Tuesday June 23, 2009

Dear Valued Customer,

Welcome to the first edition of hiveHQ! Hive.net.au’s business is to help grow your business and we want hiveHQ to be a source of education that helps you stay ahead of the competition.

The New and Improved hive.net.au

Hive.net.au has been providing clients with solutions to assist in achieving their business objectives for the last decade but we have recently had a complete overhaul. We have a new office, a range of new services and a more creative team on hand to support you!

We now offer complete marketing solutions to our clients through web site design and development, web hosting and traditional and digital marketing applications. We can help you build brand awareness, improve your communication with internal and external clients and better use your resources through business process automation. We can also help you manage your relationships with, and promote your capabilities to, your clients!

Hive.net.au's latest recruit, Dianna Woods, brings balance to the pool of talent and is dedicated to working closely with you to reach your business objectives. Dianna has recently returned from living in the UK and since completing her marketing degree has applied her skills within the legal, construction and business solution industries. She complements the team by providing marketing knowledge, creativity as well as technical support.
 

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Feature Product : hiveMAIL

The market is not static, your business is not static and neither are your client’s needs. E-mail marketing gives your brand an edge in a tough market by improving communication, allowing you to up-sell and cross-sell your products or services and reinforces your ability to generate repeat business.

Hive.net.au provides an e-mail campaign system (hiveMAIL) that is customisable to your promotional and branding requirements. We can help you create and send e-mails, manage lists and subscribers, reporting and analytics. Whether you are sending newsletters (just like hiveHQ!), following up leads or offering promotional discounts, e-mail marketing is an effective element of building relationships and loyalty.

hiveMAIL is drastically more economical and environmentally friendly than traditional posting and fax broadcasting! hiveMAIL costs $10.00 per campaign and then only $0.03 per recipient (exclusive of GST)! If you want to promote your capabilities and stay connected with your clients – let the hive.net.au team help you.

And lastly, you may be sitting there thinking why not just use Outlook? Large volumes of e-mail sent through Outlook can be treated as spam. If an e-mail is marked as spam, clients may not receive the mail you send. hiveMAIL automatically manages subscriptions, handles undeliverable mail and provides reporting (how many people open the message, how many click on the links, how many people delete it without reading it). hiveMAIL also provides you the ability to preview the formatted message in the large variety of email software (for example Outlook, Mac Mail, Hotmail).

Future projection:

Retention e-mail (e-mail that recipients have blessed with their permission) will continue to replace paper communications and will make up the largest share of marketing messages. Retention e-mails will account for more than one-third of all marketing messages in consumers’ inboxes by 2014  – so why not get ahead of your competitors and be e-mail marketing pioneers in your industry?

Contact us today if you would like us to organise a demonstration to show you the ins and outs of hiveMAIL.
 

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Think Outside the Square : YouTube

Looking for another way to attract potential clients that doesn’t incur any listing costs? YouTube is a free application and the premier destination to watch and share videos worldwide. People can find videos of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests and discover the quirky and unusual. As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them (and you!) to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.

Uploading your video to YouTube with a variety of relevant keywords will allow the video to act as a pathway to your web site. If someone locates your video from YouTube.com , you can provide them a link to your web site for further information. Providing your video to tens-of-millions of viewers a month is great exposure!

The hive.net.au production team can work with you to develop a web-optimised video promoting your business and integrate it into YouTube with relevant keywords. Your video could be a corporate profile, product description or demonstration. By having the video stored in YouTube you improve exposure, your video becomes searchable from within YouTube and Google and doesn’t take up any of your website’s server resources. 
 

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Entrepreneurial Word of the Day : ‘EVANGELIST'

We all know that organic growth through word of mouth (from internal and external clients) is the best and lowest-cost promotion for your business. So why not strive to create an evangelistic community of customers who are passionate about your products and services? Passion is contagious and, when channeled properly, leads to increased sales.

Here are three tips to help you spread the good word through organisational evangelism.

1. Get customers fired up. Being an effective company evangelist requires taking your individual passion a step further and creating a message or cause that stimulates others to join your company's movement.

2. Listen to your community. Your customers constitute a unique community with a powerful voice. If you're providing a great product or service, you can bet they're talking or writing about their experiences.

3. Create more evangelists. Once converted, customers become powerful evangelists. Give them the tools to send leads your way, and they'll happily do so.

ALSO - everyone in your company has the power to spread the good word about your business. The key is to have them all focus on a unified, core passion (and understand why it matters to your customers) so when someone asks them what they do, each of them can become company evangelists by spreading the right message.

Read more  

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Web Apps to Make Your Life Easier : FreshBooks

FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that helps professionals in over 100 countries save time, get paid faster, look professional and focus on what they love to do — their work. The hive.net.au team has integrated FreshBooks into our internal operations since February and have since been able to let Adam do what he does best – lead our technical team!

With affordable month to month plans you can opt out at any time (although we don’t know why you would as we can now concentrate on the important things i.e. providing value to our clients and not boring invoicing!), you project a professional brand with automated and customised invoices and can track time and expenses to your projects.

The current tough market conditions and focus upon business efficiency makes it the perfect time for you to re-evaluate your invoicing processes.  Have you ever wondered how you could better allocate your personnel?

For more information visit FreshBooks.
 

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Latest Project : Twenty1 Dining Room & Bar

The hive.net.au team has been working with Twenty1 Dining Room & Bar for the last three months to increase brand awareness and better manage communication with their clients through a customised package of web site redesign, hiveSMS and hiveMAIL campaigns.

The web site redesign has been founded on creating an engaging end-user experience whilst reinforcing Twenty1 ’s style and upmarket branding. Our design team incorporated a ‘velvet and lace’ theme with simple navigation to allow information to be easily accessed. Links to social networking sites (Facebook and Twitter ) helps to pull traffic into Twenty1’s site while micro formatting helps Search Engine Optimisation. An integrated Content Management System allows Twenty1 admin to update the site content ad hoc from the backend of the site. 

hiveSMS and hiveMAIL campaigns have enabled Twenty1 to effectively stay in touch with their members and promote latest events and promotions.
 

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FREE Web Hosting

Hive.net.au manages its own professional web hosting solution which enables us to provide competitive pricing and direct, local support to our clients. Our servers offer reliability and peace of mind through the high-speed backbone; security, power, air conditioning and fire suppression system redundancies; preventative maintenance and offsite backups.

Operating our services at this data centre since July 2007, we have exceeded our 99.9% benchmark in uptime.

Contact us to discuss which of our packages would be most suitable for your web site:

    Advanced          $220.00 (plus GST) for 12 months

    E-Commerce    $350.00 (plus GST) for 12 months

If you are not currently hosting your site with hive.net.au, sign up today with either an Advanced or E-Commerce package and we will give you 3 MONTHS FREE HOSTING (purchase 12 months and we will include 15 months in your contract).

For our current hosting clients - if you refer any new hosting clients to us that sign up for a 12 month plan, we will extend your current contract for an extra 3 MONTHS FREE HOSTING  (on receipt of payment from each referral).

Offer ends 31 July 2009. 
 

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