The Kona Impact Blog

At Kona Impact we work with businesses at all stages of development--from idea stage to well-established businesses. It is our goal to help these businesses find effective ways to grow online. We have helped businesses go from nothing to $200,00 in online sales in less than two years. We have also seen businesses fail.

In a nutshell, here is our advice for anyone starting an online business:

1. Do something that is congruent with your current business skills, interests and lifestyle. For example, don't try to start selling aloha shirts if you have no retail experience. Start with your existing business or business skills and see how you can expand what you are doing.

2. Find a niche. There is no use in trying to sell the same electronics online that all the big online retailers sell. You'll get no online visibility and, in the end, you'll fail. That said, if you have a gadget that is a better mouse trap, so to speak, consider online sales. Some of the most successful businesses we work with have niche products that are generally not available from other retailers.

3. Do a lot of research. This is, of course, related to #2 (above). Ask friends, business associates, family members what they honestly think of your idea. Also do a lot of online research. If you Google a term for your product, "titanium rings", for example, and find a hundred websites fighting for page 1 visibility on Google, consider a Plan B. If you ten possible competitors, you might have some opportunity. Make sure the playing field is not already crowded with established businesses.

4. Don't skimp on your website. Even though it is possible to "make a website tonight" or "website this weekend" avoid the temptation to do it yourself. If you're serious about your online business, hire professionals who will help you avoid the big mistakes and give you the best opportunity for success.

5. Avoid a huge inventory before you start. We've seen several businesses that have ordered thousands of units of products before launch, only to find that some items did not sell online. If at all possible, work with your supplier to get smaller orders of your products, even if the cost is higher.

Establishing and growing a business online is not easy. Perseverance, patience, creativity and attention to detail are all qualities that are essential to online business success. To that we would add an understanding that no person, no matter how smart or motivated, is capable to executing a successful online business without the help of talented, professional service providers.

When you have a few ideas, give us a call at 329-6077. We're here to help! Kona Impact.

Kona Impact, like most other online marketing and web design companies, is very attuned to innovations and changes in the marketplace. In the old days, a marketing company would basically offer clients print ads (newspapers, yellow pages, magazine, direct mail, etc.) or broadcast ads (TV or radio). These slow-moving marketing outlets we fairly easy to understand and transparent to the business buying services.

Those days are long gone and remnants of the last century! Not that they are still not important—they are—but the options for business far exceed what anyone could have imagined ten, even five years ago.

“Social Media” is Not Defined Well!

The new rage is “social media”. For some this means Facebook and Twitter and for others it means a broad range of ways to reach out to potential customers. The problem when everyone talks of social media is that no one can define what it is in a way that doesn’t include everything under the sun. These broad definitions give the term little meaning.

West Hawaii Social Media Survey

One study done in West Hawaii defined social media as Facebook, online video, Twitter, Email marketing, Blogs, LinkedIn, Forums/Chat rooms and bookmarking sites. So, basically social media is everything online other than a website (unless, of course, blogging is considered part of a website)?

Interestingly, when everything is thrown into the mix, business owners (or those who respond for the business—a big potential difference) find value. Value, however, is a relative term.

For example, when answering “Which of the following benefits, if any, do you attribute to your social media efforts?” only 40% cited “generated exposure for my business” and that was the item businesses cited most. Only approximately 8% said social media “helped me close business”.

Big Investment, Big Results?

One thing the survey did very well was to measure the time investment businesses put into social media to realize benefits. For example, if a company spent 1-5 a week on social media, only about 18% cited greater exposure as a benefit. Only about five percent who used social media 1-5 hours a week said it helped generate significant leads. I would add, however, that "greater exposure" is a fairly ill-defined concept.

Overall, the benefit to using social media (which is defined very broadly) comes from spending 20-40 hours a week on it. In other words, a half-time or full-time employee’s wages and benefits!

What Kona Impact Offers

At Kona Impact, we offer a better approach to so-called social media. First of all, we don’t believe it is a panacea for a company’s online marketing efforts. Our experience of doing this for years (and having mountains of data to back up our assertions) is that investing in a solid and effective website will be far more effective in generating exposure and sales for a business than to focus efforts on social media.

Second, we help businesses identify the most promising types of social media for the organization. All social media is not created equal, and instead of focusing resources on what is popular or trendy, we like to focus businesses on what fits their organization, marketing goals and resources. For certain, we would seldom recommend a business devoting half or a full employee’s salary to social media.

