Gidday Su,

I would probably send a press release to the most appropriate person in the magzine or newspapers and then follow them up to 'make sure they got it' a bit later. You should make the press release contain something newsworthy in the eyes of the editor and not just a company profile of which they will probably find quite boring. The problem with a lot of PR is that it can be quite shortlived unless you are continually giving editors a reason to keep featuring you.

Are your products only available online at your website or do you have other sales/marketing channels open? If so, why cant i find you in the first few pages of Google for terms like "baby clothing" and "baby leg warmers" etc. I would address this immediately if you think that this is an important channel. (I can offer some free advice if you wish)

just a few thoughts.

Cheers,
Adam

Hi Su,

I would be bold enough to say you really shouldn’t rely on Search Engines (SE) for your "bread and butter" sales. Think of them as the cream and concentrate on offline marketing. With a population of 4 million (ish) you are never going to get the huge $$ you hear about from SE's alone. Pushing our website EVERYWHERE is a good place to start. You have posted here twice and only mentioned your site address once. A really small thing I know but still its the point I am trying to make.

I do have a pretty good handle on your market as we ran a baby gift site ourselves a few years ago (sold the business about 2 1/2 yrs ago). SEO has to be pretty good as there is plenty of competition in that market place. Have you tried treasures magazine and littles magazine? We also targeted Retirement homes (don’t laugh) – Grandma has surplus money and loves to spend money on dear little Mary/Johnny. Mum does not have $50.00 for stack of boxes but granny sure does!!

Try advertising your URL EVERYWHERE and as you site gets more traffic it will climb naturally. Also your domain name is very new so this is also working against its ranking.

From a SEO aspect I suggest a better title, more emphasis on key words/phrases and moving away from PGM-REALTIME-BUILDER into a cleaner coded website. Most (don’t shoot me I didn’t say all) package/self updatable websites do not rank all that well due to the messy, surplus code they insert. Pure clean code (usually from a professional) will always rank better than diluted code from a package.

To quantify I know what I am talking about (after all who do you believe in this type of forum) search in Google for Debt collection Tauranga (a logical search phrase if you are a business in Tauranga looking for a debt collection agency in Tauranga). You will see Delwyns Debts (or you should) #1. This site has had only moderate SEO but ranks well.

To sum up I think you may be expecting a little much a little soon from the SE. Your name is only 2 months old so the site I would estimate is only been online a month or so and is probably being added to frequently at present so Google looks at the age of the name and the frequency of updates and thinks scam so doesn’t rank it very well (in a very general over simplistic way). Let the waters settle a bit and see where it finally ends up.

Good luck and I will look forward to seeing how you go.

Vaughan
www.dzina.co.nz (see push push push your URL)

Hi Su.

Vaughan made some very good points about repling on search engines. Some extremely good points. And looking at sales coming though your website as icing on the cake is the only way to look at it.

I have a client I do seo for, she sells gemstones, and took a year of very moderate SEO work, before she was making regular sales off her site, most of the time. And another year before she could rely on the sales from her site. It was only a couple of months ago she had no sales, then the following month she made up for them.
And her site was 3 years old when I first started working on it, until then she didn't have one sale.

How are your site and marketing efforts going?

Lynny Bishop
SEO KnowAll
www.canzdesign.com

OMG Vaughan -

Can u take a peek at my new site and give me sme tips!
have paid for Adwords on google etc,.
I got a student to do it - and althought it is fine for the moment, I will look at getting the site changed abit shortly as I hate the pull down menu and would prefer it to be all on the left hand side etc
Your feedback would be great!
www.sunshinepromotions.co.nz

Cheers
RR

Hey su,
SEO is very complicated and any work you do now towards it you arent going to see until atleast 6 months from now. There are some tools on the internet that can actually track SEO competitors and what your going to need to do to get infront of them.

I could find the website that does it if you'd like?

I use it to help my websites SEO rankings, I find they improve when i add alot more relevant links to them. For that reason i often outsource for information with the relevant search title that i can add to my site. In saying that though SEO is very complicated and i'm sorry to say it but you need to find some other ways. Yes Adwords is one.

My recommendation however for you would be can you find a EZine or newsletter over the internet that can let you add an ad? If they dont have any info on it then contact the owner of the Ezine.

These are sent out to many subscribers and really arent that expensive to get involved with/in. I find when i do this the clicks i get are well worth it aslong as it's a relevant Newsletter/Ezine.

I should'nt be giving that information away though because i have a friend in the same industry hope he doesn't see this...

Hope this is of good use to you.

Sam Bakker
"Marketing_Jedi"
www.jedifromhome.com