Merry Christmas To All Our Business Partners!

Since it is almost Christmas, I thought we would take the week off from success training and do something fun. I would like to dedicate this blog post to everyone who loves trivia. And we want to remind everyone how much we love and appreciate each and every one of you. May you all have a safe and Merry Christmas! May your households be filled with love and laughter this holiday season. And may you get everything you wished for this holiday season!

So you think you know about the history of Christmas, huh? Try this:



Do you know much about the traditions of Christmas? Give this a whirl:



You knew in a flash that it must be Saint Nick, right? What do you REALLY know about Santa Claus?



Here's one for the cosmopolitan world traveller. You think you know how the rest of the world celebrates Christmas? Then this should be a breeze for you. (it ate my lunch)



How did you do? We'll see you next week with our final blog post of the year.

Merry Christmas from the Startup Essentials family!

Listen To Their Wallet, Not Their Mouth!

While most Americans will tell you that the economy stinks, what they are saying with their wallets is quite another story. If you listen to the talk, you might become discouraged about your chances of success as an Internet entrepreneur.

Here is an article about sales this Christmas season that is very important for you as an online retailer. I have bolded and changed the color on some crucial text, but have put it here verbatim. Check it out, especially the parts that pertain to you.



US Christmas shopping season off to strong start
11-26-2006, 22h41 WASHINGTON (AFP)

They looked, they counted, and they liked the numbers. Less than 48 hours after department stores swung their doors wide open in the pre-dawn chill to let in first Christmas shoppers, the main national retail tracker reported the US holiday shopping season was off to a "relatively strong start."

Sales on Black Friday, as the day following the Thanksgiving holiday is widely known, jumped a healthy 6.0 percent compared to a year ago to reach an estimated 8.96 billion dollars, ShopperTrak RCT Corporation said in its retail performance estimate released Saturday. Christmas sales have been traditionally seen as a reliable barometer of consumer confidence and the overall performance of the US economy. Their strength this year may have come as a surprise as a Gallup poll taken earlier this month found that only 40 percent of Americans believed the state of the nation's economy was either "excellent" or "good," while 59 percent described it as "fair" or "poor."

But the pocketbook vote yielded a different result.

"Although we anticipated a solid consumer turnout for Black Friday, this data shows an even larger increase than expected as consumers proved they were willing to spend," noted Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak. He cautioned that Black Friday was not the greatest bellwether for the season's performance and retailers needed to remain cautious. "But undoubtedly this type of a season opening is a nice shot in the arm for the industry," Martin stressed.

Scenes of expectation and excitement, sometimes bordering on chaos, mirrored each other from shopping mall to shopping mall -- from New York to Chicago to Seattle. After a traditional brief pause for Thanksgiving Day on Thursday, department stores began opening their doors as early as 5:00 am on Friday, luring early comers with promises of their most juicy bargains. But lines began forming even earlier, with hours of waiting culminating in a frenzied rush toward coveted merchandise the moment attendants unlocked the doors.

ShopperTrak said Friday's "impressive consumer outpouring" should have retailers feeling cautiously optimistic for the 2006 Christmas season when retailers usually make the bulk of their profits. The success, the company concluded, had a lot to do with extended retail discounts and a recent decline in gas and other energy prices that may have left consumers with more disposable income to spend.

J.C. Penney, the nation's largest catalogue merchant and owner of one of the leading department store chains, said in a statement that traffic in its outlets throughout the nation was "brisk," with home entertainment products, jewelry, and children's apparel leading the list of the most popular items. However, at Wal-Mart, the largest US retailer, results were disappointing. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based giant reported that its sales for a four-week period starting October 28 and including Black Friday dropped 0.1 percent. No reason for the loss was given.

The most breathtaking growth, however, was reported in the burgeoning sector of Internet sales, which took off just a few years ago.

Retail Decisions, a Hazlet, New Jersey-based company that specializes in online fraud prevention, said Saturday that Internet trade volumes went up a whopping 109 percent on Black Friday compared to a year ago.

"Through our global fraud prevention and payment processing platforms, we record and analyze a significant percentage of online payment transactions globally," said Carl Clump, the Retail Decisions chief executive officer.

"There has certainly been a significant surge on Black Friday as retailers promote their online shopping channels as vigorously as their brick and mortar stores," he pointed out.

Fridays With Maxell

The picture above is a rare one indeed. It is not because it is of me, or the fact that I am in Red Square in Moscow. It is rare because it is one of five pictures that survived that trip. Here is the story in a nutshell.

In 2003 I went to Moscow to do some orphanage work. During the three weeks I was there, I took almost 300 pictures that were extremely important to my foundation. I spent all day conducting business. And every evening when I returned to my apartment, I would upload all the pictures I had taken that day with my camera to my lap top. Every time the upload was finished, a box would ask me if I wanted to back up the photos to a disc. Every time I clicked on “NO” because I was going to wait until I came back to America and back them all up on one disc after I sorted them out.

Imagine my panic here in America when I went to power up the laptop and nothing happened. The hard drive was dead. I tried to retrieve the data from the fried hard drive professionally by some serious computer geeks, but it couldn’t be done. Nobody is sure exactly what happened. I could blame Aeroflot airlines for the way they X-rayed my computer. I could blame the myriad of uncaring Russian workers who tossed expensive stuff around like they were bags of laundry. I could blame Chernobyl or the KGB. But the only one I really could blame was myself. Three hundred extremely important pictures were now gone! Five pictures remained because they were still in my camera and had not been cleared.

What is the moral to that story?

Imagine one day finding that the hard drive on your business computer is dead. Imagine all your customer names gone. Imagine all the financial data from your accounting software is missing. Imagine the panic you would feel as everything you have worked so hard to obtain suddenly vanishes.

Now imagine replacing the hard drive with a new one. And imagine putting in your back up and recovery disc and having every single piece of information restored like new.

You Must Do This Weekly!

Back up all your data weekly. When you first power up your Acer laptop, it asks you if you want to make a copy for back up. DO IT! And then weekly add the new data from the week to that disc.

I use a program I bought at Best Buy called Back It Up. It is inexpensive and very easy to use. I have it set to write the week’s information to disc every Friday afternoon. I do nothing but leave the computer on and have the disc in the CD Rom drive. It will add any new and changed data to the CDRW disc. If your data is extremely sensitive, you can literally back it up every night. But every Friday I have a date with Maxell.

Protect Yourself And Your Business!

• Make a copy of all the data on your machine TODAY!
• Back up your files regularly.
• Back up after you reconcile your bank statement every month regardless of what day of the week.

Like the old saying goes:

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”