Marketing 250 Wk 13: Ranking, Link Building & Google Analytics

This week we continued to study SEO and Google rankings, a big part of which is link building. Link building seems to me to be a challenging thing to accomplish! You basically have to have other websites endorse your site by linking to you. I think this might be difficult for some e-commerce sites. How many e-commerce sites out there are going to link to another page, thereby sending customers elsewhere? Pretty much no e-commerce site is going to do that. However blogs or influencers could potentially send people your way if they don't sell items themselves.

One part of this week's work that I enjoyed was looking at the Google Analytics data. I wish my own site had this much data to analyze. I can definitely see how websites could try and dissect the data to determine what on their site is working and what is not. How to determine who their audience is and how to further appeal to those demographics. I think I'd enjoy that. I've decided I'm going to continue working on my site well beyond the semester, trying to find ways to generate more traffic and generate conversions. I think one semester isn't long enough to give a website a fair shake. I think businesses often take longer than a month or two to really get going.

Marketing 250 Wk 12: Social Media for SEO and Social Networking

This week we got learn several things about marketing through social media. The more I learned about it the more I realized that social media could be a really game changing tool. Around 20% of online advertising is through social media platforms.  It is too big to ignore, and I think a business that does not try to market through social media is missing out on potential growth.

This week there was lots of discussion on which platform to use. Some preferred the younger and more trendy platforms while other preferred platforms that have been around since social media began. Nothing is set in stone in this industry, there are constant disruptors and innovators trying to compete with the big boys like Facebook or YouTube.

We also analyzed some of our advertising data. About a week into the campaign I made some adjustments to my keywords, landings sites and created a new ad group. While I was trying to generate a conversion, my ad quality score decreased, my costs increased and number of clicks decreased. It was basically a negative move in every measurable way. But that's ok because that's exactly what I expected with Google AdWords campaigns. I expect that every change or alteration will have some effect, negative or positive. While you can read about good ads and marketing, the only way to gain some experience is to try different things to see what works. When continuing this ad campaign, I'll make further adjustments and hopefully get my quality scores up, clicks up and hopefully even generate a conversion.

Marketing 250 Wk 11: Landing Page Optimization and Basic SEO

This week I spent quite a bit of time trying to create a landing page that looks professional and appealing. I chose one specific product I had and tried to create a landing page to market that particular item. I've also created a second ad group to drive some traffic with narrow and focused keywords to that landing page. We'll see what kind of traffic it gets and if it can generate any conversions.

It was interesting learning about the basics of SEO. From what I've gathered SEO has changed a lot. I think it began as simply scanning and indexing sites keywords and titles, but over the years has become much more complicated. I also think it's focused more on user experience than keywords anymore. It takes into account internal and external links to further ad legitimacy to the site. While I think it's important to keep SEO principles in mind, I also think that by building a website with original and valuable content, providing a great user experience, marketing it through social media, and making your site the best it can be, the SEO rankings start to take care of themselves.

Marketing 250 Wk 10: ROI and Optimizing Ad Performance

My Google Ads have been running for a couple of days now. I'm starting to understand how interesting it can be to log onto my Google Analytics site or app and see what kind of traffic my site is getting. It's only been 2 or 3 days, I've had some traffic, but no conversions yet.

Now we get to start the process of collecting data, making changes to our ads and our sites to try and figure out how to make this site successful. There was an article called "Will Your E-Commerce Company Make It? How To Tell." The article gives some numbers that are like key indicators of whether your site is becoming successful or not. One is traffic. Right now my website's only way of generating traffic is through paying for Google Ads. This has led me to think about what other ways there are to generate traffic. Some that may even be free.

