It’s easy to think that standing out from your competition is something that only your truly best competitors do.

But actually it’s relatively simple to be above average because (so often) the average is actually well below average.

My guess is that unless you’re in a hyper competitive niche then you can be above average just by getting the basics right:

• Answer emails promptly. Most people don’t send emails to websites or even email lists, so the number of emails you’re likely to get is relatively low. Because emails can become a time sink, set aside a few minutes a day for dealing with emails rather than responding to them as soon as they arrive. It’s more efficient for your and most people won’t mind a delay of a few hours to a day before you reply. You could even set up an auto-reply in your email system to say that you aim to reply to emails on weekdays between certain hours. That way you’re not training people to expect an instant response but you are reassuring them that things get handled.
• Check your website is working. If you’re on a reasonable host, chances are this is happening. If you’re on a free or mega-cheap host, it’s not as likely and you should strongly consider moving to a better service. Some hosts have gone downhill in recent years – Hostgator amongst others – but even those are usually OK unless you break something by not keeping your WordPress site up to date so there’s probably no need to change. There are various monitoring systems available that will alert you to your site being down and if your website is critical to your internet business that’s a worthwhile investment. I’ve used one such service for the last decade and it’s almost always better at detecting problems than the (fairly premium) hosts I use.
• Log in to critical sites every now and then. You don’t always get notified that computers aren’t happy about something – JVZoo did that to me the other day and was refusing to take sales unless I ticked a box inside my account. That’s thankfully quite rare but it’s annoying when it happens, especially when the “I can’t be bothered to process the transaction” screen gets stuck in a user’s browser and you lose a sale. Other affiliate programs I’m in like me to log in occasionally just to prove I’m still around, even though I’m making sales. So get in the habit of checking every now and then.
• If your potential customers are likely to mention you on Facebook or Twitter, set up an alert. This is something on my to-do list that I probably should move higher up. Customers are increasingly expecting to use social media to resolve complaints, partly because the bigger companies are inadvertently training them to do that by reacting to social media comments faster and more positively than anything else. Probably because it’s in the open air and more likely to get noticed by other possibly upset customers.
• Generally be helpful. This sounds obvious but if you’ve ever sent an email to a big company you’ll know their standard operating procedure seems to be to answer the question they hoped you’d asked rather than the one you actually asked. It doesn’t take much – if any – more effort to be helpful and help your customers or email list members. And it’s often the difference between making a sale in the future or not. We use something called reciprocity which is our way of keeping “score” and working out whether or not we owe someone a favour. It’s not a formal document, it’s more a nagging thing at the back of our minds. Read Robert Cialdini’s book Influence for a fuller explanation but it’s the reason that free gifts work so well, even if we didn’t much want the gift.

All those are basics.

But if you do them right – or reasonably right – you’ll be ahead of a very large chunk of your competition.

You might even get mentioned on social media.

And you’ll probably get mentioned when someone asks someone else who should they choose in your niche.

Doing the basics right will help you stand out from the crowd and is another useful edge in your internet marketing.