New website for Christchurch company selling steel-frame kitset homes

I’ve just launched a new website for C-Style Homes, a Christchurch company that sells a great range of steel frame kitset homes at amazingly low prices.

This website project is the first of what will be many more as part of a new business relationship I’ve developed with MARKITABLE, a Wellington company.

The website is built with the Joomla open source content management system and has a contemporary look. It’s clean and simple in its design. And furthermore, it is already ranking on page 1 of Google for the keywords steel frame kitset homes due to some pre-launch work on my part ot help get it optimised in the search engines.

The long-term strategy will be to get this site at the top of Google for the term kitset homes, which is much more competitive. I achieved this a few years ago for another website selling kitset homes and I’m confident within a few months C-Style will also be near the top of Google, certainly on Page 1.

Search engine optimisation is very important for any business website, particularly in the current economy. It’s still relatively easy to get a good search engine ranking in the local market in New Zealand, because so few websites are optimised.

That will change, of course, as more busineses get web savvy. But for now, a few simple strategies such as the right meta tags, alt tags on images and developing some good incoming links, is enough to get most sites well ranked on Google in their local market.

How to Recession-Proof Your Business Using the Internet

I have just published a new report called
‘How to Recession-Proof Your Business Using the Internet’.

The report is too long to post here (about 9 pages). So I’m offering it to you as PDF to download. The report is free and you don’t even have to give me your email to get it

But if you find it helpful, I would like to ask that you will forward it on to someone else who might also benefit from it.

The Report covers:

• How People’s Behaviour Changes in a Recession and How to Profit from It [Page 2]
• What You Should NEVER Do in a Recession and What to Do Instead [Page 3]
• The 4 Reasons Why You Need to Market Your Business on the Internet [Page 4]
• The Top 3 Ways to Market Your Business on the Internet [Page 6]

To get the Report, Click Here.

With email marketing, boring is usually better

If you are sending out an email newsletter or promotion, it’s tempting to go for a “flashy” high-tech design, rather than “boring” plain text.

But my experience over several years has convinced me this is usually a big mistake.  In fact, it was confirmed recently when I designed a slick, professional-looking email newsletter template according to my client’s directions (and against my better judgement). The newsletter looked fantastic. But a large percentage of them went straight into the recipients’ junk mail folders.

The important point is, every time you send an email to your subscribers, their email service checks to make sure it meets their deliverability standards. Emails that contains a lot of graphics and HTML automatically raise a red flag with email service providers, because that’s what a lot of spammers tend to use.

For example, SPAM Assassin, which is a spam detection software used by many email providers, will penalise your email if it has more than 30-40% HTML content.

Furthermore, most email clients now block images in emails by default, as a built in security precaution. In order for the recipient to view the graphics, they have to click on a button or link to allow it. (And why would you want to make a customer click anything just so they can read your email properly?)

Experienced email marketers know newsletters that focus on content rather than design achieve a higher sales conversion rates than newsletters with heavy HTML and graphics.

Your subscribers might be duly impressed by the design of your first email newsletter. But after that, the only reason they will keep reading your emails is if they contain something of interest to them. 

The bottom line is, if you want your email newsletters and promotions to get read, you should make them plain text… or if you must use HTML, keep the graphics to a minimum. Leave plenty of white space, so it’seasy for people to read.

Email marketing can be highly effective. But only if your messages get past your subscribers’ spam filters and they can actually read them. The most important thing about an email newsletter is not how nice the design is… it’s the content. That’s the only reason people will want to read it.