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We’ll Do The Work For You

If you want IMA-Hawaii to do the keyword research for you and show you the best keywords for your business, we can do that for $195. This fee also includes a one-hour telephone consultation to help you understand how to use your keywords on your website and in your on-line marketing.

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Part 2

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What Is Link Building

Link building is the foundation of Internet Marketing. Here’s how it works.

Google, MSN, Yahoo! and all of the search engines have a vested interest in providing the searcher with the best possible results for their search query. For example, if you go to Google.com and search for the term Maui B&B, it is in Google’s best interest to show you Bed and Breakfasts on the Island of Maui. If Google shows you something other than what you’re looking for, they know that you are very likely to do another search using a different search engine … and that means lost ad revenue for Google.

So for this example, why did Google decide to show Vacation-Maui.com at the top of its results page out of the 421,000 web pages with the term Maui B&B? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the most important one has to do with how many other websites link to Vacation-Maui.com and the quality of the anchor text on those sites leading back to Vacation-Maui.com. And what is anchor text you ask. Let me show you with an example.

I’m going to create a link back to Vacation-Maui.com. Did you see it? It’s the blue text that reads, “Vacation-Maui.com.” Vacation-Maui.com is also the anchor text. The anchor text is both a clickable link and how I described this website to Google. Problem is, the anchor text I wrote has nothing to do with the term Maui B&B. I just told Google that I thought this web page was about vacation + Maui. Let me try again.

This time I’m going to create anchor text that describes the site as a Maui B&B. Notice what I did differently. If you click on the term Maui B&B you will still be taken to Vacation-Maui.com, but Google sees that I’ve described it as a Maui B&B.

Here’s a fun exercise. If you go to Google.com and look up the term “click here,” you will notice that the first result for that term will take you to the Adobe Reader download page. Notice that the term, “click here” doesn’t show up anywhere on that page.

The reason Google shows the Adobe page for the term “click here” is because there are thousands of sites all over the Internet that are directing people to this page using the anchor text, “click here.” Do you see how important the anchor text is?

So, what does this mean to you?

If you want to appear at the top of the Search Engine Results page for the keywords and keyword phrases that your customers use to find you, you want to make sure that all of the other websites and blogs that are linking back to your website are using those keywords and keyword phrases in their anchor text.

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If I could only use one Internet marketing technique, this would be it. There is no quicker way to position yourself as the expert in the mind of your target market than by using this inexpensive and far reaching Internet marketing technique. It is simply known as article marketing.

When you write and publish an article on the Internet, you encourage people to come to your site in three very specific ways.

• First, your readers will see you as the expert in your field and they will want to come to your website to learn more about you.
• Second, your articles have the potential to be published on thousands of different websites so that your chances of having your article seen and read are multiplied by a thousand fold.
• Third, you will receive thousands of links back to your website … for free. This tells the search engines how important your website is and what it’s about.

How Does it work?

It’s important to understand that there are millions of websites owners on the Internet who earn their living selling advertising. Every time someone visits their site or clicks on an ad, they earn money. And the more traffic they have coming to their site, the more money they’re going to earn on advertising.

One of the best ways to generate traffic to a website is to load it up with valuable, fresh content in the form of articles. When the search engines see the new content on a busy website, they tend to reward the page with the article on it by presenting it high on their search engine results page, which encourages even more people to visit the site and click on an ad.

The problem these website owner run into is finding a large quantity of great articles to put on their sites. Most of them don’t have the time or money to write new content, so they go to article marketing sites where they can find articles written by people like you and me, and upload them to their website for free.

In return they allow us to attach what is know as an author block to the end of our article where we can include links back to our website. Notice how I added a simulated author block at the end of this blog post.

There is a huge demand for well written articles in every industry for just this reason. You want your articles read by potential customers and you want links back to your site. The website owners want to earn money on advertising, but in order to get readers to their websites, they need well written articles. It is the perfect symbiotic relationship.

3 Step Process

1. Start by writing an article that is 750-800 words long. The reason you want to write an article of this length is because the most popular websites are looking for articles of this length. The website owners have discovered that these are the articles that their readers (the readers who click on ads) want to read.

2. Next, create your author block. Make sure you add a link leading back to your website using the appropriate keyword rich anchor text. This is the word or phrase your customers would typically use to find you if they did a search on Google for example.

3. Then offer your article to the people who want to post it on their website. You can either do this one site at a time, or you can use an article distribution company like Article Marketer that will automatically distribute your article to over 1,000 sites. This is the service we use and recommend.

