Ladysmith is located on the eastern shores of beautiful Vancouver Island in British Columbia. With a population of over 8,000, it has a thriving downtown business community centered around historic First Avenue.
The LDBA actively works to cultivate an environment of economic and cultural vibrancy in the Ladysmith downtown core. The meeting schedule is:
Executive/Marketing Committee: 1st Thursday of every month
One of the LDBA objectives is to offer its members’ resources in which they can access for minimal cost or no charge to assist with building better business and gaining business knowledge. One way this can be accomplished is through a series of free seminars offered to LDBA members and hosted by professionals who are also LDBA members.
September 22: Marketing your Business – John Surtees
November 17: Making your Business/Practice “Elder Friendly” – Michael Furlot
HST Seminar a Success
On Wednesday May 19, the Ladysmith Royal Canadian Legion hall was filled with LDBA and Chamber members to listen to APL Chartered Accountants (APL) professionals discuss Harmonized Sale Tax (HST). Tammy Lesley, C.G.A., C.A. Professional and APL Accountants Partner, possessed a great deal of knowledge on the subject of TAX. If you came into that seminar confused about HST, you surely walked away with a better understanding of the new tax system.
To celebrate this milestone, Paul Mycroft Design hosted an Open House in June, to which there was a great turnout. Thank you to all of you who came: TAKE 5, Chris Burness (Skellig), Brian (Canadian Royal Legion) and Carol van Acker (BMO), Art Lindala, John Surtees, Connie and Bill Manning among many others.
We have a saying at Paul Mycroft Design which explains how we rate our success as a business and as individuals:
“It’s not who you know, it’s who knows YOU.”
What does this really mean? Well, your reputation as a business owner is dependent on the impression you make when meeting new customers, when networking over a beer, how you handle yourself on email, the phone, and when responding to negative blog comments, or when making a presentation. The impression you leave can last a lifetime and determine the quality of people you can use to develop your business.
Either as a web designer or a business owner, there are not enough hours in the day to work on your client’s or business website. As budgets get stretched and time becomes more valuable, larger projects can get put on hold. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t some affordable, high impact ways to boost your website and its search engine ranking.
Here are some quick tips to get you going.
Switch Domain Name Host
Are you paying $35/year to host your domain name? If you own 5 domain names, that can cost you $350 to renew them all for just 2 years! Why not switch to someone like Go Daddy, where domain names cost just $10/year? To renew those 5 domain names has just gone down to $100 for 2 years, saving you $250. And with the transfer fee of $8, you get one year free!
Switch Web Host
Again, are you paying too much money to host your website? A company like 1and1 charges upwards of $4/month to host 20 external domains so you can have all your smaller websites on one package. We’ve been happy with their service to-date and they have an excellent Control Panel and customer service.
Start an Email Newsletter
With the cost of print and mail going up, it can be costly to run a campaign to your customer list. Let’s say you have 1,000 customers. To design, print and mail a postcard would cost $420 just to mail! Thrown in $1 per print at FedEx Kinko’s and you are looking at $1,500!
With an professional email newsletter, once the initial design and build fee is paid (which can be about $500), the cost of delivery has gone down to just $35 ($5/delivery plus 3¢/email address) and you get to see who opens it, when they open it, which links they click on and much more. Also, your list can grow on its own, which can be a powerful and affordable way to tweak your marketing strategy.
WordPress Templates
Sometimes, the cost of designing and building a website can run into 4 figures. Why not purchase a pre-designed WordPress template, adjust it to suit your brand then launch and start updating your own site? And Google LOVES WordPress!
Install Google Analytics
Start learning what your visitors are doing on your website. Now.
This is so crucial, we can’t stress this factor enough. Why have a website if you don’t know what it is doing? Is it harming your online reputation? Do you get very little traffic from Google? Are people typing in some keywords that you haven’t thought about? Are you getting traffic from one particular site? Or one particular region or country?
Google Analytics if free. We used to be skeptical but have grown to love this tool and what it can do to help your business.
LinkedIn Profile
Get yourself a free LinkedIn profile or update the one you have. Add some Applications; if you have a blog, add it in; if you have an Amazon reading list, add it in; if you have a slideshow of your products, add it in.
