Firstly I want to say a big thank you for visiting our website. We also want to wish you a very Merry Christmas! I hope you have a very safe, positive and productive 2021.
To say it’s been a trying year would be an absolute understatement! I’m thinking back through this year while typing this blog post and I am gob-smacked! Who would have thought, this time last year, that 2020 would turn out to be the type of unprecedented year it has been! Hope you have made it through ok.
Our Year
Like everyone we did our very best to adapt to COVID. We introduced this page to our website (our COVID-19 updates page) that contained special offers to do our part to help other businesses. We also helped clients (old and new) add similar pages to their sites.
When the Qld Gov released grants to help businesses with staff we notified all our clients asap. We prepared quotes for many of them and they submitted their applications. Those who were eligible received the grant support. We then helped them put it to good use to help them recover from lockdown.
Note that the grant is still on offer to regional and rural businesses [info about the grant is here].
That was the first part of our year.
We then assessed our business, our services and our products and looked at what we could additionally offer.
Amongst crafting large and medium-sized websites over the past 3 years, we have created many small and very small website projects for clients as well. Along the way we’ve also created a number of one-page websites.
They are highly effective, so we decided to add a page to our website that explained their many benefits. You can read this page here.
For small businesses, start-up businesses, those running events or those needing a pop-up website, these one page and mini-websites have proved to be exactly what people need and are price-pointed to be highly affordable. They can be grown into larger websites over time as well.
We’re finding we get a lot of enquiries about them now and they’re selling like hot-cakes. We are very glad we have a website type that is perfect for those not yet ready for a larger website investment.
Our 30% Website Sale (2 days to go)
Our 30% Black Friday and Pre-Christmas Sale has been very well received. There are still 2 days go btw. Info about it is here. We don’t usually like to discount but this is no ordinary year. We know that every single cent a business can save right now is extremely beneficial to their cashflow and keeping afloat.
Side note: I want to say a big shout-out to all my team for their support throughout the year. Shout-out to Jay Donaldson, Kylie, Maryna, Carizza, James, James and Simon! I’d also like to thank all our extended sub-contractor team!
Reviewing our Processes
We revisit our 5 year written plan every 3 months. This is something I do each year. When we did our mid-year review we identified there were some ways we could further optimise our business systems. We began documenting even more of our processes. Everyone stepped in and stepped up!
Done for You Services
More and more clients needed work done on their websites (as in website updates, expansions and changes) and social media more regularly than previous years…. so we found we were sharing our ‘done for you services’ monthly retainer options with more and more clients.
How it works: Basically, instead of requesting a quote every time a client wants something done, they instead pay a monthly fee (there are tiered options) which then allows us to do work for them each month to that value. If there is any credit left over at the end of the month, it rolls over to the next month. This gets work done for our clients much faster because they don’t have to read and approve a quote, pay a deposit, send remittance advice, etc. They also get their jobs done 10% cheaper than if they were requesting adhoc (as in, requesting a quote each time they wanted a job done).
Many clients benefited from our ‘done for you services’ options this year and it’s helped them market more quickly and more effectively to their ideal customers (ideal buyers).
Side note: Our ‘done for you services’ retainers differ from our standard ‘Service Level Agreements’ that we provide our clients, but dove-tails in with it very nicely.
Customer Support
Throughout the year we made sure we kept our high standard of customer service and customer support as good if not even better than previous years.
As always we were available to all clients from 8am to 10pm each business day and available on Saturday’s if needed.
We wrote many new holistic digital marketing/ marketing plans (actionable plans) for clients this year. More than most years.
We even decided to make our action plan template available for free download. You can download it from this page.
Pro-bono Work
Each year we like to do at least 1 pro-bono project for a club or grass-roots group. This year we created a mini-website for the local Scouts. The site is here. We also put together event sponsorship packages that they could then share with local businesses, councils, etc. We also designed a PDF and printable poster:
New Team Members
In recent times one of my old SEO colleagues has joined the team as a sub-contractor. We’re looking forward to collaborating on some very interesting projects next year. We also extended our SEO offer to the end of this year. You can find out more about it here.
