There are some things we just can’t do. Turn on a country music station and before long you’re likely to hear a song about unrequited love. It pains to be in love and not have that love returned. But the fact is you can’t make someone love you.

Neither can you make someone ready for change. You can force people to change, but you can’t make them ready. Readiness, like love, is a product of how someone sees the world, how they operate, what they want, how they think, how they feel. Forcing change on people may deliver the outcome you want, but it may also deliver outcomes you don’t want – like resistance, negativity, resentment, low motivation. These unwanted outcomes can damage your organizational culture and make future change harder to achieve.

You can’t make people love you, but how you behave towards them will have some impact on how they respond to you. Similarly, how leaders behave will have some influence on how people respond to change. Here are 5 things leaders can do that give people the best opportunity to respond in ways that foster change readiness.

1. Lead, don’t manage. The type of leadership you provide will influence whether readiness thrives in your business. Scholars have identified 3 main types of leaders. There are laissez-faire leaders. These leaders don’t even attempt to lead or manage. They let staff do their own thing, and only step in when there are problems. At the other end of the scale there are transactional leaders. These people are more managers than leaders. They issue punishments for people who don’t comply with their directions, and rewards for those who do. The leaders who have the best chance of promoting change readiness are transformational leaders. These are true leaders – they model change rather than direct it. They inspire rather than instruct.

2. Build trust. Trust is critical in organizational life, and without it you’re unlikely to see much change readiness. Workers need to trust that leaders have their best interests at heart. Leaders need to trust that workers have more than their personal interests at heart. And workers need to trust each other.

3. Foster positive conversations. What people say reflects what they think. What is said also shapes what they think. Leaders need to ensure positive conversations circulate around the workplace. Such conversations about change make it more likely to succeed.

4. Encourage supportive relationships. Change readiness develops best in environments where people trust, understand, and appreciate each other. Most organizations don’t exist to provide social engagement for people, but there’s no denying that organizations provide social settings. Positive social settings are more likely to engender readiness than negative ones.

5. Train for readiness. Although you can’t make people ready for change, you can provide training that will help them develop readiness. The right kind of training will bring great rewards back to your business.

Enhancing the change readiness of your staff helps your business become adaptable, innovative, and resilient. In the long run it makes you more competitive and secure in changing environments.

This article was written by: Steve Barlow PhD

It has been especially powerful for small and medium sized businesses (SMEs). Without the marketing budgets of larger organisations, SMEs nevertheless have the same requirements for a cost effective, successful and measurable method of communicating with their customers. Email marketing offers not only this but can be used in every element of the marketing process, from building your brand, driving traffic to your website or marketing special offers, to providing customer service or technical support.

But just why does email marketing offer such possibilities to small business and, indeed, organisations of all sizes? Below are outlined 8 reasons why email marketing has to sit right at the top of every SME’s marketing activities checklist.

1. Successful – First and foremost, email marketing produces results! A well designed campaign using a properly managed mailing list will give response rates which are much higher than other direct marketing methods.

While there are many variables that contribute to response rates, indications are that overall email marketing gains a response rate about 5 times higher than direct mail. By getting a much larger percentage of people interested in what you are offering, immediately you are massively increasing the number of potential sales. Added to this, the quick response methods allow a much faster turnaround of questions and objections thus clearing a way through to closing the sale.

Even though the unacceptable rise in Spam has had a detrimental effect on the proper commercial use of emails in marketing, the success levels of well run, targeted and fully compliant campaigns using full opt-in lists continue to advance in leaps and bounds. Effectively, whatever your goal, email marketing delivers in a way that few , if any, direct marketing methods can match.

2. Targeted – The more targeted your marketing message is, the more likely it is to be successful. Email marketing provides the means of customising each message which is sent out, so that the information, promotion or offer can be individually personalised and targeted.

