Should You Really Customise and Write a Website Yourself?

SEO tips, Small Business Brisbane, Website Design No Responses »
Aug 262010

Small business owners are a busy lot; today we consider… do you have time and skills to DIY your content and run a full CMS?

We wrote a little about this when we considered the question, DIY Template or Employ a Web Designer?

Recently I found another web company offering an ‘all-in-one’ solution – where business owners pick a template and do their own content and optimisation. This really assumes that business owners have an eye for design and colour, copywriting skills, and knowledge of keywords and where to put them.

That’s quite of a lot of assumptions. Most people who are very good at what they do, whether plumbing a roof or consulting to business, don’t have the time to research and get good at these varied skill sets. Hell, they don’t even have the time to consult with us on what they want in their website at times, much less always be doing it themselves.

Content Updates to Websites

In our new publication ‘Small Business Websites… Finally Explained’ we express the need for regular website updates if you want your website to be fresh and ranked well in Google. (And we practice what we preach).

If you or your partner can set aside 3 to 5 hours per month and you are a concise writer, please go ahead and pay for a full CMS (content management). If you’re normally in a car or up on a roof for work, then look into getting Hosting Maintenance included ($25 monthly) in a standard small business website. This means you can send in your website updates every couple of months at no extra cost.

Remember, you can optionally add a WordPress blog to a small business website and easily enough put in articles. Blog writing can be a simple affair and help your site be found for very specific subjects and locations. These can be articles which encourage the reader to purchase from you. When (notice I don’t say if) you realise that you can’t possibly keep up with writing these posts then I’d be happy to do it for you on a regular weekly basis, from $40 per post, or less for editing. Cheers.

Posted by Jennifer at 2:36 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Development Applications made easy

Small Business Brisbane No Responses »
Aug 182010

Well, they say it’s difficult to get a DA through Council… and they’d be right, usually! But with Town Planning Strategies (in Redcliffe, north Brisbane), our experienced Town Planner (Robyn) will help you get your property Development Application approved, with customised plans and strategies to suit.

Being informed is a must when you are a developer.  That’s why Town Planning Strategies have included a section ‘Planning in Queensland‘ with info about the Sustainable Planning Act and IDAS, and links to all the Local and Government resources and maps, on their website.

If you see this website and think, “wow, that’s a clean, modern, and easy to use website”… please let us at Red Planet Design know and find out how you can get this kind of quality website too… all for under $1,000.

Posted by Gino Lancaster at 1:03 pm Tagged with:

Copywriting for Sales Conversion

copywriting tips No Responses »
Aug 182010

Strong SEO Copywriting will attract customers to your website, sure. This involves researching and including relevant keywords in your site.  Some people think that’s where the story ends.

But if you want people to take the next action step and buy from you, the writing must be strong enough and use emotional appeals. Mr Sturk at Mequoda Daily calls these trigger words:

“Trigger words are words that motivate people to act on something. There are a variety of trigger words, but the strongest tend to make an emotional connection with the reader.” – Mequoda Daily post

Customer Benefits

Using customer benefits is one trick of many successful copywriters to create these emotional appeals. A lot of people have the wrong idea about what is a benefit. I can give you a real example from financial services – a topic that can be dull as dishwater or a real motivator. Headline:

“If Growing And Protecting Your Wealth For Future Generations Is Important To You – Contact The Family Wealth Generation And Wealth Protection Specialists, Bronson Financial Services…”

The ‘trigger words’ in this headline are ‘growing and protecting your wealth for future generations’… this is what gets the reader thinking yes, that’s exactly what I want… however, there is no direct emotional appeal like fear, anger or love. But as this headline clearly relates very well to target market needs and what they provide, I believe it does its job very well.

Some people might be afraid of using a headline in their home page, but on the complete home page we put in eight headlines/subheadings, each relating to different selling points.

Sheep huddle together and all look the same. Be confident enough to stand out – and connect to your audience.

Posted by Gino Lancaster at 12:41 pm Tagged with: , ,

Hiring Graphic Designers – Hourly versus Project Rates?

Graphic Design, Small Business Brisbane 1 Response »
Aug 062010

It’s always a surprise to find out a competing graphic designer charged out 10 hours to design a DL flyer, so let’s discuss what a small business owner in Brisbane should expect to pay for a well-designed brochure. (Often a tri-fold DL)

When looking at getting some print design work done, there’s a few things to consider.