Example Author Block

Bob Sommers is a Maui Search Engine Marketing expert. You can learn more about how to drive traffic to your Maui website by visiting him at http://www.MauiWebsiteTraffic.com

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Local Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing your website or blog for local search. If you’re just getting started, the idea of search engine optimization might sound a little intimidating, and it can be. So, before you read the next paragraph, take a deep breath, get a cup or coffee or a beer and relax. I’m going to show you five things you can do to start making your Hawaii website easily findable.

How It Works

To start, it’s important to understand a few basic concepts about how search engines work and why you want to optimize your website for them. Imagine a search engine as a big (really big) library. The librarian has the task of looking at, and sorting billions of websites and placing them on a digital shelf where they can be easily retrieved. No easy task for the librarian I assure you.

Your job, as the author of the website, is to make it as easy as possible for the librarian to do her job. When you make it clear to the librarian what your website is about, she can quickly and accurately store it for easy retrieval. If you don’t make it clear what your website is about, she will either set your material aside to be sorted later or store it on the wrong shelf where it will never be found. This is why optimizing your website is so important.

Top 5 Ways to Optimize your Hawaiian Website

1. Before you create a new web page, think about the words and phrases your customer would use to describe your content to the Google librarian. Then, use those words and phrases in your page title, headline text and body text. In Internet marketing circles, this is known as keyword research.

2. Each website or blog is made up of multiple web pages. Since the search engines sort and store web pages and not web sites, make sure that each web page focuses on only one subject. It’s a lot easier to accurately sort and store a web page about Hawaii sunsets than it is to sort and store a page about sunsets in Hawaii, California, Vermont and Georgia. If you’re going to talk about sunsets in multiple locations, consider creating a web page for each location.

3. Create a link from the front page of your website to each new page on your website. If this is not possible, place a sitemap on your website so that the search engines and human visitors can easily navigate to each and every page of your site from your home page. For more information on sitemaps and how to install them, please visit Google Sitemaps.

4. Most website creation programs like Dreamweaver and GoLive allow you to create descriptions for each page of your website in the description meta tag. If you have this option, create a one sentence description of your web page using the same words and phrases you used in your text. It’s also a good idea to write the description meta-tag with a call to action to encourage the people who read your description to visit your Hawaii website.

5. Once your web page has been created, ask your Hawaii friends to link to your new web page from their Hawaii website or blog. As far as the Google librarian is concerned, if other websites think your content is worth linking to, it’s probably important enough for Google to immediately sort and store your web page for others to find.

There are certainly other, more technical things that can be done to optimize your Hawaii website, but few will have the impact of the five tips listed above. Go forth and optimize.

Level of Difficulty

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

SEO Resources

The SEO Book – Click on the Tools link
Keyword Country
WordTracker
BeRush – Keyword Tool

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A blog is nothing more than a website on steroids. As a matter of fact, the Internet Marketing Association of Hawaii website is a blog. A blog allows you and your visitors to communicate in ways that are not available on a standard website. For example …

With a blog you can

• Easily add new content to your site without the help of a technician.
• Allow people to make comments and give you feedback from any computer in the world.
• Build your web presence for free and maintain it yourself.
• Easily create links to other websites, including your own.
• Add thousands of cool widgets and gadgets to your blog to enhance the experience of your viewers.
• Add new content to your blog from any computer in the world that has access to the Internet.

The best reason of all to have a blog however, is because the search engines love blogs. Let me explain.

Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the other search engines know that the better the results they provide for a searcher, the more likely that searcher is to use their search engine in the future. They also understand that people are more interested in reading fresh content than they are in reading content that is weeks or months or even years old.

When you add new content to your blog every day or every other day, the search engines are much more likely to show your blog in the search results page than they are to show your competitors’ website that hasn’t changed in years. Now, there is certainly more involved in getting high placement on the search engines than fresh content, but fresh content gives you an edge that you can’t easily get on a static website.

Here is what I suggest you do.

Create your own blog today. Yes, it’s OK to have a blog and a website. You can use your blog to get high search engine rankings and use it to send traffic to your website or use it in place of your website.

If you aren’t familiar with blogging, you can learn how to build your own blog using the free blogging platform from Google. You can  access over 120 videos and have your own Blogger blog up on the Internet in less than four minutes.

If you’re interested in creating your blog on a WordPress platform, similar to the platform we’re using on IMAHawaii.com, let us know and we’ll put you in touch with someone who can help you get started.

Write interesting content to your blog on a frequent basis. It doesn’t have to be more than a few sentences long. Make sure you write about something that your target market is interested in reading and use the keywords and keyword phrases that your customers would typically use in your title and text if they were searching for your article on the Internet.

Create links from your blog to different pages on your website. It’s easy to do and the search engines love it. Best of all, now that you have your own blog, you can create links back to your website whenever you want.