Effectively, using targeted HTML emails gives you the opportunity to quickly and easily tailor the message to directly respond to each prospect’s own needs and interests. Results consistently also show that the more you can personalise your messages, the higher your response and conversion rates will be.

In many respects, a well run email campaign makes the concept of “one to one marketing” available to all, because of the way that it is perfectly suited to segmentation and personalisation. Whereas printed mailers are created, printed and fixed, with email marketing you remain in control of the process for longer giving you more flexibility both in the overall approach and offering.

3. Economic and Cost Effective – Email marketing eliminates the significant time and expense of full graphic design, printing, postage, handling and so on which is associated with printing and processing traditional direct mail campaigns. Yet with graphic html emails, you are able to create the same imagery and provoke the same responses with the added benefit of having follow up information instantly available via your website.

Perhaps just as importantly, with the correct maintenance of an email list, the cost benefits increase as does the ROI through the closer relationship established with the recipients. Coupled with the higher response rates that email marketing attracts, you therefore get more positive responses, more quickly and at a lower unit cost! Win – win situation!

4. Trackable - When using email marketing, you can track the results of your campaign in real time thus providing you with instant feedback on its success. This allows you to respond to developments as they happen and to follow up while the campaign is still in progress.

For each message, you can see whether:

• it was received successfully;
• it was opened and read;
• the recipient used the links in it to reach your site.

There are two immediate benefits of this level of information: firstly, it puts you in a position to be able to make changes to a campaign already underway to improve its response rate; secondly, when sending out follow up messages, you have the possibility to segment your mail list according to the action taken on receipt of the initial one. This allows you to respond immediately to any issues which arise and to complete the feedback loop quickly and effectively.

Moving forward, you also have a complete record of those elements and links which worked best for you and those which require changes to improve their performance. The experiences taken from the campaign can then be applied to future campaigns with a high degree of accuracy.

5. Measurable – As the adage goes, “If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it” and measuring the success of your marketing spend is more important today than ever. To make best use of your budget, it is essential to keep track of not only the costs but also the results and the revenue that the campaign specifically generates. This will allow you to focus your activities with the most appropriate methods in future.

In addition to tracking the recipients’ reaction to the email, you can also follow their subsequent path through your website, with the appropriate software. This allows excellent visibility as to the success of the landing page and the anticipated route through to the purchase or sign-up page, according to your campaign’s objectives.

Together, this information is invaluable when planning future campaigns or being able to precisely calculate the costs and sales generated by any email marketing activity that you undertake. Hopefully, the ROI (Return on Investment) you achieve will be as good as the campaigns run by companies which have reported ROI rates 40 times higher than those achieved with direct mail!

6. Testable – To achieve the best possible response rates, it is common practice to send any intended piece of marketing material to sample groups to test its effectiveness before starting the main campaign. With traditional direct marketing, this process can be time consuming and costly.

However, with email marketing, this process is fast and effective with results available almost immediately, thanks to the instant measuring of the results. Additionally, as there is no printed material involved, the turnaround for any changes in layout or wording required as a result can be incorporated into the main mailing quickly and easily.

7. Immediate – The speed at which business happens is constantly increasing. Email marketing allows you not only to keep pace with these changes but stay ahead of them, not only in terms of the speed of response to the campaign but also the creation of the campaign itself.

Firstly, the “Call to Action” can be immediate and ideally handled through the website. When you read a compelling offer in an email you can respond using the links in the message itself, usually taking you to a specially created page with additional information and recommendations. Responding to a direct mail piece, on the other hand, requires a much more active response, such as completing and sending off a form or even just picking up the phone. Just as importantly, the responses start to come back immediately! On average, 80% of the responses happen within 3 days as opposed to the weeks which is more normal for traditional direct mail.

Secondly, the creation and distribution of the email campaign is also much quicker. Carefully constructing, producing and sending a good html email which is going to bring the top level results, need only take a matter of days (or indeed hours if you are working with a supportive partner!) rather than weeks for a printed mailer.

