The better-performing site is actually based on a design done by another web company a few years ago (I put a new back end on the site but esssentially used their original design). The poorer performing site was designed by me from scratch.

I have tried all sorts of different banners on the poorer performing site to try to improve its conversion rate. We did get pretty good results in the week before Christmas but then it dropped right off again.

A few days ago, I decided to give up completely on banners, and just display the 20 best selling products on the home page – 4 rows of 5 products each. I intended to do this as a temporary solution until I could come up with a better banner.

But within 24 hours of making this change, the conversion rate shot up to a record level! It’s only been a few days but this site is now converting just as well as the other one. With no banner on it – no attempt to “sell” at all. Just presenting the best-selling flowers to the visitors as soon as they hit the home page.

I suspect the reason is, when people are looking to buy flowers online, they just want to be shown the flowers directly and make their own decisions, without any attempts to “sell” them in a banner.

I’m not saying this is going to work for every online store in every market. But if you are looking to improve the conversion rate of an online store, it’s definitely worth testing.

He had purchased a large list of New Zealand business owners, with names, emails etc. He wanted me to send out a mass email to this list with his offers.

Now, I am aware of the spam laws in New Zealand but I thought I might be able to find a way around it. I carefully worded an email, addressing the recipients by first name, telling them I had got their details from a directory of New Zealand business owners.

I invited them to sign up for this company’s offers by going to a web page and I assured them this was a one time email and they would never hear from me again unless they signed up.

I sent this to 3000 people, to see how it went. The good news is, we got over 100 sign ups within a couple of days. The bad news is, we got four spam complaints which were referred to the Department of Internal Affairs.

The Department now has me under investigation for sending spam. Hopefully, for a first offence, I will simply get a warning. After all, it’s hardly in the same league as sending millions of emails a day selling viagra.

But the lesson is learned. It’s pretty much impossible now to get away with anything that even vaguely resembles spam because a small but very active number of people are ready to report any unwanted email to the authorities.

The moral, don’t even think about sending spam. It’s not worth the grief.

I have always regarded website design as being primarily about marketing – about selling. A website should not be simply a work of art that you can look at and admire. It should first and foremost work to bring in more enquiries, leads and sales for your business.

Most of my clients share this desire to see their websites sell. In most cases, they trust me to build them a site that will work effectively as a marketing tool, and leave it up to me to design the graphics, layout and content in such a way as to maximise the site’s selling power.

Thankfully, through a lot of hard work, study, trial and error (yes, plenty of errors along the way) I’m getting closer to the point where I have a fair idea of what will work and what will not work in terms of selling online.

Getting ranked on page one of Google – an experiment

Until now I’ve done very little to get my own website ranked on Google for the search term “website designers christchurch”.

It’s the old story – I’ve been too busy working on everybody else’s website and haven’t spent much time on my own.

OK, so here’s a challenge. I’m going to see if I can get ranked on the first page of Google’s search results – as close to the top as possible – for the search term “website designers christchurch”.

Currently I’m ranked nowhere… about page 6 or thereabouts. It’s going to take a few months, I guess. It will put my own SEO skills to the test. And I’m going to try some things that are a little different from the dubious SEO tactics I’ve seen some other using.

I won’t be wasting time building questionable incoming links. What I’ll actually be doing, I’m going to keep a secret for now. For a couple of reasons. One reason is, it might not even work, so I’d rather test it first before saying too much. The second reason is, SEO is a continaully changing business. I’d like to keep at the cutting edge and keep a few things under my hat.

OK, I’ll update on this in 3 months from now.

From what I can see, Google+ is a stripped down version of Facebook, without all the meaningless status updates etc that Facebook has. I like it a lot, on first impression.

The challenge for Google+ is that most ordinary people are already locked into Facebook. The only people on Google+ so far are geeks, journalists etc who are early adopters.

Google+ has some nice features but Facebook is already moving to copy them. So will Google+ wipe out Facebook, as Google hopes it will?

