This is a guest post from an old friend of mine, Pete Ekizian, a very savvy small business owner who owns and runs a very successful ecommerce engraved gifts store that has been online for twelve years.

I’ve known Pete for most of those years and had no idea what he wanted to write when he asked if he could guest post here and am very happy to share these tips from him on how to manage a small business during economically challenging times.

I hope you REALLY listen to what Pete has to share in this post. Few are as successful at ecommerce as Pete is – I can count how many I know about personally on one hand.

Pete has a HUGE selection of gifts and the best warranty I've ever seen so consider his ecommerce online gift store for holiday shopping or any time.

You can read more about his store in my post
How to Evaluate an Ecommerce Store and Merchant’s  Affiliate Program.

Image Credit: 123rf.com Royalty Free Images

So the recession is killing all of us.

Ignore what you read from certain people
who claim you can actually do
better in this economy.

The only reason they are saying
this is that they have something to sell.

You know the pitch:
The economy is bad, yes,
but we have the secret to
getting richer than ever!

It comes in many different forms:

• Build links that Google loves, without leaving your couch!
• How to add tons of content to your site on autopilot!
• Comment on followed blogs in your industry without lifting a finger!

There are two common threads to just about all pitches like this (and I’m sure you’re getting more than ever because people are getting desperate):

1. First, they promise to automate a service that we all know works:  Building links, building content, adding real value to blog conversations, etc.
2. Second, they state that these invaluable activities can be done effortlessly.

And, of course, they claim that for a small lump sum payment or monthly fee, they’ll show you step by step how to do this.

Please, please, please take my word on this for your own sake…

Do NOT fall for what SIMPLY DOES NOT WORK!

99.9% of pitches for ways to automate your business
are utter nonsense!

I don’t say 100% are nonsense because I’ve been around long enough to know never to say never! (Never and always will usually come back to bite you.)

Grow Your Business by Building a REAL Small Business:

How about doing this instead?

Build a real business
(yes – even if its a website based business)
with real customers / clients who will
come back to you again and again
because you provide value.

How about using this recession as an opportunity to refine your business?  You’re not packing as many orders, overseeing as much AdSense activity, or consulting with as many clients, so take the time to fine tune your business processes and practices.

When the recession ends, which it will because they always do, you will be so much better off because of this.  Here are some tips that you can get working on today:

Business Operating Expenses:

Take a long hard look at your expenses:

• Stress what’s working for you
• Eliminate what’s not.

This is probably the single most important activity you can do right now.  When business is booming,  you can often add a whole bunch of expenses that may or may not work.  Who cares when you have so much money coming in that you don’t want to upset the apple cart by getting rid of anything.

That social bookmarker you hired for $200 a month, maybe he’s paying for himself in traffic and/or rankings.  The blog commenter from the Philippines you employ for $100 a month, well you don’t have time to check your analytics to see if she’s actually driving traffic. You’re too busy!

Make sure money you are spending
Is actually working for you.

Well guess what, now you’re not too busy.  You have the time now to go and check your analytics, to do backlink analysis, to get on the phone with your virtual employees and see what’s working and what’s not.

GLOBAL OUTSOURCING:

Stop outsourcing so much that you lose
control of the quality of your product.

Look, I love outsourcing.  It’s one of the most important activities you can do.  When you break it down, every great business in history has used outsourcing in one way or another.

When you think of outsourcing as just getting someone else
to do your work (tedious, or otherwise), there’s no debating
that you need to learn how to do this.

The problem arises when you lose control. When you don’t know what your article writer is writing, and whether its really content you feel proud putting “out there.” When your AdWords specialist is upping your spend without increasing conversions because they get paid as a percentage of spend.

Or when your “brand” is becoming known more
for the blog comment spam your blog commenter
is posting than for your actual products or services.

Right now, outsourcing is huge. Everyone is touting the virtues of outsourcing your life. This is fine but you need to monitor your outsourcers just as you would any other aspect of your business.  If you don’t, they may run amok, and bring your business down with it!

Strive for a better product and happier customers.

This one seems fairly obvious in theory, but judging by many of the companies I’ve bought products from or employed to do a service, it needs to be stated.

Everyone wants more, more, more.
More clients, more sales, more money.

How about building a real business with happy customers
that you care about and products you’re proud to sell.

Now, you can do this for purely altruistic reasons of course but, let’s face it, you’re a business person. The best reason of all to do this form purely a business perspective is that you’ll build customers for life.

Your customers will come to you,
even in the midst of a recession
with hardly any money to spend

Because they know they will get value from you!

They know that you stand behind your products
and that they’ll never feel like they got ripped off.

They know they will be treated well –
and that is even more important to them when they’re
parting with the few extra dollars they have.

