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!