I've told you this before - you should NEVER use a free platform as a replacement for your own business website.

You have no control over your content, like the guy who had used Blogger for 14 years and one day his site was shut down without warning & he lost all his work.  14 years gone! Today the reason was illustrated once again when Facebook went down for a while.

I read an article recently that gave 3 reasons for businesses closing when the owner wants to retire:

• internet competition,
• lack of loyalty among younger customers,
• and owners not being able to find a buyer. 

All of these reasons come back to one uncomfortable truth:

The average business owner has been watching the internet come roaring down the track for years and has made little to no effort to figure out how they could use the web to:

• improve their business operations and efficiency,
• increase customer loyalty,
• improve communications with customers,
• reach target markets they could have never dreamed of before, 
• and adapt their business to survive.

With all the talk of the $13.7 billion cash deal for Amazon to buy Whole Foods, most people are just talking about it in relation to the retail industry and what it will mean for its future. I think small business owners should be looking at it to see what they might be able to learn from the deal that can be applied to their own businesses, though.

Having been in the internet industry for 21+ years, I know that everyday business owners can come up with great ideas that transform their businesses and their lifestyles. I've worked with many of them, and have friends who've used the internet to build wildly successful businesses that let them live life on their own terms.

You have to keep your mind open and, more importantly, dare to dream about what you really want out of your business. Here are 4 of the many lessons you can take from the Amazon - Whole Foods deal:

Modern cloud-based tools that encourage cooperation between Sales and Marketing instead of competition can help transform your results. They're also affordable and readily available.

Business owners and managers like to complain about their Marketing and Sales teams not working together, but what they don't recognize is that they've often set up the very circumstances that create the usual problems.

With most businesses, Marketing is evaluated based on the number of leads they send to Sales, and Sales is evaluated based on how many deals they close.

This creates inherent problems that damage the relationship between the two teams as well as the company as a whole.