  • Designer is adept at carrying out the brief, with solid design skills, to the point of making it print ready.
  • Designer gives a quote or estimate upfront of entire job, not just an hourly rate. (Since 3 hrs x $90 ph only costs $270, whereas 10 x $80 ph costs $800). This should include high res PDF, all print ready. He/she may also state whether the cost includes print management – i.e. liaison with your printer. (RPD can design A4-folded double-sided brochures from $300 – $400+ GST).
  • Designer is a decent person with good customer service (ie. calls you back promptly, happy to do changes, etc)

You should also be mindful of printing prices. Red Planet Design can actually give you economy print choices so that on a smaller print run, a very low cost digital printer is used, and on quality or larger runs, a reliable full service printer is used. We pass on the savings to you and never charge a commission.

And of course, these days you can even have personalised print, different shapes cut (like a wave), different styles of designs done for various markets/products, and of course gloss spot UV varnish on high quality paper, all to make your print brochures stand out.

Posted by Gino Lancaster at 12:36 pm Tagged with:

Prevent Marketing Material Project Delays

Small Business, copywriting tips No Responses »
Jul 292010
Power of Words website

Power of Words - our Copywriting site

When business people think of getting a brochure or website developed, they often start by getting a quote from their favoured graphic designer, who then obliges and starts asking about the design. The designer makes a start, but then find he can’t go any further with the project without content.

Unfortunately, business owners are often juggling many balls – and the copy (words) gets overlooked and left… sometimes for months.  The reason for this could be lack of time (busy on earning activities), or lack of knowledge of how to approach the writing.

Either way, the business owner or marketer should not be the sole person who is responsible for the copy and content. Just as designers exist to ensure artwork is balanced, attractive and print ready (or web ready), editors exist to ensure your grammar is perfect, consistent, and correct in voice. People wanting professional material hire an editor.

But if you struggle to write, the solution is hire a copy-writer (that’s a writer of copy). A copywriter is trained to write to get results – so the approach is a little different. If sales conversion from written collateral is important to you, the solution is… a copywriter. Making a document compelling to read is what makes our heart sing.

All you will need to supply is info on your target market, your business proposition, benefits to customers (these can often be found in client testimonials), product features, what you will use the brochure for, and what you want to achieve. Even the desired length and form of the piece can be worked out collaboratively from what you say about its purpose (with a mind for practical things like posting through the mail and printing costs).

Posted by Jennifer at 8:28 pm Tagged with: , , , ,

Search Visibility Part 2: Building a Theme with Keywords

SEO tips, marketing strategies No Responses »
Jul 142010

Building a Theme with Niche Keywords

Many people have a simplistic view of keywords. Just putting two word phrases commonly searched for onto your website isn’t enough. You need to attract the right visitors from the right selection of keywords.  Search engines are actually quite clever at working out themes through indexing methods, saving you the job of over-thinking keywords.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an indexing method that identifies patterns in the relationships between terms and concepts. Words used within the same context (i.e. ‘new computers’ and ‘MacBook Pro’) have a relationship. With this relationship in mind, you can organise a keyword list into themes of related keywords. It’s pretty much how our mind likes to work anyway.

From those themes, your site’s best structure and content will start to emerge.

Tools to Help You

If you don’t have the benefit of your own consumer research, there are tools to help derive keyword relationships, like Google’s Wonderwheel. Wonderwheel, listed on the left side of Google.com search results, shows related keyword phrases that can be used to build subpages within each of your categories. (Just click to show the wheel’s results).

Chris Anderson’s 2006 book ‘The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More’ explains the theory that its best to concentrate on the smaller, more focused end of the customer movements/sales chart (i.e. the long thin tail). Since this book come out, every Internet guru has been talking about how to apply this methodology to internet search (keyword research).

As you assign related keywords based on their relationships, it may be you end up with several long-tail keyword phrases. This is a good thing. Achieving rankings for one or two-word queries (e.g. ‘web design, ‘landscape gardeners’, ‘car sales’) are important, but most experienced marketers have found they  generate the MOST targeted clicks and BEST sales conversions from three- to five-word queries (web design Brisbane, landscape design Sydney).

What I do is use the Market Samurai tool to investigate more three-word or longer keyword phrases. If you’ve got money on the line, then I suggest spending some time to research current market trends and keyword searches… it’s better than fumbling in the Internet darkness.

Posted by Jennifer at 1:54 pm Tagged with: , ,
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