These are some things that have helped me survive this economic downturn.  Obviously, things are not booming like they were three years ago, but when they do come back, my company will be a leaner, nicer, more customer-friendly operation.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the things you’re doing to survive the recession.

My name is Pete Ekizian, I own an e-commerce website named Executive Gift Shoppe.  We specialize in gifts for men like Flasks, Wallets, Pub Signs, Accessories and Money Clips.

[NOTE: Pete often shares business tips in the Executive Gift Shoppe blog including this interesting piece on Keeping Your Employees Happy When Money is Tight.

NOTE from GrowMap:
I hope you REALLY listened to what Pete had to share in this post.

Few are as successful at ecommerce as Pete is – I can count how many I know about personally on one hand.

Small businesses like Pete’s that Google’s favored big brands see as
competition were severely impacted by the Google MayDay update,
then the Google Panda update, and will continue to lose traffic from
organic search and from AdWords pay per click ads (unless they
keep adding more and more keywords or spending much more).

One other thing Pete does is that he offers the very best money back guarantee I have ever seen – so good that I highlighted it in this post I wrote about my favorite category of all the products he offers: business card holders.

You can see Pete’s guarantee
and some of my favorites in my post
How to Use Business Card Holders to Attract More Business.

Pete has a larger selection of practical and unusual gifts that can be personalized with engraving than any site I’ve seen online or any store I’ve ever seen – and because I once managed Pete’s AdWords account and worked with him on blogging and social media I’ve done a LOT of research in his niche and seen all of his competitor’s sites.

As the holiday season approaches, I encourage you to
support small businesses – both local and online.

Every dime you spend with them benefits our economy and working people everywhere because real people like us spend the money we receive so that it stays in circulation and benefits more people!

Make notes about your favorite small businesses
that include their Web site URL because during the
holiday shopping season they will become harder to locate online.

Whenever you need personalized gifts, groomsmen gifts, or unique holiday gifts I can highly recommend Pete’s store.

DISCLOSURE: Pete Ekizian / Executive Gift Shoppe is a former client of mine. We are not currently working together. He did not offer and I would not accept any compensation for the privilege of my readers and I benefiting from him sharing his wisdom.

I put more links in this post because limiting links is another way that search engines make it difficult for us to find small businesses. I wrote the intro and closing. At the time of publication, he has not even seen what I wrote about him.

I add this because so many (not my regular readers who understand – others who may see this) are so quick to jump to unwarranted conclusions and so far have still not seen what is so obvious to me:

When we actively promote small businesses
we use and trust EVERYONE benefits;

• The small business benefits because they MAY receive more sales.
• Anyone who reads or hears your recommendation benefits because you have assisted them in finding a business they can trust offering products or services that they need or want.
• Our economy benefits because money you spend in a small business stays in circulation, pays sales and often property taxes, and creates jobs!
• Your favorite small businesses will STAY in business and you still have freedom of choice!
• The relationships you form with small business owners can change your life and theirs for the better.

We have been conditioned to object
when small businesses use
word of mouth small business marketing
to help us find what we want and need.

WHY greatly favor ONLY the multi-national corporations
who can afford to advertise nationally or internationally?

Small business marketing BENEFITS US!

Big brands and bankers have taken too much from us already:
our jobs, our pensions, our benefits, our standard of living –
and now they want our food and our freedom, too.

If we are ever going to stop this we must understand
what caused the great depression that is happening again now
and what causes economic decline.

WE MUST ACT NOW!
to stop it from going any further
While we still can.

By understanding how our economy benefits we can raise our standard of living – and the first step is to CHANGE where we spend our time and money!

Have you heard about BANK TRANSFER DAY? MOVE your money!

If you have a Yahoo Store and do not host your images somewhere outside your Yahoo Store there are serious issues that will affect your listings on sales sites including one that is especially important to your success: Google Product Search aka Google Base (formerly called Froogle).

If you don’t know or have not paid someone to upgrade your Yahoo Store and host your images somewhere else this issue affects your store.

Fortunately, there is already a solution you really need to know about. That solution is provided by YourStoreWizards (formerly Y Store Tools) and ironically we were using them, but we would not know what we do now if we had not changed feed providers and come back to them.

It has taken months, dozens of hours and emails, and increased costs for one of my favorite Yahoo Store owners so if you find this information valuable I ask that you repay them by visiting their excellent online personalized gift store.

I finally know enough about how Yahoo Stores work to determine what the issues are and share them.

If you have a Yahoo Store it is IMPERATIVE that you read and understand this post.

If you know anyone who owns a Yahoo Store do them a huge favor and send them a link to this post. It will save them a lot of money and increase their sales.