8. Flexible & Adaptable – Email marketing is adaptable enough to support your business in many different ways and can help to achieve a variety of different goals. While email marketing is often considered stronger when you are looking to maintain customer relationships rather than forge new ones, it is in fact able to fulfil a variety of different purposes for your business. Some of these are:

• Increase the number of visitors to your website
• Attract new clients, leads or registrations
• Build stronger relationships with existing clients
• Provide improved levels of company, product or service information
• Build brand awareness

These goals can be achieved through the use of emails to distribute different items, each offering different opportunities for strengthening the relationship with the company’s customers. Some of the more common ones include:

• Sales promotions / vouchers
• Account statements
• Company Newsletters
• Press Releases
• Product Announcements

Summary – Email marketing is in itself an excellent method of communicating and distributing information and an essential part of an integrated marketing strategy. Like all marketing methods, it is most influential when used in conjunction with other media with the result that the sum of the parts being more powerful than the individual parts themselves.

With the use of RSS feeds and blogs gaining greater acceptance as corporate communications media, there will undoubtedly prophets of doom announcing the imminent demise of the use of email marketing as a tool for the future. The astute marketer will, however, develop these up and coming channels alongside their email marketing program and so be ideally placed to offer our customers the information they require by the method they prefer.

1. Change is ever present – simply because you may not be facing a major change doesn’t mean you are immune from change.  The fact is, we all live and work in a world that is constantly changing.  It is short-sighted and naive to imagine that these changes are not putting pressure on organisations in subtle, if not major, ways.

2. Don’t get complacent – your organisation may be doing pretty well, but it is risky to become complacent in a world that constantly changes.  New competitors emerge, technologies morph, global markets shift: shifts such as these constantly reshape the environment in which we all operate.

3.  You can always improve – you may be doing well, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do better.  It is great to be able to function well in the present, but how well will you function in the future?  How adaptable is your organisation to change?  Organisations that promote a change readiness culture recognise that functioning well in the present is not enough.  You need to develop your change readiness potential so you can continue to function well through all the changes and uncertainties the future will bring.

4.  Change readiness refers to underlying capacity – change readiness comprises a set of psychological resources and change-empowering stories.  In other words, it is about having the potential to deal with change in general.  Think of it as someone who learns martial arts in the present so that he may be better able to protect himself in the future.  There is immense value in developing readiness before you need to change.  It may be too late to do it after.

5.  Retain your change leaders – people with change readiness find it much easier to change than others.  This means that your change leaders may find it easy to leave your organisation and go work for one of your competitors.  Unless you value them and utilise what they have to offer, you may lose valuable people and your competitors may have a windfall.

6. Recruit change readiness – it doesn’t cost any more to recruit people with change readiness?  Yet people with change readiness can help your organisation become more adaptable.  Furthermore, it will cost you less time and money in training them.  It makes economic sense to recruit people who are ready for change.

7. Promote people with change readiness – people with change readiness are natural change leaders.  They are often natural leaders, full stop.  Promoting natural change leaders into positions of structural leadership makes good sense when it comes to change.

So even if you are doing well and you are not facing immediate change, there are good reasons to identify your change readiness resources and make the most of what you have.

This article was written by: Steve Barlow PhD

Businesses that are new to the online environment, must know that there website can face two challenges- getting found by the right audience and converting visitors into profitable customers. You can overcome these two challenges by hiring a professional web developer who can develop a robust website design strategy.

Some of the strategies that must be incorporated by the web developer in your website design plan are discussed below:

1) Defining the purpose of the website- Though the primary purpose of a business web site is to attract the targeted audience and improve the conversion rate, each website has its own goals and objective to achieve. You can achieve these objectives by discussing them with the web developer, who can create a strategic site design idea that strives to achieve the specified objectives. For instance, if you want to create a website in order encourage people to do online shopping on their online portal; the web site developer can sketch a plan accordingly.

