One of my customers who owns a boat tour business down the west coast of  scenic South Island gets a lot of compliments for her website.

She used to have a simple HTML site.  I revamped the site for her about a year ago to a WordPress site. She saw a good jump in her traffic and her bookings. One of the reasons is she writes a post in her blog occasionally. Imagine her traffic if she does regularly!

she is very happy with the site and regularly gets compliments. Here is what she wrote to me yesterday:-

” Getting lots of compliments for the site, even from a web designer who is staying here so all is well!”

She loves it so much that she wants a second site for another business of hers.

As a small business the website is crucial to her marketing and bookings. So if you are a small business and want an editable website that you can update easily contact me today!

Here is the website that my client loves   www.okaritoboattours.co.nz

I have not posted for a while. I decided to have a good break this year and took 3 weeks off.  Fully refreshed and charged for 2010!

I am planning a few different strategies for my online business this year. I am almost done with the new look and feel for pixels. It got delayed due to various reasons. It will feature a few bells and whistles. WordPress has evolved so much in the past couple of years. You can do amzing things on the interface side and have all that muscle that makes it work on the backend as well. What more could you ask for?

I just want to touch base on an earlier post here.

Why have a website?  For small businesses:-

• The website is a great marketing tool
• Builds Credibility.
• Builds trust
• Before a prospect contacts you they will always check out your business and you online
• Your products & services are available 24/7 online
• Your market reach increases enormously
• So much cheaper than printing a whole lot of brochures again and again
• Not having a website will cost your business dearly – you miss out on the youth market

A prospect came to me recently and wanted a website. I asked her why she wanted one?

One of the things she said was ” Every time I give my business card to someone they want to know why I don’t have a website”.

It is like the norm these days.

contact me for a simple editable website.

• For a small business your website is a working horse. Make it work to your advantage
• As you can see, the new site has a ton of features the old site doesn’t:
• Have a good clean professional looking design
• information that will generate a sale or booking should be visible clearly at the top of the page
• Free quote enquire now will generate leads
• the Buy Now visible prominently on the home page
• Phone number/contact details on every page to encourage people to ring you
• Blog – keep your prospects and customers always in the loop about your products or services.
• Display a gallery of your products/wares in a simple way with some description if neccessary
• Have the site optimised for your niche keywords
• Use web 2.0 methods like Twitter, Facebook, Blog, Feeds to spread awareness of your products.(One of my customers saw a big jump in his traffic to his site by tweeting on Twitter. Now he has a good relevant following there.)
• Blog regularly with good relevant posts

Do all the above and keep marketing actively and see the results within a few months.

get your website revamped to a Web 2.0 one now by contacting me me for a free quote.

A good website should do the following

• Tell the visitor what your business is all about.
• Tell the visitor what to do – buy product, sign up to newsletter
• Tell them why your product/service is better
• Make them feel safe when they are visiting your site. (Display clearly any Better Business Bureau badge encrypted buying facility etc)
• Make it easy to buy from your site. Give them many payment options
• Once they have bought, send them a thank you email and a follow up email.(that way they will come back for more products or service

I have only scratched the surface. To have an effective small business website there are many other important components to make the website work properly.
contact me to revamp your existing website and increase traffic.

Increase your market share

Anyone can look up your website from anywhere.Your prospect could be 100s of miles away and looking for your the product or service you sell. Your website can help them find you.

You can sell 24/7 365 days a year

Gone are the days where you sell 9am to 5pm to your local community only.

Build credibility
People can look your up and find out how long you have been trading, your physical address before contacting you. They can read your customer testimonial etc.

You can showcase your products services easily
It can be like an online shop at a fraction of the brick & mortar shop. And it us open 24/7.

You can get into social sites

And create a presence like Dell and HP. They have a huge following in places like Twitter and Facebook.It is instant exposure and awareness of you products and services.

You can advertise online

By sending some Google or Yahoo traffic to your site. It is instant traffic and if you are smart you will see conversions quickly.

You can swap links with complimentary businesses

Your visibility will increase.

Advertising and promotions can cost a fraction of your offline efforts
One of my customers spent a whopping $20000 for printing brochoures for his upcoming workshops. Just imaging the amount of traffic it could have got him for that kind of money.
He is not in a competitive niche at all. Around $5000 or much lesss would have got him enough conversions.

these days if you don’t have a website customers will not even consider you for buying.

Having an effective website and using it as a marketing tool is important for every small business owner. contact me contact me for website packages from $500 onwards.

Nearly every business has a website these days. Almost 100,000 new website go live each day. I know that is a lot. but most of them don’t know why they need a website or how to use it effectively for their businesses.

To make your website work for you and give you  a good ROI you need a plan and a clearly identified goal.

