How to cut your business expenses in the long run

Some time along your journey as a blogger or Internet marketer, we will be tempted to use “the cheaper alternative” - whether it is for web hosting, for autoresponder services, analytics services, ad servers etc.

Don’t.

I know you know this, but are you doing it?

Cheaper alternatives cause irreparable damage in the long run. From my own experience, it ALWAYS pays to get a professional to do the job. Do your due dilligence and do your research. Professionals charge a professional price, and they give you professional results.

The Story Goes…

Recently I met a friend attended an Internet marketing course held by one of Singapore’s Internet marketers. The course was great, as he has claimed, but as a newbie then, he was recommended to put his site under a web hosting provider.

Apparently the “web hosting provider” he was recommend to was not even in the business of web hosting! Their main business was in some international calling cards, callback and roaming services. But of course, being a good learner, all he did was follow. He was told that the money he paid would get him “lifetime webhosting”.

And by the way, he didn’t get a good deal. The amount he paid was equivalent to about 2 years of hosting fees with many of the good hosts you see out there. It is quite obvious that there was some joint venturing between the marketer and that hosting company.

“Lifetime webhosting” for a one time fee. Right. They just didn’t mention whose “life” it was.

Anyway, just one year down the road, the hosting company “migrated servers”. My friend had a WordPress blog hosted in his original website with over 20 well written articles. 20 articles is not a lot, but each article was well thought, and it was a lot of effort.

Guess what he got back? He got a “clean-Kubrick-themed-hello-world” blog back.

Overnight.

Good thing for him, he’s got the articles on disk. He now has to reload the articles one by one, creating the exact permalinks.

Now that’s painful.

Imagine what would have happened if he didn’t have those articles on disk?

Case Number 2

As I am writing this, the world’s most popular autoresponder system (the one on my sidebar) is refusing to load my opt in form. Instead of taking 5 seconds to load a page, my blog now loads at a facinating speed of 30 seconds.

Enough time to bore even the most hyperactive child to sleep.

Not only that - I’ve just sent out my monthly newsletter. I’m eager to see my open rates and click through rates. The click thrus in the newsletter ARE tracked. That means the clicks first go to the autoresponder system’s domain, THEN get directed to the page on my site.

Unfortunately I think my subscribers are going to see the same thing as what I see.

This.

Good thing my email out was not a product launch. It was not as fortunate for CopyBlogger, judging from his tweet.

I’m confident of AWeber’s deliverabilty, but after today, maybe not so much confidence in their uptime anymore. I believe this is not the first time this has happened.

Case Number 3

4 hours ago, I was at my prospective client’s office. It was a web design job.

One and a half years ago, they outsourced their web design project to an overseas firm. It was a Joomla project. The website was set up beautifully.

Everything was perfect, except the firm provided a pathetic manual on how to update the site. There was no training given whatsoever, of the editorial process, the user roles etc.

Leaving the non-tech savvy users to the steep learning curve of the Joomla administrator pages, you can imagine how broken the site is now.

They tried to get in touch with the web design firm. No news.

So now they are looking for another provider (me!) to step in to make the changes.

So the moral of the story goes…

If you want to cut your business expenses…

Then pay a good price for professional services. You will find that the work professionals do - the little things that didn’t seem apparant at first… that will save you money in the long run.

Here are some things you need to look out for when you select a provider, whether for outsourcing or as a strategic business partner.

1. Independant third party accreditation and certification.
2. Track record. Reviews, comments from the previous buyers.
3. Price. Is it too good to be true?
4. Documentation. In programming code, and user manuals.
5. Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Do they have any in the first place?

If you are on twitter or any social media platform, do a shoutout - ask for opinions and experiences. Search the forums. Look at what people are saying.

Don’t scrimp on the essentials, if you mean business.

I know you know this, but are you doing it?