Google AdWords
Are you paying too much for your pay-per-click advertising on Google AdWords? Can you tweak some ads or remove some dead keywords? Maybe geo-target your ads so they only appear in specific regions or cities (you can get this from Google Analytics)?
Home and Key Landing Pages
Does your Home page speak to your visitor? Can you change it up so it sends people down the right funnel in your website? Does it have enough keyword-rich copy? Do you have a new line of products, which need promoting?
What about the main landing pages on your site? If someone landed on them directly from a search engine, are they good enough? Do they “say the right thing” then send people to your target pages?
A few tweaks here and there can have a dramatic boost in your rankings and traffic.
Review Title and Meta Tags
This one is often overlooked and underestimated. Are your too long? Do they say the right thing?
The Title tag is what appears as the 1st LINE link in a search engine results snippet. It isn’t actually visible on your web page; it is visible at the VERY TOP of your web browser. We recommend no more than 60 characters (otherwise the search engines cut it off with a …) and position your main keyword phrase at the beginning.
e.g. POOR: Paul Mycroft Design provides professional web design and email newsletter marketing (83 characters) BETTER: Professional Web Design | Email Newsletter Design | SEO (55 characters)
This is what it looks like in Google:
Secondly, adjust your Meta description tag, again not visible but still important as it can be displayed under the first line in the above snippet. Try to use 12-15 words and keep it short and sweet. Mention your company name too and keep it relevant to what is on the page.
Lastly, use the Meta Keywords tag to list 6 keyword phrases visible on the page.
Add More Pages
Take this opportunity to add more keyword-rich pages. Learn which are your strongest phrases from Google Analytics then write pages around them and link to them internally. Give your visitors what they want!
Use your Blog
Do you have a blog but don’t use it? Did you pay all that money to have a web designer install it on your website and you don’t have the time to write? Well, you need to find thetime, my friend. This particualar article took us 1.5 hours to write but we know that many of our customers will find it useful.
Home Page Now, Site Later
Is your web designer willing to build you a Home page only then add pages later? This can be a great way to affordably establish yourself on the Internet and service your customers at the same time.
We did this for The Royal Dar, a local Vancouver Island Indian restaurant, and they are enjoying some traffic. A group of 10 women recently used their Home page to book dinner using their Facebook pages! Nice!
Payment Plan?
Is your web designer willing to put you on a payment plan if the budget is too high? Have you asked? If he or she is willing, this can be a great way to get your website up now then pay for it later. And everyone wins.
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Please let us know if we can help you with any of these tips to boost your website.
Company name: Paul Mycroft Design Ltd Website:www.paulmycroft.com | www.market2all.com Contact: Paul Mycroft Year formed: 2002 Address: 622 1st Avenue, #201, Ladysmith, B.C., V9G 1A1 [ see Google map ] Phone: (250) 245-8777 Fax: (250) 245-8790
Services
Paul Mycroft is a professional web designer who has been in business for over 10 years, specializing in professional web design, email newsletter marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and WordPress website development.
We have many built up a great list of clients from around the world including Canada, the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, so working remotely is not an issue. Unless we are asleep or having breakfast.
Our web design services come in many forms. We can design and build from scratch then maintain the site for you. If you feel the need to update the site yourself, we can provide a simple-to-use Content Management System, which will allow you to do just that: create pages, manage content, upload photo galleries, or even get started on a blog. You decide.
We also believe strongly in providing a site that not only performs well in the search engines from day one but will continue to grow. From the start, we’ll help you to understand the important of choosing the keywords most likely to bring you traffic then optimize your site for those phrases. The rest is up to you but at least, we give you a leg up at launch time.
If you are looking for a cost-effective and easy way to develop your client base, you can’t go wrong with email marketing. We have just the tool, a gold standard email marketing newsletter system called Market 2 All, which makes it easy to send well-crafted campaigns while providing awesome statistics on its performance. It’s very cool.
We’ll also provide a monthly analysis of your web traffic, sent to you in an easy-to-understand email report, making suggestions on improvements and identifying problems at an early stage. We offer the complete package.
Take a look at our portfolio links to see the work we’ve done and what can be possible for you or your business. Then get in touch.