Take the time to write about your customers and link to their website from your blog. Make sure you say something nice and send them an email with the link to your blog post. Not only is this a great PR move, but your customers are very likely to send an email to all of their customers with a link leading back to your blog. This is a very effective method to generate instant traffic to your Hawaii website or blog.

Blogging is easy, it’s fun and it’s a fantastic way to generate targeted traffic to your Hawaii website. Get blogging today.

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Video has been available over the Internet for more than a decade, but it has not been until recently that technology has made it possible for web users to view it. Today, video is one of the most effective and compelling forms of marketing on the Internet.

With the removal of major technological roadblocks in both video production and distribution, web marketers are able to use this tool to sell their products and services very economically.

How Does It Work?

Creating a sales video and showing it to potential customers is old school marketing. It still works … and you should consider using it in your marketing mix, but you can do so much more with video on the Internet.

People who use video on the Internet to market their products and services use it in many different ways. They use it:

• To demonstrate their product or service
• For testimonials
• To educate their prospects
• To rank high in the search engines
• To rank quickly in the search engines
• To take multiple spots on the search engine results page
• To drive potential customers back to their website

The Video Marketing Process

1. Create a Short Video for Distribution

The first step is to create a video with the knowledge that it will be hosted on multiple video websites. The purpose of this video is to drive viewers from these multiple sites, back to your website where you can further promote your product or service. You can do this by adding a text link to the bottom third of your video and giving your viewers a reason to visit your site after they’ve watched your video.

2. Upload Your Video to Multiple Video Hosting Sites

Once you’ve created your video, upload it to multiple video hosting websites. Some of those sites include YouTube, Google Video, VEOH, Daily Motion and many other sites. You’re looking for exposure. The more sites that host your video, the more people are going to see it.

3. Add a Keyword Rich Description and Tags

After your video is uploaded to each of the sites, you’ll be given an opportunity to title it, describe it, place it in the appropriate category and tag it. This is one of the most important things you can do to insure your video is easily found by the people who are interested in viewing it. It is also the information used by the search engines to accurately show your video on their search results page.

By following this method you will have your video on multiple video sites, all driving interested visitors back to your website where you can promote your products and services.  If you titled and tagged your video properly, you will also find that your video will appear multiple times in the search engines for your keywords.

Level of Difficulty

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Video Marketing Resources

Hawaii Internet Video Production Companies

Take 1 Video Creations Maui

Video Distribution Sites

Traffic Geyser
TubeMogul

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What is Email Marketing?

Have you ever gone to a website and signed up for a newsletter or requested to be put on a mailing list? In doing so, you authorized the owner of the website or blog to send you information via email.

Professional email marketers understand the value of being able to stay in touch via email and they respect their prospects by sending information of value.

How It Work?

Marketing experts agree. It takes between 7 and 11 positive encounters before a potential customer is receptive to your offer. Email Marketing allows you to do just that with either a newsletter or an auto-responder.

1. Offer Something Of Value

In order to create an email marketing campaign, you have to start by acquiring an email address. You do this by directing potential buyers to your website and offering them something of value in return for their name and email address.

You can offer discount coupons, mini-courses, white papers, e-books, access to restricted information etc. The more valuable your offer, the more likely your visitor will be to give you their name and email address.

2. Request Name and Email Address

Study after study shows that people are very reluctant to provide personal information to strangers on the Internet. They don’t want their identity stolen and they don’t want to be sent SPAM. In order to overcome their resistance, you must do three things.

1. Make your offer more valuable than their perceived cost of giving you their personal information.

2. Provide an easy to find link to your privacy policy and promise to never sell or trade their information to anyone.

3. Don’t ask for more than their name and email address. If you ask for any third piece of personal information, studies show that compliance drops by 50%.

3. Stay In Positive Contact

The third aspect of email marketing is to stay in positive contact with your prospect. You can do this by sending them valuable information on a regular basis. Don’t over do it and don’t try to sell them with every email you send. Your purpose is to give your prospect the opportunity to get to know, like and trust you. You can do this with a newsletter, or my favorite, an auto-responder.

Should I Invest In Email Marketing?

Yes If your business is based on building a relationship, you should invest in email marketing. The quicker you build a list of potential buyers the sooner you’ll be to building a profitable business.

No If you’re selling a product that people need or want right now, an email marketing program may not be the best investment you can make. For example, if you’re selling roofing material to a homeowner, (a once or twice in a lifetime purchase) there are better ways to market your product.

Resources

There are a few things you will need in order to create an email marketing campaign.

To start, you will need a web page, website or blog for potential customers to read your compelling copy and see your offer.

Then you will need a way to gather name and email addresses along with the ability to easily send newsletter and/or an auto-responder. Here are the services we suggest.

AWeber Auto-Responder
iContact
ConstantContact

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