However, before you go investing in getting more visitors, it’s essential to make sure your website is best optimised to convert those visitors into customers (or subscribers, or members, or whatever it is you want from your website).

A while back we had a great question on NZS.com Answers from Ann who asked “How do I convert web traffic into sales?“. This question attracted a range of great answers from some top web professionals in New Zealand, including SEO professionals such as hairyLemon, Double Black Media, Avatar, MediaCore and PogoStick. MediaCore also contributed a resource that discussed graphical conversion techniques.

If you haven’t looked through their responses yet, be sure to spend a couple of minutes going through them as you’ll find some great tips.

Before you head back to your website to start putting these tips into action, it can help to understand the full process, and beyond, when it comes to a person’s decision to become your customer.

Check out our website resource on The 5 Step Conversion Process to find out how to maximise the results from each step of the conversion process.

Be in to Win a $500 Advertising Package

For everyone else, have no fear as we have another great promotion where you could win a $500 promotion package for your New Zeland website and it’s super easy to enter the draw …

All you have to do to be in to win is make sure you’re subscribed to the NZS.com newsletter and a follower of the NZS.com Facebook Page during May.

Enter now by ensuring you’re both a newsletter subscriber and a Facebook Fan.

Entries close on 31st May 2011.

You can also check out our terms and conditions.

All you have to do is update your details on your NZS.com Site Profile during April (get in quick!) and you’ll be in the draw!

How do I update my details?

Simply log in to NZS.com with your account then add your website details and you’ll be in the draw. Don’t have an account? No worries, you can sign up when you start the process. Check out the benefits of registration.

Already added your details? To update them just visit the My Websites page.

How can a Site Profile get me more sales?

Updating your details increases your exposure and you’ll get even more targeted visitors to your website from NZS.com.

Compare the below listings and you’ll quickly notice which of the two has updated details. You can imagine how much more visually appealing your listing will be with your own screenshot next to it:

Listings with screenshots and details are much more prominent to searchers that are looking for New Zealand companies to do business with.

Get started now to update or add your details.

Winners will be notified by email.

With this comes an increase in the number of people that are using their cell phones to browse the web and a shift in how consumers are finding and using information.

The chart in this post shows the increase in the number of people using mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, Android Phones, Windows Phones, etc.) to visit the NZS.com website. As you can see, this has basically doubled in the past 6 months.

A typical outcome of this is that website designers need to be more aware of how their websites look when viewed in a mobile phone browser.

One advantage to New Zealand businesses is that consumers are more connected to the web and so this opens up new doors in terms of ways that businesses can communicate their message to their target markets.

Increase in Visits to NZS.com from Mobile Phone Browsers

One funky way to encourage interaction with a website or print advert through the use of a consumer’s cell phone is through the use of QR codes. QR codes have actually been around since the mid 1990s but, with application-capable cell phones becoming more and more mainstream, QR codes are starting to crop up in more and more places around the web and in magazines and other print media.

Overseas, QR codes are already in use in promotional advertising by companies such as Pepsi, Audi and even the police. Quirky ideas include using QR codes on large billboard advertising, on bus shelters, on take away coffee cups and even on cakes as edible icing.

In terms of functionality, QR codes are a very easy way to transmit information to a user’s cell phone. However, the magic of QR codes may lie in the mystery behind them. It’s difficult to look at a mysterious code and not wonder what text it might reveal with a code reader. Many successful advertisements overseas that have used QR codes have simply displayed the QR code image itself with no accompanying text!

Are QR codes in common use in New Zealand?

The reality is … no. Not yet at least. While there are certainly plenty of people using mobile devices to browse the Internet, QR codes haven’t caught on just yet in mainstream use.

At this stage, QR codes are more likely to be used by New Zealand businesses due to the novelty factor and to represent them as innovative rather than for any practical purposes. However, it may not be too long before we see this black and white boxes appearing more and more in modern day advertising.

You can find out more about QR codes and about how to read them and generate them for your business in the QR Codes Website Resource.

Flickr image credit: clevercupcakes

Defining Social Media Monitoring and the tools used

If we take a step back to define what social media monitoring tools are then we’re talking about automated online applications that update you about any discussions happening online surrounding a specific topic that you’re interested in.

An example would be if you’re interested in knowing every time someone discusses (or even mentions) your brand name on Twitter. For NZS.com this involves setting up an automated tool specific for Twitter like Twilert where a daily email is sent through to staff listing all of the conversations on Twitter for the past 24 hours that have mentioned the keyword “NZS.com”. Twitter is only one of the social networks that this is important for, however it is one of the easiest to use as an example case as almost everything discussed is in the public arena.

These tools help businesses discover, monitor and sometimes interact with the people that are discussing their brand or products online in social networks.

