Changing Up Your Website
By Taryn Kama If you own and run your own small business, you know that it’s often enough work just to run your business. However, to increase your business, marketing is important. Your on-line marketing presence, including your social media (or lack of), is a major part of your marketing. Your on-line marketing efforts complement your off-line marketing strategies, which may include referral programs, print advertising and special events. One of the most important on-line marketing tools is your website. The beginning of the new year is a great time to do an evaluation of your website. This article will give you a few things to consider and questions to ask yourself. First, does your page have the minimum links, such as “about us” and “contact us”? Does your contact page have a web form that allows a user to send an email with a subject line, as opposed to just listing an email address? Ideally, it would have some kind of security measure that the user must complete in order for the website to send the form. This gives your website more credibility and cuts down on the amount of spam you will receive in your email inbox. Additionally, when was the last time you made an edit or added content? Is your content outdated? Have your hours or locations changed? Do the images look dated, or are they too low-resolution or high-resolution? High-resolution images make your website load slower, which can affect your search engine optimization. This is just a start. If you need more instruction or help with revamping your website and social media presence, I can help. Taryn Kama is a Maui-based media expert and college professor. She is the owner of Go Get it Media, a business that provides media services, coaching and workshops/education on on-line marketing for heart-centered businesses. Visit www.gogetitmedia.com.
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Maui Vision Magazine
Spring, 2019
All Is Well In All Of Creation
By Tanya Gabriel, MA Imagine if all beings could trust in the perfection of the universe. How would our relationship to events change if we believed that the universe is perfect? For the longest time I struggled with reality. My judging mind would categorize life’s events as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and I would consistently fight against the current of that which I deemed ‘bad.’ It wasn’t until I discovered meditation and equanimity that I learned to drop the fight against reality. It is inevitable that things will happen to us. Believe those things happen to us in order to prepare us for the next chapter of our lives. We can take the perspective of victim and lament all the bad things that happen, or we can find gratitude for the profound lesson being dispensed — lessons that can only be gleaned by going through difficult times. How do you judge events? There is a story of a farmer whose horse ran away. “What bad luck!” villagers declared. “Who knows, we shall see,” replied the farmer. The next day the horse came back with more horses. What a blessing! But the farmer’s son broke his leg training the new horses. Again, bad fortune! But then the military came to draft his son into the war and couldn’t because of the broken leg. Good fortune! And so a similar story plays out in our lives when things go wrong. The truth is that all events are creating a beautiful tapestry of life. If you’re only focusing on the ‘bad luck’ threads, you will never recognize them as an integral and necessary part of the whole tapestry. What we are going through now is exactly what is necessary for our highest growth and development as souls. Allow yourself to trust that all is well in all of creation. Tanya is a licensed mental health counselor in the state of Hawaii, specializing in mindfulness-based therapy. Contact 808.269.5996 or Tanya@MindfulLivingGroup.org.