Lastly, as a company that works with these issues day in and day out, we can almost certainly offer a business better results and significant cost savings by handling some, if not most, of their online marketing needs. We have numerous clients that outsource their online marketing needs to us, and have realized excellent return on investment from our work. Because we have the tools to prove our effectiveness, we show businesses exactly what they getting in terms of online exposure, website traffic and search engine visibility.

If your business is hearing the words “social media” a lot and trying to figure out how to become more effective and visible online, give Kona Impact a call. We have a perspective that comes from over ten years of online marketing and web design experience. Kona Impact | 329-6077.

Flash is a proprietary platform that allows animations, videos and interactivity on websites. For the most part, when you see animated web pages (or whole sites) you are probably seeing Flash. A lot of web video is encoded in Flash. Most only games are Flash. About 95% of a *notebook and desktop* computers have the Flash players installed. The problem is that 0% of ipads or iphones have Flash installed.

A few months ago Steve Jobs, head guru at Apple, released a stunning and comprehensive statement about the use of Flash in Apple mobile devices. I believe there were six or eight reasons why he said that Flash would not be in ipads of iphones. This is big news, as there are over 30 million iphones and (predicted to be) 10 million ipads used by consumers within a year. That's, conservatively estimated, approximately 35 million people in the U.S. that will not be able to see Flash websites, animations, navigation buttons and video.

So, the question becomes whether it makes sense to use any Flash on a website.

At Kona Impact, we have moved pretty quickly to the "No Flash" side of the issue. We just cannot in good conscience create websites that are not fully functional for such a large, mobile and affluent group of web users. For certain, full Flash websites are dead. Should web designers add animated Flash headers or other animations? At Kona Impact, we say "no" because these elements are mostly just eye candy AND 35 million or so web surfers can see them.

As we move to a more mobile society (at least in terms of computing) it is important for web designers to ensure that the websites they work on will be accessible to mobile users.

There are many choices for any business looking for a website. One of the big choices is whether to go with a web design company or find an individual to handle the project. It is a decision of great consequence, because the difference between an ineffective online presence and a strong online presence can result in a difference in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year in revenue. In reality, the cost of a website is very small compared to what it can do for a business.

An individual might offer initial cost savings. After all, he is probably working out of his house and thus has low overhead. It's also likely that he will be doing web design part time, so he will have other sources of income. That's, however, where the advantages stop.

A professional web design team will, almost certainly, be a better choice. The tendency of a lot of individual web designers is to over-promise and then spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out how to do what they have promised. After all, an individual's skill set is inherently limited, and it's very unlikely an individual will have top-notch skills at design, programming and online marketing. Most teams will have dedicated staff to each aspect of successful websites, as they are very different skill sets. So, in the end, many individuals either give up and don't deliver what they have promised, or they take much longer than is necessary to complete a website. At Kona Impact, we have numerous clients who have started with an individual and lost their money (the designer moves) or spent months waiting for their site.

The most important reason to hire an established company, however, is that the website will be better. A team of designers, programmers and online marketers will be able to excel at all aspects that make a website successful. Just the other day, we had acquired a new client. She said that she could not find the website of three of her local competitors despite the knowledge that they have websites. After about ten minutes we did find one of her competitors on the third page of Google's results. The design was terrible and there was no attention paid to search engine optimization. Her competitor probably saved some money but has lost a lot more more by not having an effective web presence. We are looking forward to helping our client look good and be found online. We are very confident that she'll be more visible online than any of her competitors.

At Kona Impact, we encourage our prospective clients to look at a website as a very high return on investment option for their business. A bad website will, over time, cost a business money because of lost opportunity. An effective website, on the other hand, should be a vehicle to help a business be found and attract new customers. Saving money at the beginning is pointless if the website is not found online and represent a business well.

Receiving cold calls is a fact of life for most businesses. They are an intrusion and annoyance, yet, on occasion, a cold call pitch is intriguing and perhaps worth a few minutes of time. After all, cold callers seem to be cut from the same cloth that produces car and timeshare salespeople. I mean this as a compliment: they are awesome salespeople!

If you do get a sales call for web design or online marketing services, here are a few important questions. If the salesperson cannot answer them to your satisfaction, hang up. If the salesperson does answer them to your satisfaction, take your time. Verify the information. Have the salesperson call you back in a week. Or, just simply ask for an email detailing the offer or product and then investigate the details at your pace. Never buy anything on the first call.

Questions to Ask a Company Cold Calling for Web Services:
1. Who are you? Where are your headquarters? How long has your company been in business? When you know the headquarters's location, you can check their Better Business Bureau information. Also Google the company's name and look at the second and third page of Google results. Look for blog posts complaining about the company. If you don't find any, it's a good sign.

