I’ve heard that a few people have been writing to other businesses associated with Corneotherapy, asking for more information about this website, and about me. So I thought it might be easier if I put up an “About” page to answer all the questions. if, after reading this, you want to know more, I invite you to Contact Me.
About Me
My name is Christine Abela, and I live in Timaru, New Zealand. I live with my partner and in my spare time I enjoy gardening, quilting, knitting and fishing.
Way back in the early 1980’s in Australia I did a university degree in computing and became a programmer. In the late 1980’s I was involved with setting up programming standards for what was then called the World Wide Web, so I sometimes say I have been online for as long as there has been an online to be on.
Some time during the 1990’s I started building websites for friends who became clients, and for clients who became friends, and in 2000 I formally started my business Gecko Gully.
In 2016 I moved back home to New Zealand from Australia, and because my business was online I was able to bring it with me. I took a break for a few years from building websites for clients, and travelled a bit and renovated a couple of homes. I also volunteered as an ambulance officer.
Also over the last ten years or so I have been working as a voiceover artist, including helping Pastiche Training with their courses for Corneotherapists.
As I said, my business is called Gecko Gully. Over the years I have worked with a lot of wonderful clients, but I often choose a project, or a niche, to go deep into.
For example, in Australia one of the niches I worked a lot with was quilting retailers. As a quilter myself, I “speak the language”, and can understand better than most website builders, what they need and want. I have also spent a lot of time understanding how best to do marketing online for these businesses, so that I can help their websites get to the top of Google (a process called SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation).
As a programmer, I have been able to build a lot of very cool tools for myself that give me (and my clients!) an unfair advantage in getting found on Google. But I also have spent a lot of time researching and studying so that I know exactly the best techniques to use, whether that is social media, video, website content or whatever.
Most of the work that I do for clients, I do myself. I am not going to be outsourcing work to some third-world country to get it done cheaply. I do sometimes use large US-based companies that do a great job, when the work load gets too much for me, or if I have an influx of new clients all at once. But I always have tight control of the project, and get great results for my clients.
Why Corneotherapist.com?
As I said, I have been working with Florence Barrett-Hill and her husband Ralph Hill from Pastiche Training. I do the voice on their training, so it is me who has the job of pronouncing words like re-epithelialization, peptidases and phagocytosis.
Although I am not qualified in any way to be a Corneotherapist, let alone to teach it, working with Pastiche has allowed me to gain an appreciation of the great work done by Corneotherapists. Yet when I asked around among my friends and family, nobody had heard of Corneotherapy. Not even people who have a skin condition that could be helped with Corneotherapy, or people who frequent beauty therapists.
I was looking for a new project, a niche, to work with. Something to get my teeth into, so to speak. So I decided that niche would be Corneotherapists, and set up this website. At the time of writing this (early October 2020), I have done a lot of online research and found a number of clinics in New Zealand and Australia, as well as a few in Canada, who do Corneotherapy. I have (so far) contacted those in NZ to tell them about the site, and will be going through the rest, and adding more, over the next few weeks. I have also set up a Twitter account a Facebook page and an email mailing list.
What's next?
The site Corneotherapist.com will serve as a hub for a number of things.
- I want people to know what Corneotherapy is. There will be online advertising, as well as social media campaigns, to help people with skin conditions to know that Corneotherapy may be an alternative method of treatment for them. I want to change the apparent fact that most people have never heard of a Corneotherapist.
I want the wonderful work that Corneotherapists do, to be known a lot more widely. Then people can make a much more informed decision about whether to go to a beauty therapist, a dermatologist or (what I think of as somewhere in the middle), a Corneotherapist. - I want people to be able to find a Corneotherapist. I called several local beauty therapy businesses, asking whether they do Corneotherapy. Very few had heard of it, and nobody knew of anyone near me actually doing it. A Google search was not much more help.
What I want is to provide a website where people can quickly and easily find a Corneotherapist. And I want this website to rank well in Google, so that people looking for a Corneotherapist can find the site. Since I am an SEO specialist, I know I can do that. - I want to work with Corneotherapists to help them find clients. To start with, this will be a simple listing on this site, with the business name, address and phone number. It will be up to the client to contact the business to see whether they are suitable for their needs.
In the future, I want to offer a paid listing option, where clinics may, if they wish, add more information to their listing. Or they could have an advertisement giving more information.
But even right now, I can offer website building or SEO services to clinics. I already have all these services in place and ready to go, and can make a huge difference in the number of new clients a clinic gets through online marketing.
Most of the clinic sites I have visited while doing this research have been beautiful. Most work well, and have a lot of the features that I consider desirable for a website.
But most do not rank well for searches on Google for Corneotherapist in a local area. I ran a SEO report for a number of them, and most scored a very poor 50% to 55%. Which basically means that they would be hard to find if someone was looking for a Corneotherapist.
Also, most of the sites do not sell physical products online. I realise that to recommend the correct products, a Corneotherapist needs to examine the skin in person, and evaluate what might be the problem to be treated. But in these days of COVID-19 and lockdowns and social distancing, that is becoming more difficult. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to sell products online to people who are already your clients, and have had that initial consultation? Or, a clinic could sell some of the less specialised, non-corneotherapeutic products via an online shopping cart.
Too good to be true?
These days people aren’t used to getting something for nothing. They feel there must be a catch. Why would someone like me, who usually charges good money to do online marketing for businesses, set up a website like this and help people get clients, for nothing?
I even have a form on this site that potential clients can fill in, tell me where they are, and I will do my best to find a Corneotherapist in their area to contact them. Free.
There are two reasons. One is because I honestly believe that there would be a lot less unhappy people in the world if they knew about Corneotherapy. And the world could do with a few less unhappy people.
The other reason is because I can help clinics to grow and dominate their local area, not just in Corneotherapy, but also in general beauty therapy and in product sales online and over the counter. This website will help everyone to find the services they need, whether these are clients looking clinics, or clinics looking for clients.
Let's talk
If you are a Corneotherapist, and would like to know more about how we could work together, please Contact Me.