It’s too early to tell. But this video is the best I’ve seen at explaining Google’s position with Google+ alongside Facebook and Twitter.

“That’s nice of them,” I thought. Until I looked at my visitor statistics and saw that this comment had actually been posted in India. Of course, I realised, the company has hired cheap labour to post comments on other people’s blogs, to help boost their website’s ranking in Google.

Sure enough, this particular web design company is number one in Google for the term ‘website designers Christchurch’. So their tactic works. And in one sense, good on them for taking advantage of a loophole in the system that Google has put in place.

The reality is, most people are doing email marketing wrong. And that’s why it’s not working for them.

I still believe that building an email list and maintaining regular contact with that list is a very powerful way to market profitably. It’s far more effective, in my opinion, than social media marketing (Facebook and Twitter) which is all the rage at the moment. Maybe I’m missing something, but the amount of time and effort required in social networking and the few sales that result from it, seems to make it a sidetrack for most businesses.

Think about it. Why do people go on social media sites? To socialise! They don’t go there with the idea of buying things. That’s why paid advertising on Facebook produces far less targeted prospects than Google Adwords.

Given a choice between 100 contacts on Facebook or Twitter and 10 on an email list, I’d take the latter any time. Traffic is only as valuable as the conversion (leads and sales) it brings you. And studies have shown that in most markets, email driven traffic is 15 to 20 times more likely to convert than social media traffic.

So, why do most businesses fail so badly with their email marketing? I believe it comes down to a couple of crucial factors. The first is, they think they need to have flashy HTML designs to make their emails look glitzy and professional. The problem is, these types of emails scream out advertising and they turn people off. There’s no personal interaction involved in the email. Your email looks and feels like an intrusion.

Email is a personal marketing medium. You send emails to your friends and family. And you do it in plain text.

I’m not saying you should never use HTML emails. If you need to show a picture of one of your products, for example, you need HTML. But keep it simple and personal.

The other big mistake most businesses make with email marketing is not having the balance right between information and sales pitch. If your emails are just pitch, pitch, pitch – nobody’s going to open them. You need to offer some interesting and valuable free information to engage with your readers first. Then tell them about your product or service.

Despite all the buzz about social media, I am convinced that email is still the cornerstone of Internet marketing. With a little thought, effort and persistence, it can work very powerfully for most businesses.

The message is, the world has gone mobile. From smartphones to tablets, mobile devices are quickly becoming the best way for people to find products and services when they’re on the go. During the past year, the number of Google mobile searches has quadrupled. In fact, by 2012, more people will connect via a mobile device than a computer. If your business is targeting the local market, mobile users are especially important, because one out of three searches on a mobile devices has local intent.

There’s a reason that companies like Google and Microsoft are investing lots of money into the mobile web and in making their products more accessible from the mobile web. Think about it, if a customer is doing research on their phone and comes across two sites, one that is hard to pull up and read and one that is elegant and attractive and makes it easy to call a number or send an e-mail directly from the page, which company has a better shot of getting the business?

What happens when someone wants to find out more about your business, and clicks to your website? Does your website load quickly enough for mobile phone users? Take a few moments to see if your website passes the test. Go to Google’s new page speed tester. If it doesn’t, there are a range of options to help you optimise your website for mobile devices. You can check out Mobila for mobile website design.

If you’re a web designer, optimising sites for mobile devices doesn’t have to be difficult. If you’re using WordPress (now my personal CMS of choice), there a great plugin called WPTouch that can quickly optimise a WordPress site for the iPhone and Android devices. Another good WordPress option is the Carrington Mobile theme.

The reason is, search engine optimisation is becoming much more difficult. And it will get much, much harder to get a web page to rank on page one of Google.

When I started in the web business in 2003, the number of sites competing for each search term was fewer and it was much easier to get to the top of Google. I had some great early successes and started to get a swelled head, thinking I was an SEO guru. The truth is, it was partly fluke and partly the fact that it was much easier back then.

