By Denise Hall (C) 2003

Have you ever walked into a store and things looked sloppy? Stores should have nice neat displays, right? Normally, yes, but sometimes they get a bit messy on busy days and we all understand how that can happen.

But what if you were to walk into a store as soon as it opened in morning and place looked liked it had been ransacked? What would you think?

You'd probably think it wasn't very professional-looking. If a rack of shirts was haphazardly thrown together, with all styles, colors and sizes mixed up, you'd probably walk right past it without giving it a second glance.

If a sales associate wouldn't answer your questions or help you find something, you would consider that unprofessional, too, not to mention rude.

When we do business in offline world we expect a professional appearance and professional manner from those who deal with customers. The same is true for online businesses.

Your business depends on how professional you are. Your website, your customer service and appearance and quality of your work all reflect upon you, business owner.

Two key factors of professionalism:

1. Good Customer Service/Relations

2. Quality Appearance and Writing Skills

Recently I had problems submitting information to several websites. After trying for several days I finally e-mailed for technical support. (After all, website owners had messages posted that said to contact them at any time.)

I didn't expect an immediate reply to my inquiries. I know they're busy running their businesses, and dealing with other people, too. But I have yet to receive any replies.

Where is customer service? Why would I want to do business with someone who seems to be ignoring me? At very least, if it typically takes them more than a couple of days to reply to e-mail, support questions or other requests, they should post that information on their website so customers/visitors know what to expect.

Without good customer service, you're shooting yourself in foot. Don't expect customers to buy from you if you can't afford them some common courtesy.

This has happened to everyone.

Meltdown, overload, too much information, brain malfunction. All sound familiar?

I mean, they don’t call it information superhighway for nothing. This millionaire is an expert at creating his own products, this millionaire is an expert at creating sites that sell, this millionaire is an expert at getting free traffic to his site, this millionaire is an expert at getting high search engine rankings, blah, blah blah.

You get idea, I’m sure.

I am sure you have heard saying “Too many cooks spoil broth”. Well, I’ve expanded that a little. “Too many net gurus cause brain freeze”.

Think about it. If you have been marketing online or researching how to market online for months or even years you have, no doubt, learnt a hell of a lot of valuable information. But once you have that knowledge what do you do with it?

I don’t know about you but there have been times when I’ve felt so overloaded with all information running around my head that I’ve not been able to even switch my pc on for days!

I read so much about what this expert had to say and what that expert had to say that I just didn’t know who to follow anymore. I became so overloaded and overwhelmed that my brain just froze. I didn’t know what to do and who to follow so I did what comes naturally…absolutely nothing!

I remember actually holding my head in my hands feeling totally lost and stressed out to max because I so wanted to succeed but there was just so much information to take in that I hadn’t learnt yet how to cope. I don’t know if you have ever felt like that but it was a pretty exhausting and eye-opening process for me.

As I sat in front of my pc and opened my email address that receives all ezines that I subscribe to I thought: There must be an easier way. Why does this seem so hard?

And then it was like a little light bulb going off in my head. I was making this way too hard on myself, putting myself under way too much presssure, and it was all absolutely unnecessary. As it usually is, answer was right in front of my face :O).

Why did I have an ezine inbox with over 400 ezines it in a matter of days? What for? So I can sit here over two hours and go through them all, day after day?

Is my time not more valuable than that? Did I not have more important things to do?

Of course I do. I’d spent so much time working harder and not smarter. Thank goodness I finally figured it out.