My website is targeted at parents or expecting parents. I think of all the people shopping for baby items, the vast majority will be female. I have to wonder if finding some baby or mommy blogs and making comments while signed in as my website would generate some traffic. I would imagine some blogs would not allow comments that may lead to their readers going to another site, but some may allow it. Some may ask for a referral fee. But I do think that I could answer questions posed in the comments, maybe even write guest posts on blogs using my experience as a physician who regularly cares for babies. Maybe I could create a Facebook account for my business and join some groups and be a regularly contributing member, again having my profile be closely tied to the website, I'm just tossing ideas around here, but I have to think there are other ways to drive traffic to my site beside Google Ads. For the purposes of this course though I will of course focus on measuring ROI, optimizing ads and trying to make them more effective. It's exciting to actually have real-life visitors on my site!

Marketing 250 Wk 9: Relevance and Quality Score

I think it's interesting that Google places so much emphasis on the quality score of an ad. Higher quality ad scores are charged less cost-per-click and displayed more frequently than lower quality ads. It is useful that Google gives you feedback and performance analysis on how your ad is doing, and what can be done to improve it. I guess it makes sense, because Google doesn't want to be displaying terrible ads, it reflects poorly on Google too. It's in our mutual best interest to develop and pay for high quality ads that are going to interest people.

I also like how Google encourages you to be specific about your ads. They provide tools like negative keyword to further hone your ads to those people who are most likely to click on your ad. They discourage using many many keywords, instead encouraging you to tailor your ads and landing page to the most important keyword or keywords in your campaign.

I also like Google's idea of trying multiple ads and rotating through them. That allows me as the advertiser to try different offers, different wording and maybe find a more enticing deal or a stronger call-to-action. As this is the first Google Ads campaign I've ever run I'm trying to temper my expectations, but I really appreciate that the class has given feedback and the course materials have really been helpful in learning how to create effective ads.

Marketing 250 Wk 8: Ads and Ad Groups

This week we've focused on writing our Google Ads, sharing those ads with classmates and receiving/giving feedback. I think this is a great idea in the design of this course. It's sometimes hard to put your creative work out there for criticism and feedback, but I think that process is how our ads can get better.

I enjoyed the quote sent out in one of the weekly announcement about ads having a hook, story and offer. The hook is what grabs the person's attention. The story gives a little more information to keep the individual reading. The offer is to get the person buying. I appreciate the simplicity of organizing an effective ad. Having that structure helps me while thinking about what to write.

Another point that stood out to me this week is having a landing page. At the beginning of the week I thought that my Google Ad would just link to the front-page of my website. One of the most important parts of the ad is the offer. It makes way more sense to create a landing page that further expands upon what I write in the ad. So if the hook is a product you think is priced competitively and will be popular you can have a page dedicated to that items, with links to other items you think they may be interested in.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the ads I create perform when we go live.

Marketing 250 Wk 7: Google Ads and Keywords

Understanding how to use Google Ads I think is one of the most important parts of this course. For our online business the costs of starting are pretty small. The advertising cost is going to be our biggest single budget item. So understanding Google Ads is very important. It doesn't make any sense to spend hours and hours designing a great website if you can't get any traffic to check it out and hopefully buy your products.

I really like how Google Ads gives you an idea of how competitive a certain market is. We covered this a few weeks ago, and it's becoming more apparent how helpful these keywords are. I wish Google had a function where you find keywords that had high search volumes and low competition. I'd be interested in seeing those results. It'd be nice to look through a list of keywords that have high interest in Google but not much competition with Ad words.

One of the class member suggested googling your keywords to get an idea of what comes up. I did that and saw some of the websites selling similar items to my own websites. It made me realize how much I need to up my game! There are some really cool websites out there, and I appreciate the amount of work and time it must've taken to get those sites up. I realize my website is very basic, which I think is expected with a brand new site. I'm going to continually improve it, make it more attractive, more legit looking and more sophisticated. It'll take some time, but I think the site will get there.

Marketing 250 Wk 6: Legal Structure

Legal structure is probably one of the less exciting aspects of starting a business. It's one that can be difficult to understand, but is one of the most important aspects. Not paying the right amount of taxes is one of the quickest ways to attract the wrong kind of the attention from the government.

