Information overload to blur truth

     This week was all about optimizing our site and traffic through SEO optimization, social media and analytics.  A few things really stood out.

     Everyone is susceptible to a scam these days.  While some are easy to spot it’s somewhat disconcerting that the rules of how to fool the internet into believing a false claim is so readily available.

     For example, site checking tools are cross referencing each other and  their paid and affiliated sites to prove whether a site is valid or not.  On the surface it would seem that as long as a fraudster is thorough in not just making a bogus site, but making a consistently bogus Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account linking to the bogus site, and cross linked from the bogus site to the social media page, there is a higher probability of being accepted as legitimate.  That paid services can also boost the credibility of a particular site.

     As we get more saturated with information that may or may not be true, but appears as credible and cross referenced as any other page, finding the truth can be nearly impossible.  I think a few things that can help are to look for the spirit to guide us as to whether the content and purpose of the site is intended to uplift and inspire and could have been created under inspiration or not.

Social media for SEO and Social Networking

Some great new concepts this week,  keeping stats on prior weeks, and a few "aha" moments.

Some of the new concepts that we had regarding social networking were kind of repeats, or a variation on the theme of internet marketing that we have been doing all along.  Keeping your site, titles, tags, photo naming, and social media consistent is such a big deal.  If you want your entire network (not just a single site like facebook) to work for you, you can't have substantially different content in each location. 

Imagine if Coca-Cola called itself by a different name (Coke, Cola, CocaCola, Pop, Soda) in each site.  If you wanted to see their content in facebook you need to search Pop, while Instagram is CocaCola, and LinkedIn is "Soda".  Even your biggest fans would probably give up in frustration.

It will also help the sbots and spiders that try to make sense of all the content on the internet happy; and who doesn't want happy spiders? 

Statistical analysis of the changes to our google ads campaigns over time came in.  While I didn't have great success in conversions (paid sales).  I did manage to create a massive increase in the number of impressions and clicks.  It gives me some new respect for marketing folks.

The big "AHA!" moment of the week was reading a classmates post.  He described how I have typically felt about social media after a bad MLM experience.  Feeling like he didn't want to exploit his personal followers/network for his business venture. 

Short version is that people are following YOU, not the memes you find and repost, not the political re-tweets, the whole reason any of us signed up for social media is to connect to each other.  Telling your social network about your life (starting a business is a major life event) is sooo different than selling your social network.  I truly want to hear about your graduation from whatever school, and your new life as a  whatever you just got trained on.  

It really helped me to log in more than the couple times a year that I currently do and want to share more, but in the right way.

SEO and ad optimization

A very interesting week. 

As we continue to work through ways to improve our site and ad performance, consistency is key.  Keeping keywords, content, titles, image tags, as much as you can consistent and true to your message and purpose, the more relevant your site will be.

It was also interesting to think through the visual heat maps for our landing pages.  Whether by color, or through the subjects of the photos and artwork, having them point to the action that we want our site visitor to take will improve our profitability, performance and the flow of the site.

When it comes to ads, it really makes you think about ads as a customer funnel. 

• Impressions are like number of people that have a newspaper delivered and open the paper to the page you are on.  They may or may not read your ad on that page, and even if they do read your ad, they may not respond.  
• Clicks are like people that see the bold part of your newspaper ad and choose to read more than the bold part.
• Conversions are like the people that actually call and order your product because of the ad.

Improving the success of any part of the funnel is critical to creating a successful internet business.

Optimizing ads

This week we have started our ad campaigns and spending money.

Since I don't plan to continue to work on the business after this course, I was trying to avoid the risk of overspending.  While I did add a daily budget to google ads and a max Cost per click, when it came time to start the ad campaign there was one other option not mentioned in the course.  You can pre-pay for your google ads (make a deposit to your google ads account instead of allowing google to automatically bill you).  This was a big relief after hearing the horror stories of students that ended with an extremely large bill because an ad campaign was so successful.

I also added some negative keywords to avoid paying for ads that might be related to gambling or other games of chance vs. board games.

This week there was also a congressional hearing about Google steering search users and youtube users away from conservative ideas and information.  While they are the number one search engine,it will be interesting to see if the public actually uses other search tools to avoid being steered, or if it will just happen naturally out of frustration.

The missing Link Google Ads and Google Analytics

This week we added another text ad to our campaign, added analytics to our site and linked our Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts.  We also went over how to limit our spending within google ads by setting daily budgets and max CPC.

One of  the best pieces of knowledge from this week was a video from Brother Poole.  He walked through some of the finer details of how spending will actually occur.  While we may set a daily budget, google translates it into a monthly budget and may go way over or under our daily budget to compensate for the fluctuation of number of users searching for our keywords. 

Tying this back to our research into keywords, they also showed monthly searches and then divided for daily estimations, so that strategy works.

