About

About Chris Mole

For more than 25 years I have been passionate about communicating by the written word. When I started in journalism in the early 1980s there were no computers and no Internet. It wasn’t until 2002 that I began to grasp the enormous power of the Internet as a marketing tool.

I was working as Press Secretary for Richard Prebble when he was leader of the Act Party, prior to the 2002 election. At that time, the Act Party was at the forefront of using the Web and email marketing to get its message out. I wrote a weekly newsletter called Richard Prebble’s Letter from Wellington, which went out to more than 30,000 subscribers by email.

In 2003 I built my first website. It looks horrible when I look at it now. But I was hooked from then on by the combination of the Internet and the written word as a means of marketing and selling. I became an Internet marketing junkie. I subscribed to the newsletters of all the top American Internet marketers and devoured all their ideas on copywriting and marketing. It took me a while to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

There’s an awful lot of hype and rubbish out there about Internet marketing and people are still getting sucked in by the ‘get rich quick’ dream of making money on the Internet. The fundamental rules of business are the same on the Internet as they are anywhere else. You need to provide a quality product or service, to a market that wants it, at a price they’re willing to pay.

What makes the Internet so exciting, is it opens up a huge potential marketing opportunity that simply didn’t exist 10 years ago. I work with many older business people who are still struggling to get to the grips with the Internet. Many choose to ignore it altogether and continue on with the way they’ve always done things. They’ll be wiped out by sharp young entrepreneurs who understand the power of online marketing to the younger generation.

New Zealand is lagging well behind the US and even the UK and Australia when it comes to marketing on the Internet. For example, New Zealand businesses will often write the content of their websites themselves, to save money. They may well save money but they end up with a website that is using only a fraction of its potential because their prospective customers don’t understand the full benefits of what the website is offering.

The focus of my business has evolved mainly into helping people to SELL their products or services, using a combination of the written word and the Internet.  Things have grown so rapidly, I simply don’t have time to do everything myself now.  I have a team of extremely talented professionals who I work with, not only in New Zealand but also overseas. Since 2004 I have been working with Dave Alston, a very talented copywriter and Internet marketer in the UK.

Dave and I have worked on several projects together. He has been an enormous help and inspiration to me and I couldn’t have got as far as I have so far, without his input. In 2005 I bought Dave’s web design business, Ace of Webs, which at that time had mainly UK clients, and I have extended its client base not only throughout New Zealand but also the US and elsewhere.

The focus of Ace of Webs is building websites that SELL. We focus on writing compelling, hype-free sales copy and designing web pages that keep visitors engaged and interested.  More recently, I have become excited about the potential of web video and have started to offer this to my clients.

Futhermore, I work with a very talented young web programmer called Enayet Rajib, who lives in Dakha, Bangladesh. Whatever web programming challenge I can throw at him, Enayet can always find a solution. He is worth his weight in gold to me. More recently, I have formed a partnership with Markitable, a marketing company in Wellington, which specialises in Web marketing and graphic design. This team of talented young people (headed by my son, Jonny) are going to be an integral part of my business in the years ahead.

When it comes to business, my passion is helping people to sell more, using a combination of the written word and the Internet. If you need help to achieve those kind of results in your business, you are welcome to contact me. I keep pretty busy, so I can’t work with everyone who asks me these days. But if you are a serious business and you want serious results, I would love to talk to you.