This week I was explored the Utah website for businesses. I was interested to learn that when it comes to charging sales tax I'll only have to collect and pay tax from my customers when orders come from Utah - where my business is located. At least until the website attracts more attention and greater numbers of orders. WooCommerce has an automatic tax management system. I'm nervous to see how it handles taxes - I hope it calculates everything correctly. The last thing I need is some tax agency coming after me for tax evasion or tax fraud.

I'm am happy with how straight forward and easy it was to register my business with Utah and to obtain an EIN. It was relatively quick and relatively painless. It also wasn't terribly expensive. That's one thing I like about online businesses. If I want to start a restaurant or other traditional business I need to come up with at least $100,000 if not more, plus probably borrow more from the bank. That kind of money takes a while to save up. This online business I can start with only $100-200. I chose to try drop shipping so there's no inventory or overhead costs other than hosting a website. Because there is such a low barrier to entry I also think there is likely to be more competition. But competition is what business is about.

I'm looking forward to trying to attract some people to my website - when it's ready. I've got more work to do on it. It's starting to take shape though, which is fun to see.

Marketing 250 Wk 5: Site Design

A whole lot of thought and effort go into designing a website. The past few days I've read up on site design from multiple sources. Some things were brought to my attention that I hadn't thought about previously.

One example of site design that I hadn't previously thought about is optimizing site load time. Experience and data show that for every second it takes to upload your website, a higher percentage of people will navigate away from your page to continue their search elsewhere. The biggest factor in page load time is the size of your pictures. If they are uncompressed and large files it will take noticeably longer to load the webpage. To me, that's such a vital step yet so easy to not think about if you're a novice at website design.

Other factors we've thought about this week are the functionality of the website, ease of navigation and payment options. I've also thought a lot about customer expectations. In the early days of the internet you could probably get away with more unique website design. These days customers have expectations about where to find navigation buttons and how the website will look. So if those expectations aren't met it will be a "turn-off" to your website. So you can be creative as long as you follow some of the established and expected guidelines of website design.

Marketing 250 Wk 4:

This week we examined some of the various hosting services. These are companies from which you buy server space, which is where your website will be stored. There are several of them out there which offer similar services for a similar cost. I do think there are multiple good companies in this sector, so it's almost difficult to make a wrong choice. I do like BlueHost, I've used them in the past and I find that they integrate seamlessly with WordPress, the other website builder I have some experience with. I think they are the industry leader when it comes to website hosting.

This week we are actually creating our websites, choosing URLs, etc. It's exciting!

Marketing 250: Source the Product

At the beginning of this week we learned an skill I thought was interesting. How to quantitatively compare. One sets up an excel spreadsheet to compare two options. First you set up your parameters. What are the factors affecting your decision? You list them, probably 3-5 factors. Then you assign each of them a weight. Say the first factor is the most important factor, so you give it 45% of the weight in your decision. Then you rate each options on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the easiest or most desirable. You can then quantify your options, helping to identify which option best fits your criteria. I think it can be a useful tool when making many types of decisions.

I've also enjoyed learning about drop shipping and affiliate marketing. The two do have similarities, but some important differences as well. Neither have a very high barrier to entry, which in my mind likely makes it more competitive. Almost anybody can do it, which means there's probably lots of people trying. Neither have to deal with inventory, and both require little more than a website to get started.

All in all I've learned some very interesting things about both of these business models.

Marketing 250: Week 2

This week I was impressed by the tools that we were introduced to. I'm new to Google Ad Words. I've never really used it or explored it. This week we created a free account and began to learn about the power of keywords. Because google is by far the most used search engine in the United States and probably the world, they know what is popular and what is trending. Keywords gives you access to that. You can actually get data on how popular certain search terms are, as well as how competitive advertising is in that space.

The excel spreadsheet we filled out is an example of how someone can use the available data to estimate how successful a certain business or idea might be. How can also estimate how much of your advertising budget would increase sales. It's fascinating and I'm looking forward to exploring this further in the next few weeks.