Today, there are so many web pages that it’s a truly daunting task to get a website onto page one of Google for any competitive search term. It can be done, but it takes a lot more time and effort – and skill – than it did seven years ago.

A lot of SEO practitioners are finding it harder and harder to satisfy their clients’ ranking requests. There is growing client dissatisfaction with SEO results, and it will only get worse.

The harsh reality is, to do SEO properly today in any market where there is any serious competition, requires a substantial budget. Most small businesses gasp in horror at the prices now being charged by the top SEO companies – but they just don’t realise the amount of time and effort that’s required to get a top Google ranking today.

Only the very best SEO practitioners can ever attain a top 10 result for a meaningful keyword – and they have to charge a hefty price to do so.

What this means for small businesses on the web

First, it’s no longer good enough to simply ask your web designer to “do some SEO” on your website. There are some basic on-page factors that any web designer can (and should) do to give the site a fighting chance if the market is not too competitive. But beyond that, there are no magic tricks any more.

What this means is that advertising on the web is no longer “free” – in the sense that you can’t just put up a website today and expect people to find you, without having to pay anything more for advertising. Those days are gone. And it will only get worse. It will cost much more to make money on the web, just like in a “real business”.

So, if you are serious about getting your website ranked at the top of Google, it’s going to require a true SEO expert and it’s going to cost you a substantial amount of money.

And how do you find a true SEO expert?

Well, here is the acid test. It’s quite simple. If the SEO practitioner is not well ranked on Google for terms such as ‘search engine optimisation’, ‘search engine ranking’, ‘SEO’ etc…, then they probably can’t get you into the top results either. On the other hand, if they are well ranked themselves, it shows they know what they are doing and will probably do the same for you (given time and money).

The moral. Choose your SEO company carefully, be patient, and plan on the expense.

If the subject of building websites that actually make money is of any relevance to you, this is a ‘must read’ book.

In some ways, there’s nothing new or ground breaking it. It’s just the basics – explained very simply and clearly. As I read it, I thought, “well, I could have written this book myself”.

What I like about the book, is that it brings together all the relevant parts of the jigsaw of selling online, in one handy resource.

Ben points out the sad reality that 95% of small business websites are a waste of time and money. They simply don’t work to bring in new business and make money for their owners.

One of the key messages is that most website designers (myself included until very recently) use a “best guess” approach to building websites. We build what we think will work, based on past experience, put it online and hope for the best.

The new approach that Ben advocates (and what all the really smart internet marketers have been quietly doing for some time) is to continually test a website with different headlines, layouts, graphics etc – to see which gets the best response.

Another key message is that a website needs to be built on the right foundation, by doing keyword research at the first step of the process – not as an after-thought once the site is online. Keyword research is essential for search engine optimisation. If your site is not going to rank in the search engines, it’s not likely to get much traffic (unless you have some other traffic strategy in mind). So doing your keyword research at the outset is a smart move.

‘Convert’ is a book that every web designer should read, as well as any business owner who is interested in making more money from their website (and then you can pass on the information to your web designer).

You can get the book from Amazon (I actually downloaded it as e-book and am reading it on a kindle).

Read “Convert!” Introduction & Table of Contents (PDF format).

Forward-thinking businesses have already launched separate mobile-friendly websites that are designed specifically to be viewed on a mobile devices. If you own a website, and you are serious about making money from it, you should think about doing the same.

How does your website look on a mobile phone?

If you have your phone handy, put in your web address right now and check. Most business owners get a nasty shock when they view their website on a mobile device.

See the difference…

The mobile phone on the left is showing Europcar’s conventional website. The device on the right is displaying the company’s custom-designed mobile site.

You can see how much more simple and clear the mobile site is for visitors to read and navigate.

The mobile site is reduced to the bare essentials, for quick reading and scanning by web users who are on the move and in a hurry.

If you are interested in having a mobile-friendly website designed, go to Mobila.co.nz and see the very cost-effective packages offered.