In New Zealand there has been a tipping point recently where social networks have become mainstream and the monitoring of the discussions that take place on the networks, particularly when they’re in the public domain, has become something businesses can’t ignore if they’re planning on staying on top of their own public image.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Here’s a list of tools that are available for monitoring social conversations online. Note that none of these have been reviewed specifically, this is only a compiled list of tools that have come to our attention and are worth checking out, if you have any feedback on them specifically please let us know in the comments:

• Google Alerts (Search style through email updates, free) – probably the most commonly used
• Twitter Advanced Search (Twitter only, free)
• Chatterbox Search (Built in New Zealand, free and paid options)
• Twilert (Twitter only through email updates, free)
• Tweetdeck (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, generally used for updates but good for monitoring)
• Social Mention (Comprehensive search style, free)
• Raidan6 (Paid service, expensive, used by some well known brands)
• HootSuite (generally used for updates but includes monitoring)
• Lithium (formerly called Scoutlabs, paid service)

The New Zealand Government Web Standards site has a useful guide that has been put together to help government agencies and State servants monitor existing social media entitled Implementing social media monitoring with reference to a few of the tools above as well as links to other studies that back up the need for monitoring. From this guide:

Social media is a new medium that New Zealanders are using to communicate with each other, sometimes regarding government policies and services. The use of social media is part of the transformation of bureaucracy from one built for the industrial age to one meeting the needs of the information age.

The guide also asks some excellent questions relating to interacting with discussions like checking who is maintaining accurate Wikipedia entries and finding ways to talk or discussion with communities online rather than “storming their territory primarily for your purposes”.

For more of an overview on social media monitoring and why it is important for your business, view our Monitoring Social Media article in the NZS.com Website Resources.

Influence and Sentiment

Further to purely seeing where the discussions of your brand are happening within social media online is what impact the discussions are having. Monitoring tools are quickly evolving and the holy grail of these tools is working to define the influence and sentiment these discussions are generating. When we discuss sentiment we are talking about whether or not the discussion is positive or negative, passionate or indifferent. It may be that while a post reads particularly strong, the sentiment behind it and the reading of all of a discussion’s posts in context show an indifferent sentiment towards your brand.

Understanding the influence of the specific person or group that has tweeted or posted about your brand is also as important as the sentiment. This helps you understand the impact the discussion has and is key to making the decision on when and how to respond, or even whether to respond at all.

Flickr image credit: timothymorgan, wwworks

Now think of your website domain name (i.e. www.yourwebsite.co.nz) as your fishing rod. There are many ways that you can upgrade your fishing rod with extra attachments and better bait in order to catch more fish, but one way that people often neglect is to add another fishing rod.

What I’m trying to say is that with a second website address you may be able to turn your fishing rod into a net and boost your presence online to score more visitors. And seeing as we’re currently offering a free new domain registration with every 12 month Enhanced Listing booked in November, now is a great time to secure your domain name. Visit the Enhance page to book your website advertising and secure your free domain name.

What can you do with a second domain name?

• Secure the alternative spellings of your website address to make sure you’re not missing out on visitors and to stop your competition from taking your branding.
  
  Example: have you ever accidentally visited dominopizza.co.nz? This site is nothing to do with Dominos which is at dominospizza.co.nz!
  
• Build a second online presence, i.e. you could create a domain name that re-directs to your Site Profile on NZS.com. This is a great way to show off all of your Social Media feeds in one place.
  
  Example:  www.heapsnews.co.nz could re-direct to the Site Profile for ‘heaps!’. This then links to the heaps! website which helps to develop their online presence all round.
• Thinking about new ideas for a business? Secure that special domain that you always wanted
  
  Example:  Domains4Less have a search function that you can use to see if domains are available to register. Try a few searches to see what’s still up for grabs. You might be surprised. If you find something, be sure to Enhance your Listing on NZS.com to obtain your free domain name.
  
• Brand your blog. Have you got a blog hosted at blogname.wordpress.com? Or blogname.blogspot.com? Get your free domain registered and you can give your blog its own professional identity.

Take a look at the Financial Advice category to see just how prominent the new Enhanced Listings are.

Flickr image credit: jonhanson

This week, NZS.com has officially launched a new way of bringing your businesses’ social content together into a single place. You can read about it here in our media release: Local search company connects businesses’ social media efforts with searchers.

We’ve been working in the background, talking to our advertisers on what they’d most like to see on their own Site Profile pages and are quite happy with the reception it’s received around the industry already.

• Grant Osborne from First Rate said: “Brilliant! I was looking forward to a NZ directory launching this.  In my opinion, the new features on NZS.com offers visitors far greater value and increased interaction with businesses.”

• Duncan Shand from Young & Shand said: “It’s a nice addition to the profiles!”

• Kalena Jordon from ask-kalena.com said: “Now there’s a smart idea.”

Over the last year or so, many in the online industry and beyond have been inundated with statistics on how many consumers in New Zealand are now involved in social activities online. 2010 has surely been the year when New Zealand businesses’ have sat up and taken notice of where their customers are spending their time online and how new publishing technology allows a business to start interacting socially with them.