Some new clients didn’t fully understand that we offer repayment plans, so we added that page to our website too.
Some people didn’t know we have been providing brand development services, video, animation, print graphic design, landing pages, online sales funnels and signage design either so we started to make this more clear when onboarded new clients.
The majority of our core services are listed here:
- Growth services
- Full professional website growth services
- Website design and development
- eCommerce Websites
- Any type of website
- Custom website coding
- Service level agreements
- WordPress security
- Website updates
- Landing pages
- Website training
- Traffic reports
- Data analysis
- Competitor research and monitoring
- Domain Name registration, hosting
- Business-grade email: Large IMAP, Hosted Exchange, Office 365
- Brand development
- Traffic driving strategies
- SEO campaigning/ organic traffic growth
- SEM campaigning / paid advertising traffic growth
- CRO: website Conversion Rate Optimisation
- Inbound marketing
- SEO coaching and training
- Holistic digital marketing and marketing
- Signage design
- Online lead generation and funnels
- Social media growth
- Social media paid advertising
- Growth coaching
- One to one training and group workshops
- Video productions
- 3D and 2D animation
- Video Infographics
- HD video effects
- Self-publication of books services (via our sister business)
- Graphic design
- Printing
On a personal note, I started making time to get back into ‘maker’ projects. I’ve been making stuff since I was a kid. This year I created a Star Wars necklace for a friends 50th b’day present in August (the video is below), I kept doing pop-culture art, start learning airbrushing, started building models again (hadn’t done that in 20 yrs), two of my team and I kept refurbing & repainting a vintage ski boat (there is a video showing some of the project progress here) and kept restoring pushbikes for kids as time allowed (my facebook page for this is here).
I started pulling apart some motorbikes I plan to restore as well. I might have some movie props to make for some people soon as well.
I very much enjoy making things in my spare time.
Plans for Next Year
Several of our clients are working with us on their marketing plans for next year atm. We have also mapped out our plans for the start of the year. Amongst things, we will be announcing a new product that will further aid the productivity of businesses within their day to day operations. We also have a special offer in January that we will launch at the end of December.
We will be launching Kylie’s new website next year too. Kylie is one of our long-time team members (her bio is here) and she also runs her own business. Her interim site is here. Kylie used to be my Manager back in our Upper Roma Street Brisbane days (pre-2005).
I will be doing more traveling next year as well. Recently we started delivering flyers into Hervey Bay and Childers. We also did the same in Bundaberg. We’ll be doing similar next year on the Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Gold Coast and other areas in Queensland as well. We’ll also be using more and more retargeting, remarketing Google Display Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc to promote who we are and what we do. There is also a ‘warm email marketing’ campaign we’re putting together. We’re also in the early stages of ramping up our own SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) so we’ll be discovered by more and more people when they search Google or Bing for phrases related to:
- Digital marketing
- Business growth
- Business coaching
- Website design
- Website development
- eCommerce shop growth
- SEO
- Goolge Ads
- Google Adwords
- Social Media Growth
- … and a lot more.
Like any business that is successful, or wants to be successful and/or plans to remain successful, we do not rest on our laurels. We work on our own marketing constantly. The old saying applies more than ever before: “Businesses who succeed do what others can’t, can’t be bothered doing, or simply don’t know how to do”.
I wanted to keep this blog post fairly short, so I’ll wrap this up now. There were many other things that occurred this year but I really need to get back to work, so don’t have time to write about each and every one of them here.
Thank you heaps though for reading this blog post. As I said at the start, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a safe and prosperous 2021! Let’s hope next year is a MUCH better year than this year!
PS. I want to say a special thank you to our clients, our team and our families. Your support and loyalty to us means a huge, HUGE amount!
** This blog post has been written by Jay Daniells (founder and owner of Green Valley Digital)
Jay Daniells has been doing advanced Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) work for clients since 2010. He is an SEO specialist. He first started doing SEO work in 2005. He has also been creating websites full-time since 2003. Amongst things Jay is also a graphic designer, digital marketing consultant and creative person. His focus is helping businesses, community groups, clubs, charities, organisations and other entities achieve their goals. He is the owner of Green Valley Digital.