2. What is your company's website? Where is the information detailing what you are selling on your website? Where can I find your terms of service?

3. If they are selling online marketing services, ask for five keywords that the company has tried to do well on in the organic Google rankings. This will tell you if the company is good at what they do. For example, if a company has focused on being found on Google for "web design in Seattle" or "Seattle online marketing", Google those terms. If you find the company in the top ten results, you can be reasonably assured that they good at what they do. If they don't have a good keyword strategy, don't use them! Simple: if they can't do for themselves what they want to do for you, they are no good.

4. Can you provide the contact information for five clients (in your area or state) who have purchased your services. Contact them. Verify results. Be skeptical. After all, it's your money, time and business!

5. What is your guarantee? (This is a bit of a trick question; a reputable online marketing will not make guarantees, as no one controls how Google or the other search engines rank items.) What happens if you don't perform as promised?

Kona Impact encourages all businesses who receive cold calls for web services to be very skeptical and ask a lot of questions. We get these calls one or two times a day due to the nature of our business, and, almost without exception there are better options at better prices. Some, if not most, are outright scams.

If your business is in Hawaii and you are looking for a reliable provider of web design and marketing services, give us a call at 329-6077.

Spend any time online and you'll run across ads for "website tonight" or "website this weekend" types of web services. The allure is appealing, no doubt, as everyone can imagine spending an evening or a weekend to create a website. The costs are usually quite low, and the examples you see are often quite nice. We at Kona Impact certainly believe that these types of template websites and hosting solutions do fulfill a need. That said, they are often an incomplete and costly solution for businesses.

Here are a few things that a business person should consider when looking at these template site programs.

1. An "evening" or a "weekend" is seldom true except for the simplest websites with a minimal amount of text. How much time and energy do you want to spend on your website? How much is your time worth an hour? Couldn't you be making more money running your business than trying to build a website?

2. You probably lack any technical skills that would allow you to modify anything but the most fundamental parts of the template.

3. Your design sense, while it may be good, is probably somewhat less than that of a professional. Combine #2 and #3 and you have a recipe for frustration and a very unprofessional-looking website.

4. You do not own your website when you choose a pre-packaged template! You do own your text and your pictures, but the design is not yours and you have no right use any part of it in the future. If the company on which your website template exists goes bankrupt, your website will be offline and irretrievable. If the company chooses not to update its systems or software to meet new web standards, you are helpless. If the company doubles or triples the hosting cost, you have no choice but to pay if you want to keep your website online. We at Kona Impact have seen these things happens tens of times over the years.

5. Your website will look like thousands of other websites online. Templates only make sense for a web design company if they can be sold and re-sold thousands of times. In order to make the process easy for the buyer, they have to be simplified and very generic. Unfortunately, no business is generic or simple, which inevitably results in the "trying-fit-a-square-peg-into-a-round-hole" problem. The business must tailor its content to the design, instead of the other way around.

Kona Impact offers an alternative: custom-designed websites that are made to fit the buyer's business and design sense. When we finish a website, the business owns it, which means that even if Kona Impact disappears (we're not planning to!), the business owns the website and can host it anywhere and modify it. In addition, our website are what we call standards-compliant, which means we write clean website code that will be viewable online correctly now and in the future. Finally, the Kona Impact team works with business owners to tailor the content of the website to not only look great, but to also to be found on the search engines.

When you're ready to grow your business online, give us a call at 329-6077. Our consultations are free.

One of the clients Kona Impact has been working with for some time is the Titanium Ring Shop. It is online presence of a store that is just down the street from our office in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. They sell custom-made titanium rings, which are all designed and made right here in Hawaii. The craftsmanship and designs are top-notch, so we are naturally proud to be working with them to grow their business online.

One of the main difficulties in marketing jewelry online is how to convey the beauty of a piece of jewelry online. Test won't do, and pictures, unless they are professional quality, don't usually capture the true details of the item. We have always lamented how something can look so awesome in person, but loose that feeling online.

Our solution, which we have been working on for months, was to start filming the rings in High Definition and placing the videos on the website. It's much easier said than done, as lighting, camera focus, ring reflections make for a challenging task. We have literally spent twenty-plus hours trying to get everything set up correctly, which pales into comparison to the 4 minutes of videos we have finalized.

Here is a video of the Titanium Ring Shop's most popular rings, a Curly Koa Wood Inlay Ring (click to view).

One of the nice things about doing business locally is that we often come across businesses that we end up using ourselves. One such business is Precision Auto Kona. Within ten minutes of speaking with the owners, Raymond and Shelly Ciriako, we knew that we would be taking our cars to them instead of the mechanics we had been previously using. Raymond, we could tell, knew how to treat customers and, more importantly, has a passion for top-quality work at reasonable prices.

