get among those ordering that new stock which is in the pipeline, may be among those forced to buy more of that older, slower, stock that some wholesalers have plenty off. 

Whilst quite times mean big ticket items are on hold for many consumers, small luxuries and nick knacks are far too much of a temptation for many to resist, particularly whilst times are not that bad and predicted to get better. So stick to the low price point items, stick to what you know and to well established wholesalers who know what sells and above all, keep plenty of fresh new stock in front of your customers. Give them a good reason to make the plunge, a purchase that they can’t resist.

I discovered an easy fix to an annoying facsimile machine problem this week that I thought was worth sharing, because it seems to affect a lot of small businesses.

Occasionally I would get a call from a customer saying we did not get your fax. Also saying that they don’t seem to have a problem with other fax machines “maybe yours has a fault”. Since mine is new and a larger and dedicated fax machine, and since I have seen some of my customers old style phone/faxes and some that need to be switched on each time etc., (Some businesses even switch their fax machines off overnight? Why? A fax machine is your unpaid all-hours employee). Also since our business receives and sends faxes regularly throughout the day, on most days, I just figured well, mine seems to be working correctly, so if one of our machines has a bug in it, then its probably not mine. This turned out to be a bad assumption.

Several customers had said that their fax seems to have problems with just some fax machines and not others.

Last week a customer insisted that his fax works well with other faxes and that he had also experienced problems with mine before. So I decided I might have an intermittent fault or a problem with certain categories of other fax machines and needed to investigate the matter.

I phoned the manufacturer (Brother) for tech support and was surprised to discover the way they handled this intermittent fault was quite simple. He gave me a number for a Telstra FaxStream TestFax Plus fax 1300 368 999. He advised that Telstra’s test machine would fax a report back automatically with details of the performance of our fax transmission.

That report came back promptly and showed that our fax’s transmission level settings were way too low. I phoned back the tech support guy. He walked me through a few button pumps to change that setting on the machine and wallah! 5 minutes later a second test fax to Telstra’s above number says our transmission level is now excellent.

Obviously our machine came new with the wrong transmission settings. Maybe they expect it to be set on site? In any case, if you have any doubts about your fax transmission performance or you have a customer or acquaintance that seems to have a fax problem, then the above Telstra Faxstream TestFax Plus number might be the answer.

Telstra’s feedback also notes that you should test the transmission level of your machine if you move it to a new phone line and further that 85% of all fax transmission problems are caused by wrong transmission level settings.