Special thanks to Jim at YourStoreWizards (Twitter), Yahoo Store Developer Michael Vorel of VastPlanet, and most importantly Yahoo Store Expert Rob Snell, author of the book Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies for answering my questions

Specifically, I had to determine why the feeds from GoDataFeed did not have thumbnail images in them (since the store did) and why traffic dropped from Google Product Search.

Here is the distilled version:

1. The default hosting in Yahoo stores has drawbacks and that is what most Yahoo stores use. Two major issues that affect feeds is that there are no thumbnail images in a standard Yahoo Store and the URL of your images in your store actually changes. (If anyone knows why a Yahoo store would do something with such negative consequences I would love to hear from you!)
2. YourStoreWizards actually pulls the images from a Yahoo store, hosts them on their servers for use in feeds, and creates thumbnail images which they also host and use for the feeds. Other Feed solution providers do not choose to provide that service and should only be used if you host your images outside your Yahoo store (which is recommended but can be a major undertaking with additional risks and expense).
3. If your images are currently stored at Yahoo since there are no thumbnail images in your store so no feed service provider that does not host your images can pull them and get them into your feeds or c an not include thumbnail images.

Yahoo Stores should ONLY use YourStoreWizards unless they store all their images including thumbnail size images somewhere outside their Yahoo Store.

I am not aware of any other feed solution that provides image hosting services as part of their feed solution. The other two best feed solutions I know of are GoDataFeed and SingleFeed. I know that GoDataFeed does not choose to host images.

SingleFeed and Rob Snell did an excellent Webinar on Shopping Engine Success for Yahoo! Stores which includes this warning:

Making changes to sizes of images or any other image changes can cause loss of images in Yahoo stores. They advise that it is better to host images elsewhere and call them into your store.

Based on that information I believe that SingleFeed does not host images so only Yahoo Stores who have their images hosted outside their store should use SingleFeed. I am attempting to confirm this information and will update this post when I hear back from them.

There is a known problem with images from Yahoo Stores and Google Product Search. Yahoo stores continually change the URLs for where they store your images and that affects whether Google Product Search (and probably other sites) can find them or not.

When the path to an image changes in your Yahoo store between the last feed sent to Google, when the search occurs your images will be missing from the feed.

Since YourStoreWizards hosts multiple sizes of your images at static URLs this issue does not affect their feeds. This is the reason Yahoo Stores using YSW will get more traffic and sales from Google Product Search.

Conclusions:

1. It would be best to host the images used in your Yahoo Store elsewhere to avoid future problems with images. A recent change caused images in some stores to be too large.
2. If you want to continue to allow Yahoo Stores to host your images you need to use YourStoreWizards at least for the SAS and Google Product Search feeds. Some sites resize their own images so you could use SingleFeed or GoDataFeed for them but you would have to check that on a case by case basis – most likely not worth the hours involved.
3. If you chose to host your images elsewhere so you have total control, I would recommend staying with GoDataFeed because there solution is far more powerful than YSWs (so far – YSWs is upgrading their service) and they are much easier to work with. I received 19 separate emails from Jim before I finally understood they were hosting images. I still had to go to Rob Snell to get definitive answers.
4. I advised GoDataFeed that they should be notifying their clients that have Yahoo Stores about this issue. GoDataFeed needs to either host the images or make it clear that they do not and recommend alternative image hosting solutions to their Yahoo Store clients.
5. I have detailed information from Rob Snell regarding image hosting that I can sort through if you want to consider hosting your images elsewhere.

The bottom line: You need to choose one of these options and only you as a Yahoo Store owner can decide what is best for you:

1. Leave your images in the Yahoo store and use YourStore Wizards exclusively for your feeds.
2. Leave your images in the Yahoo store and use a combination of YWS and GDF so that you can take advantage of optimizing whatever feeds do not have to rely on images hosted at YSW.
3. Pay extra to host your images at YSW while using other feed solutions. The last email I got from Jim at YSWs said, “We can provide hosting for images to be used on their Yahoo store but will need to charge for the bandwidth. The hosted images each have unique URLS which remain static. These could be called in using HTML.”
4. Host your images elsewhere for maximum control and freedom to use any feed solution you choose. I sincerely believe GoDataFeed has the strongest benefits for you but only if you control where your images are (or they decide to add image hosting).

If you currently leave your images in your Yahoo Store and use GoDataFeed, SingleFeed or any other feed solution that does not host your images the way YourStoreWizards does you need to expedite moving your feed to YSWs.

That should increase traffic and sales from Google Product Search because it will eliminate the missing images issue.

GDF currently does not believe their not hosting images affects very many Yahoo Stores and YSW has built an entire business model around the fact that it does.

What I have explained here is critical to the success of Yahoo Stores. If you do not understand it or need specific questions answered use the comment section in this post or contact me directly.

GOOGLE PRODUCT SEARCH RESOURCES:

• Using Google Product Search to Test Demand for a Product