We have finished their logo, business card, banner and website work, and while not looking forward to car and truck repairs, Precision Auto Kona is at the top of our list for places to take our vehicles when we do.

When you're ready to start growing your business, give us a call at 329-6077. Our consultations are free, and who knows, we may end up becoming your customer, too!

At Kona Impact, we always start with a simple premise: you are building a website to be found online. Other than the rare occasion when someone wants what we call a “vanity site,” the goal of most business owners is to have a website that is found through web searches.

The coolest site is the world is not worth a lot if it is invisible online. That said, a terrible-looking and functioning site that does well on Google is also sub-optimal.

At Kona Impact, we feel a business should have the best of both worlds: a great-looking website that is found online. One without the other is like a car with four great tires and no engine.

We propose a simple way to find a web designer that can help you be found online.

Ask any prospective web design team to show you the last five websites they have designed from start to finish. If they haven’t five completed sites, seriously consider someone else. Imagine hiring a mechanic who has not done five tune-ups or brake jobs!

Then ask them to give you ten keywords (like “kona web design” or “Hawaii online marketing”) they are targeting for their own website. If they don’t have a list, they are amateurs and should not be trusted with your website. If you can’t find them on Google, how are they going to help you be found?

Seeing what they can do for their clients is important. Likewise, seeing how well they can market their own business online will show you their skills. Any reputable web development company will, without hesitation, show you their most recent projects, and they should be willing to show qualified potential clients their own online marketing prowess.

When you’re serious about growing your business online, give call us at 329-6099. We never hide from questions and our proud of our record of success.

Whenever you use Google to search for a term, you’ll see two different types of results. The pay-per-click listing are the top three listing in the beige box at the top of the page and the eight listings on the right side of the page. You may not see all these ads if you are searching for something that has no pay-per-click advertisers. Advertisers pay a fee to Google every time someone clicks on their ad in these positions. The results that begin below the beige box (if there is one) are organic search results. These are not advertisements and the website owners do not pay when someone clicks them.

Which is better, organic or pay-per-click? The answer is simple: both! And, it depends!

Let’s look at three marketing scenarios:

New Website, Invisible Online

If you have just launched your website, you’ll notice that you’re not found easily on the first page of Google search engine results. Unfortunately, many web designers don’t have a clue about how to design pages to be found and indexed properly. Even a skilled web design team like Kona Impact will tell clients that it can take weeks, if not a month or two to be found.

Initiating a pay-per-click advertising campaign can insure some immediate results. That is, your ads can begin running almost immediately. The downside, of course, is the cost in terms of money and time it takes to set up, run and sustain a pay-per-click campaign. That said, it’s really the best way to guarantee some immediate visitors to your website.

Established Website; Good Organic Visibility

If your webmaster has done his job and your website in the top five of Google results for the keywords you targeted, you are in pretty good shape. After all, it’s best to have people arrive at your website with no pay-per-click cost to you. If you have good coverage of most the keywords you want to target, it may be a good idea to leave well enough alone and put your marketing dollars elsewhere.

Imagine, however, that you have thirty of forty keywords you want to target (based on solid research, I hope), it will be difficult to do well on all of them. This is where you might want to supplement your organic search efforts with pay-per-click ads. You can buy yourself visibility, which is something you can do with organic search efforts.

Established Website; Want Control

If you are great at organic search and you want to have the greatest possibility of people searching for your business or products to find you, include pay-per-click advertising in your marketing plan. With eleven pay-per-click ad spaces available on Google for all keywords, web searchers can become overwhelmed with the choices and just click to top, pay-per-click results. Even if you are #1 for all your targeting keywords, you will still miss potential visitors who will click the pay-per-click ads. Likewise, if all you have going for you is a lot of pay-per-click advertising and no organic search results visibility, you are missing a lot of visitors.

So, in the best of all possible worlds, you are in a category that allows you to dominate the organic results and the pay-per-click advertising. In the worst of all possible worlds, your webmaster did a crummy job of designing your website and helping you with the content and you are invisible on the organic search search and you don’t have the time or budget for pay-per-click.

Unfortunately, Kona Impact sees websites every day that look nice but, for a number of reasons, do terrible on the organic search results. In effect, the only way the business owner can get visitors to her site is pay-per-click. This is a worst case scenario, as pay-per-click ads are best seen as a supplement to your organic search result marketing efforts and not a substitute for them.

The Kona Impact team has been making websites and running pay-per-click ads for over ten years. Put our experience to work for you. Call today at 808-329-6077.