2) Creating a theme that reflects your brand and sticking to it- Businesses invest in web site design so that their business is well represented on the World Wide Web. In order to achieve maximum results, you should provide elaborate information about your brand and services that you offer to your developer. A uniform theme in the website reflects the professionalism of the company that improves its reputation.

3) Using the latest technologies and tools that enhance user experience on the site- There are always new technologies and tools being developed across the world in order to simplify web design process and improve the user experience. The developer must stay up-to-date with these technologies and tools that make the site easy to use and navigate and compels the users to take a positive action.

The key reason for having a strategy for your website design is that it creates a vehicle for your business to capture and convert visitors and sales leads. When you work on these strategies during the development of your website, you can be assured of effective business promotion in the online environment, make more profits and get value for money. Your website can be a highly cost-effective marketing tool in comparison of the traditional marketing methods.

Tip: If you have budget constraints and cannot hire a web design and development company to develop a performance-oriented website, you can do-it-yourself. While a web design company can render highly professional website that can provide significant increase in your profits and revenue, developing your own site wouldn’t harm you either. Though you may not be able to generate that much profit, you may still be able to establish your online presence and continuously improvise on your website design.

Based on our research we have put together 2 charts which show globally the most used browsers as well as that of our monthly visitors and users on NZ Directory.

On both charts for the Internet Explorer browser all versions (1 – 9) are included within it’s percentile count.

By comparing these 2 charts we can see a similar trend with the exception of the Internet Explorer browser which is roughly 18% up on NZ Directory compared to the global usage. This can suggest that the Internet Explorer browser may be more widely used within New Zealand, based on our monthly visitors of 55,000 – 65,000.

This article was written by: Mike Stevens

Below we have put together a list of popular resources on everything you need to know for living, traveling and experiencing New Zealand.

Learn about New Zealand

• www.newzealand.govt.nz
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_zealand
• http://wikitravel.org/en/New_Zealand

Things to experience in New Zealand

• www.newzealand.com
• www.destination-nz.com
• www.tourism.net.nz
• www.tourism.govt.nz
• www.explore-new-zealand.com
• www.nz.com
• www.newzealandnz.co.nz

Facts and figures about New Zealand

• www.newzealand.com/int/facts/
• www.linz.govt.nz

If you are looking for more information, please also see our post on: Travel & Tourism Within New Zealand

Shopping Vouchers and Coupons:

• www.yellowvouchers.co.nz
• www.vouchermate.co.nz
• www.govouchergo.co.nz
• www.treatme.co.nz
• www.ezycoupons.co.nz

Competitions and Giveaways:

• www.winstuff.co.nz
• www.blinky.co.nz
• www.contest.co.nz
• www.gimme.co.nz

Have we missed something? Feel free to post a link if you’ve found a website that you think should be added to these lists.

When a web browser has loaded a website and detects it has a feed available, it will display a small RSS icon in the address bar.

Visitors can click on this icon, view these feed(s) and subscribe to them if they find them to be of interest.

If your website has a blog or RSS feeds available, you can have the RSS Autodiscovery feature setup with just one simple line of code also known as a link tag, placed within the <head></head> of our HTML document.

The Code:

<link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“Your Website or Blog Title Here” href=”http://www.yoursite.co.nz/blog/feed/” />

Below is an example of how it would be implemented in to a basic HTML web page.

Please remember when linking your feed to a web page that you give it a valid title and ensure you have added the correct URL.

If you have multiple feeds which you would like included within a certain web page, simply add another link tag as described above and your done. When your visitors now click on the RSS icon within their browsers address bar they will see a list of feeds available for them to subscribe to.

Adding the RSS Autodiscovery feature to your website is also positively validated by W3C and adds additional SEO value.

