Sell anything and eventually you will be on receiving end of a sentence like this. So how do you turn a disgruntled customer not just into a satisfied one, but – even better - into a powerful advocate for your business?

1. Don’t get angry, don’t act hurt

Reactions are initially emotional. Particularly if you are in a small company or you are owner of business, you may take a complaint as criticism – a personal attack.

What do humans do when attacked? We want to fight back and justify ourselves. We become angry and act hurt. But this is last thing you want to do when interacting with your customers – however difficult they may be sometimes.

So prepare yourself in advance: Read this article and you will know how to turn these situations around, so make a decision right now to receive any negative customer feedback in a positive way. As my mother would say: “Engage brain!”

2. Save sale

Got your feelings under control? Good. Now you are ready to secure your primary objective – saving sale.

Remember: this is a person who has already bought from you. The vast majority of visitors to your site don’t even do that, so just fact that this person has already made a purchase makes them an instant VIP and their business worth fighting for.

How do you it?

1. Prioritize – Remember this sale is a bird in hand. Yes, enquiries from potential customers are important, but remember you already have this person’s money in bank. Not potential money – cold hard cash! So first prioritize disgruntled customer with a speedy response.

2. Be respectful – Remember not to get riled. A polite, calm attitude will go a long way to taking heat out of rhetoric.

3. Be informative – Reply thoroughly to every point that has been made and add any other information you think could be useful. Misunderstanding or a lack of knowledge rather than a problem with product itself is often real issue. Part of being informative is also going out of your way to remind customer about his or her right to return or replace product under your (generous) full satisfaction guarantee. Being up front and positive about this will go a long way to diffuse any concern customer may have about having to wrestle money out of your hands at some point in future.

Apply above methods and chances of securing sale will increase tremendously.

But remember that even if you do lose sale, your positive approach may well have saved customer: Part company on good terms and you retain potential for future sales and have at least neutralized a lot of negative word-of-mouth publicity.

3. Sell more!

As you no doubt already know, writing articles is probably most effective way to promote your web site. It's a very simple principle - publishers want a vast quantity of good quality content that they do not have to pay for; you provide that content, with proviso that at bottom of your article, they include your resource box with a link to your web site. It's a win-win situation. With your article published on heaps of web sites, and in several ezines, it's enough to set your traffic counter spinning.

However, I see many articles that are simply not written in a way that will maximize benefits for author. Minor mistakes can turn an article that would otherwise get published several times and achieve a great deal for author, into an article that is barely published and discarded by most publishers into trash.

By avoiding these common mistakes, your article will appeal much more to publishers, and you will see results from your article submissions vastly improve:

1. Do Not Write A Solo Ad

Many authors make mistake of submitting articles that are actually little more than solo advertisements for their web sites. Containing little helpful information, they read like a sales letter and then urge reader to visit their web site - and that's before you get to resource box.

The chances of such an article getting published are virtually zero. Publishers are looking for an informative article, a quality piece that they can publish in order to benefit their readership and their visitors.

This means that including a link to your own web site in article body is generally a no-no, unless for example, you are linking to a helpful article that adds further to information you have included and is in context.

Your article should not read like a promotional vehicle for a particular product or service.

2. Do Not Include Affiliate Links