My Story - Wendy Hearn

My first web site was a basic five page site designed for me back in 1997. I didn't know anything about website’s and thought it was a good idea to have one to promote my business. I met someone who made website's and just hired them to do it all for me. It looked quite good and I soon started receiving some inquiries from it. However, when I spoke with the people who had inquired, they all seemed to mention the word ‘counselling’, which I didn't do. I was puzzled. The word ‘counselling’ wasn't mentioned on my website.

As I was getting some new business from my website, I decided to learn a bit more. At that time there wasn't a huge amount of information available to help businesses. But, one thing I did find out about was about the use of ‘Meta Tags’. These aren't anywhere near as important today as they were back then. That's when I understood why I was getting inquiries for ‘counselling’ because the word count ‘counselling’ had been used in my Meta tags. The person who did my website, hadn't taken the time to fully understand my business and when I'm working with clients this has to be uppermost in my mind.

The more I started to learn about websites and the Internet, the more I wanted to learn. It didn't take me long to dive headfirst into learning everything I possibly could, and there was always more. It would have made more business sense from me to have hired somebody do all this work for me, but generally that wasn't available back then. Even today, most companies don't offer the full service. They only offer parts and usually this part is search engine optimisation. Yet as I've learned over the years there are many more parts for website to successfully get people to visit it and then to convert to leads and sales.

Through everything I had learned, tested, tweaked and experimented with in 1999, I took my first web site to the top of Google where it has stayed until this day. I also learned about the importance of building a list, a database of people who had visited my sites and started to put this into practice. This list built up to 8000 people and I share information, articles and tips with them. This helps to build trust in and credibility, and to keep your name in front of people so that when they need your service they are more likely to think of you. This brought me inquiries for a lot of work and included workshop/seminar, speaking and writing engagements.

I still enjoy keeping on top of all the new developments on the Internet and invest quite heavily to keep myself ahead of the game.  

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