These are the main point to consider before getting a website for your business.

• what is your target market
• What will the website do for your business
• How will it help your existing customers
• What is the main purpose (generate leads, sell online, support your existing customers, inform the prospect)
• How will you accomplish the above tasks on your website?

In this day and age the Internet is the first point of getting information, buying, hiring etc. Think about this.How many of us look in the phone book or yellow pages or go to the library to get info, buy or hire some one first step? We may check online then go to the shop to buy or may even buy online.

so whatever product or service you are selling, ask those questions first before getting your website done.

I have just scratched the surface here.  Once it is up you need to test and track and tweak as you go to get maximum results.

It is not that hard to do that if you have a website with Content Management System installed. You can update and edit your site whenever you want.

contact me to get a website with CMS at a very reasonable cost.

• editing without needing to know HTML
• easy to update current events – takes a few minutes
• No uploading of files – like static HTML sites
• post-dating of articles so they can automatically “go live” in the future
• reader participation through comments
• organization of the content using tags – these are like signposts for search engines
• If you already have a site and are switching to WordPress you can retain the URL addresses
• easy addition of new functionality (because it is “open source”)
• free support by the very responsive developer and user communities
• Pinging facility – pings newsaggregators automatically
• You can add gazillions of plugins to add more functionality
• easy to integrate social media widgets – seamless with twitter, Digg etc
• Instant traffic – no waiting 3 months to see a few visitors
• So many free themes and custom themes to choose from
• Add image galleries videos very easily

What more do you want? It is one click installation if you use Hostgator.

I set up a review site last night for a product with WordPress. It is a simple 4 page site with some useful articles. Guess what this morning in my stats I saw 11 unique hits.! If I had done a static HTML site I am sure this would have taken about 2-3 weeks or more. Two keyword searches for the very specific product I was recommending. Now way HTML site can achieve this.

So if you are a small business owner and want some quick exposure online, some targeted traffic  contact me and I can set up a wordpress site for a very reasonable cost. I will train you to update your site and teach you basic SEO functions.

From my experience Google love WordPress.

I see a lot of searches in my stats with names of cities other than where I live (wellington). I have local clients and clients all over New Zealand.

With email and skype or phone it is so easy to get what you want these days. I have not met most of my customers face-to-face. They usually find me on Google and email me what thery want. I reply to them within a day. Then :-

• We narrow down the specs
• I give a quote
• They tell me if they are happy or not
• I request them to work on the content and images etc
• I start work on the look and feel
• I train them to use the CMS
• They start using the CMS to tweak copy and images

This process is so easy as they get access to the website on my server at once. All they do is log in and make changes. I also teach them to FTP files. They upload the images or PDF documents. How easy is that?

So yeah I do not have to be local to design your website and get it up and running!
Contact Me to get your website with CMS up and running in not time!

How often to update a business website was one of the searches on my blog stats today.

A very good question.
If you are a small business update the site as often as you can. It can be twice a week or more. Definetely 3-4 times a month. Search engines love fresh good content. You will get more Google love. Write good relevant keyword rich articles or blog posts for the humans. (No keyword stuffing).

For example if you are a rug seller write about the different kinds of rugs, where they come from, the differences between machine and hand knotted. Ways to repair and clean rugs etc. all this information will be crawled by search engines. When people search for information your blog posts or articles will come up on the first page. Over a period of time you will have regular readers or imformation seekers who will become your customers or even one time visitors will become your customer.

To do this you need to have a way of updating your site and keeping it fresh. I can help you do that by revamping your existing site or build you a new site with a content management system in place.

I will train you to update your site. CMS is quite easy to use and has Word like dashboard. You can easily add artciles images etc.  It does not take much time. You can do even if you are travelling. You can update it from anywhere as the files sit on the server and you can access it easily

Contact me for a free quote. No matter what the size of your website I can install content management system for you.

Search Engines love wordpress website. Must be the way they are structured and the way you can popularise them.

What you can do with WordPress Sites:-

1. Can be a normal site
2. Can have a blog
3. Can set up RSS feeds to popularise your site
4. Can have plugin to create tags for your content. (These act like signposts for Search Engines)
5. Add content regularly through posts in your blog or articles.
6. Add pictures, embed videos easily
7. Check your traffic stats regularly and tweak your content and posts accordingly
8. Add book mark buttons
9. Add social bookmark buttons (your visitors can bookmark you easily)
10. Set up directory pings. (this kind of blasts your posts to about 200 news aggregators – kind of news broadcasters

Best things is you can do this all so easily once the site is set up.

It is much easier to get traffic fast to your site with WorPress running at the back. Doesn’t this sound ezy peazy?

Contact me to setup your wordpress site. It can be done in a couple of days! And see the difference.