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

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!

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.

As a small business myself I know how important it is to have a website that is targeted at your customers.

How many of you small business owners know

1. Where your traffic is coming from
2. How they are searching for you ? (keyphrase or keyword)
3. Who is refering the visitor
4. Which search engine sent you the traffic?

If you do not know any of the above you are leaving money on the table. This is like the pulse of your website. the more you know about the traffic the better you will be in a position to tweak it for conversion.

Some of my customers are so on top of this and are tweaking theirs sites almost every week or more.

The reason being when I set up their websites with the content management system I install Google analytics or another plugin that gives them detailed stats. I also train them to look for the goldmine in their stats.

This helps them refine the content for their traffic.

But if you have a static website and have no easy access to update how will you be able to do the above?

Increase your traffic by tweaking your content to suit your target market with my website packages.

Contact me for a website with content management system.

I realised this morning I have not posted for a while. The reason being – busy building websites and driving traffic to my own sites.

A friend of mine is starting a business. She is not very computer lierate and is not very comfortable using computers.  She came to me and said “  I am starting this business. It needs a website.  I don’t even know how to send an email though”. ( She had just bought her first computer that day).

My reply was “Not a problem. I will get you a simple website that will be a marketing tool for you. I will also teach you how to update your site. You can even have a blog on your site if you want to. ”

I installed wordpress on site and am in the process of building the site. I will give a manual that will walk her through the steps in a simple manner with lots of screenshots. I will train her over the phone as well. I am very confident she will be updating her site in no time!

The reason being Worpress is so easy to use.I have trained people who knew only to switch on their computers. I have met many small business owners who get penalised by Google as nothing has been done to the website in the past 8-10 years.

• Are you a small business with an outdated website?
• Don’t know who to approach to update your website?
• Stuck with content that is no longer useful to your customers?

Contact me and I can set up your wordpress website for a very reasonable amount in a very short time. I will give it a professional look and feel install all the necessary plug ins and train you to update the site in no time!

give me a call 64 4 477 2135

This was the headline in a news portal today

“Small businesses accentuate the negative ”

Wellington small business confidence has turned on its head since February, with pessimism doubling and optimism nearly halving.

The global credit crunch and the markets & banks facing tough times is trickling all the way down even to this little corner of the worls. Globalisation has made sure of that. Consumer spending will drop over the next months. Experts are saying that recession is going to be long and painful. It is much harder if you are a small business. What can you do?  Many things actually.

1. Keep in touch with your customers. They might want to upgrade their product
2. Keep your marketing funnel going all the time. Lead generation has to be continous
3. Redo your printed advertising. Get a new look for all of them.
4. Revamp your website and give it a facelift.
5. Keep writing related articles for your website and update content regularly.
6. Get your website listed in local web directories. It does work.
7. Make sure your website is optimized for SEO. (Search Engine Optimization)

image by midori syu

One of my customers recently did just some of the things above. She redid her advertising material like brochures, business cards etc. She emaile me a week ago to get her website redone and the look and feel to be like her printed material. This time round I am giving her a content management system. That way she can update the website herself and she will blog about her business to get more traffic. Summer time is her peak time. She will be ready for it with a new look.

What are you doing to make sure you get more customers now?