As businesses step off into their own social content generation, it can be too easy to spend time on each social avenue as a silo, without considering how they all fit together and without using the power of each social stream to its fullest advantage as a whole.

That’s where the re-launched NZS.com Site Profile page comes in.

A business can have their Business Info, Twitter discussions, Facebook friends, YouTube videos and blog posts all together on a single page creating an exciting marketing opportunity for the business to present all of its social content in one place.

You can see some great examples of companies already using these pages to promote their social streams: Vodafone, Domains4Less, EuroAsia, Natcoll and many more.

If you don’t already have a directory and business listing with NZS.com you can do so through the Promote Your Business page or if you already have a listing with us just login and Edit Your Website / Business.

I had the opportunity to chat with Adam Hutchinson, the Event Manager of SEO Challenge, following the launch to chat about his ideas behind building the challenge.

From Adam:

“The reason for creating SEO Challenge was to raise the awareness of search engine optimisation amongst both businesses and the general public. There is a global trend of people turning to Google nowadays for answers rather than offline media such as the Yellow Pages. For this reason it’s important that businesses understand the search environment they operate in, and also understand that there is a valid practice for ranking high within it.”

After asking where the word Quadracentifiable came from he had this to say:

“The keyword phrase came to me like a flash at 5am one morning. I really liked it as it would allow people to make up their own interpretation of it. I had to wake up and do a search to which I surprisingly discovered there were no results..Bingo! Luckily it didn’t rule out any domains that had been already registered by participants, given the ‘only 3 subsequent’ characters rule.”

It’s great to see people like Adam working, in their own way, to build the awareness of the industry and while there are varying opinions on the value of a competition like this, the one thing it does do is stimulate discussion about the SEO industry in New Zealand.

The competition is definitely open to a wide variety of SEO tactics including where people might spend their time generating low-value links to their website thereby gaining initial results without generating true value that a quality SEO and link-building campaign brings.

It has never been clear in the industry what is “black hat”, “white hat” or in between, however it’s definitely true that no two SEO campaigns are equal and in the race to bring a site up the rankings on a term like Quadracentifiable there will be many who employ SEO tactics that aren’t applicable to a quality campaign.

The team at Avatar (their entry in the challenge is the www.avatarchallenge.co.nz website targeting Quadracentifiable) have this to say on their challenge website:

“Unfortunately, this type of quick-fire SEO challenge targeting the single word quadracentifiable is likely to be won by a link-begging competitor with a lot of time on their hands to peddle a plethora of low-grade content. In the real SEO world, ongoing success is assured by a compelling raison d’etre, quality content and a plethora of incoming links from authoritive sites.”

Whether you’re planning on watching from the sidelines by following the Google Search itself or are deep in there giving it a go, we’re looking forward to seeing the final result and good luck from the NZS.com Team!

Searching through the phone book might give you some ideas but when you’re dealing with web professionals, it’s essential that you view their work online so that you have a good idea of what they can do for your business.

Most web designers will have a sample of the work that they’ve created for you to view on their own website. This could be a section titled something like ‘Portfolio’ or ‘Past Work’.

If you’re the creative type and would like to build your own website, there are a number of DIY website builders that you can use as well as a number of web images that are licensed for use on your new website. For a complete guide, view our Cost Effective Websites resource.

Other website companies that you’ll need to get in contact with, unless your web developer takes care of everything for you, may be domain registration companies and web hosting companies.

Once you have your website online, the work doesn’t stop there! You’ll need to optimise your website to help it rank in search engines for specific keywords that you’d like to target. This can be a complicated process so it’s best to contact a Search Engine Optimisation company. Otherwise, you can view our extensive Search Engine Optimisation Tips in our Website Resources section.

Flickr image credit: rosengrant

One nice little touch of this is that it can encourages new subscriptions from friends of people that like your Facebook Page (it was easier to say fans wasn’t it!). Take our search engine optimisation pals at Search Engine Land as an example. On their blog they have the Facebook Social Plugin. If you’re not logged into Facebook, this shows a random selection of people that “Like” Search Engine Land. So what? Good for them.

However, if you ARE logged into Facebook, this plugin quietly looks in your contacts list and then shows you which of your contacts like the blog. You may not even realise you’re logged into Facebook when this happens. I was on this blog and saw no one I knew in the social plugin. I refreshed a few times with the same result. I then logged into Facebook and refreshed the page. Instantly, Kalena (an SEO buddy of mine) appeared in the social plugin. I refreshed a few times and she appeared every time.

What does this do for readers of the blog? Seeing a friendly face instantly helps you to connect with the blog. If a trusted friend is a fan/liker then you are far more likely to trust the blog and feel like you should also become a fan/liker.

For more information on the different plugins available and what they do for your site, check out our guide to Facebook Social Plugins.

Clever stuff, Facebook.

P.S. Incidentally, don’t forget to like NZS.com on Facebook for more insights into the New Zealand web space.