This article was written by: Mike Stevens

Have you ever heard of this term ‘on-page SEO’? If not, then the first and foremost thing you should learn is this only. On page SEO ensure that your website is as search engine friendly as possible and for that you should help the search spiders find other pages easily on your website after finding your website. If you are website is not well optimized, then you have less chances of getting good results in the search engines.

Here is a quick guide towards good on-page search engine optimization:

Make sure that all of your web pages can be indexed by search engines – make sure that they all have at least one link from somewhere on your site.

Provide proper paths for spiders to follow from starting point to the end point of your website and then again to the starting point. If you use text based links rather than flash, it will increase the relevancy of your website page.

Do not forget to add XML sitemap which is the ideal and structured way to redirect the search spiders to catch hold of relevant pages. For effective on-page SEO, you can also place a link at the bottom of your website.

You can use robots.txt files for certain pages of your website which need not be included in the database and this will result in effective on-page optimization.

You also have to ensure that the images in your website use descriptive URLs as it will make easier for the search engines to index that particular page of your website.

After learning all the basics of how search engine actually take your website, you have to come down to the contents of your website which is the most important thing to tell search engines what you actually sell.

The title tags should include some of the strongest keywords first and less relevant at the end.

Do not forget to optimize the description tag which is used by the search engines to know about the theme of the page. Once the search engine spiders have relevant information from the starting of the website, they scan the whole page for the same kind of relevancy.

For better on-page SEO, you must create separate page for each topic as it becomes easier for the search engines to crawl and index it without any kind of confusion. You must keep the content simple, add keywords in the link names, put keywords in anchor link also.

Ready to take your business to the next level? We recommend our premium business listing option to fully market your business throughout New Zealand.

Below we have some quick tips on helping you decide which domain name best suits your website.

TIP: If you are going to offer products or services through your website, who will be your audience? Potential customers within New Zealand or international?

For most websites doing business within New Zealand a .nz domain name will work fine. For websites deciding to expand in the future a .com would be a better choice as an official commercial international business. The reason .com can also be a better choice, is that it is an international domain name extension which can rank higher in search engines and is accepted by more general searches and online directories. A .nz domain can restrict the inclusion of your website to these various online services from around the world.

TIP: If you already have a registered Limited company name, for your customers to find you better online and to spread the name within the market sector you are working in, if possible it is best to use your companies name as your official domain name as well.

For example:

Your business name may be: Fish Fingers Limited.

Best choice domain name would be: www.fishfingers.co.nz or www.fishfingers.com

Try not to use www.fishfingersltd.co.nz/.com or www.fisherfingerslimited.co.nz/.com as having the Limited isn’t necessary, it adds no additional value or rank to your website, simply makes it longer and harder for your customers to remember.

If the desired domain name is already taken, you may need to decide on a work around. Based on the above example the following names may work, however some have as indicated a downside attached to them, which would also be applicable to other names.

1. www.fish-fingers.co.nz or www.fish-fingers.com : With this choice you would still have the ability to use your business title, however this can cause some customers visiting the wrong website by forgetting to add the “-” with the name.
2. You can base the domain name on a main product or service provided. In this cause www.fishproducts.co.nz or www.fishproducts.com : This option would tell potential customers before even visiting your website, that you offer fish products and doesn’t confuse them as to what your business/website provides.
3. If going with another domain name, for example based on a product or service provided by the business : Make sure that this is an easy to remember name, descriptive, not to long and made up of no more then 2 words.

TIP: Never use your businesses phone number or mobile number as a domain name. This doesn’t give your customers any meaning when viewing the domain name in search results,  it also doesn’t tell them where this number belongs to, adds no descriptive or search engine rank value and cannot be used if the number changes.

When you have found the right domain name, it is important to make sure that this is registered through an authorised registrar to prevent any fraud, ensure the safety in your personal information and having full rights to the registered name.  For a list of authorised .nz registrars you can visit the New Zealand Domain Name Commission at www.dnc.org.nz.

I hope that this article can help you to choose the right domain name.

This article was written by: Mike Stevens