The site I’m working on is built using wordpress.    I initially attempted to add the code in a code block to each page last week, but analytics didn’t pick it up.  So, this week I spent more time researching how to get it to work correctly.  Before I could add the analytics code, I had to try out several plugins that would allow me to insert code in the header or footer, before I found a plugin that would work well on my particular site design. 

The reading and research on Quality Scores gave a good general idea on what factors influence the score, but I think in application it will come down to what results am I getting from my ad campaigns.  If the ads are cost effective and driving good results, I might settle for a 8 instead of a 10 that doesn’t actually translate into sales. 

I think that rather than edit the ads I have, I would create new whenever possible to make sure I keep historical campaigns for comparison.

Predictive Keywords in Google Ads

This week we mocked up our text ads.  There were lots of best practices shared.  Some of these best practices that resonated with me were:

Create a separate group of ads for each word type or strategy. Keeping tighter groups of ads within a campaign will help to make easier refinements to advertising later on.  As you identify the demographics that purchase your product you can focus your advertising dollars there.

Like most technology, getting the most out of ads means filling in all of the fields available.

When completing an ad, if you use http or https, you will receive an error code that doesn't pinpoint the problem.  You must use the www. prefix on your ad.

Use some basic code to insert the consumers keyword plus yours in the ad.  This one was by far my favorite.  Rather than creating a nearly unlimited number of ads for all possible word combinations. Pasta Salad Recipes, Green Salad Recipes, Fruit Salad Recipes, you can use code like {keyword: Salad Recipes} and google will insert the preceding keywords in your ad, so it broadens your audience while at the same time making the ad result look like a more precise match to the user.

Keywords and phrases

This week, I kept pondering on what we learned about Google Adwords keywords for setting up ad campaigns.
A couple of items that I want to make sure I implement in my businesses:
Set up smaller ads within a campaign.  Rather than just putting every word or phrase I can think of in a single ad, if I break them up, I can be more prudent in where I spend my advertising dollars.  As I try new keywords, I can see a more specific success rate and deactivate ads that are not actually creating revenue (if that is my goal).
I also think that while I had originally thought I would have a single large page with lots of products on it, I can see why it is worth the effort to have a separate sub/page for each item, so that as users search for the goods or services that I have, they can be guided to exactly what they are looking for instead of getting frustrated, or abandoning the search for it because of the difficulty in navigation.
Finally, if I were to create content in a different language (spanish), I would want to separate it so that I could drive preferred language users to the appropriate site, instead of hoping they will go through the trouble of using google translate, or hoping that a site translator will do an accurate job.

Why I want to sell a service - Amazon associates - 1099k

This week I created Amazon associate referral links on my website.  Actually pretty easy to do, and has some great earning potential.  

When I started looking at what the referral fees are it's amazing that Amazon is able to keep prices so reasonable and even cheaper than retail when they are paying up to 10% as a referral fee on some products.

If you think about how hard it is to make a net profit of 10% on something, the ability to capture that kind of profit without having to produce anything (other than buyer interest) is awesome!!   When we owned a restaurant we tried to keep food costs to 35% because after labor, the cost of the building, waste and other expenses we would have been thrilled with a 10% net.

In comparing notes with classmates, it seems that many states have no sales tax for services vs. products/goods.  So starting with a service definitely makes your Minimum Viable Product musch simpler.  I also like the idea of advertise and sell first and then become a supplier second.  If you have a good sales funnel, you can always change the referral to your own product later.

Web Marketing W05 - Site design and taking payments

     So this week we worked on site design and looked for similarities between successful websites (or websites that we might consider as a model for building our own).
     While intersting to change the point of view for looking at websites, I'm a little jaded.  I have been working on getting several web sites up to WCAAG 2.0 AA standards for accessibility.  Unfortunately, it has been a painful exercise, and one that requires a level of detail that would scare even a seasoned developer.
     I was biting my tongue a little bit this week because of it.  Fortunately, it seemed like many of my classmates quickly made the statement that they would be hiring a web designer to build for their real business.  Hopefully they will be able to find a web designer that is aware of the frequent changes to web standards and regulations.
  While I have been a paypal user and merchant for years, I haven't revisited making a payment button for a long time.  It was fun to discover some new features (like inventory tracking and controls that have made paypal buttons more dynamic.

W04 Site and host builder

     This week was a lot of dejavu. 

     I've built sites before on several different platforms and with several different tools.  The constants in the process are:
1) You eventually have to just make a choice and get started.
2) You WILL have some sort of frustration.

     With all of the help that is available through youtube and how to sites for writing code like W3 schools, you will be able to get it done.  The time spent on researching which web and site host was actually more time than I have taken to build some sites.  Seems crazy right, to slow down a process that much. 
     This week I chose to focus on a couple of the free site builders and honestly think if I were writing the curriculum for the class, I might have had students try to build a home page and a product page on a free builder like Wix or Weebly as a test run (stop short of paying for anything).  Try inserting a piece of code, or a paypal link (also free to open a paypal account) and then had them use that experience to inform their decision about what they were looking for in a site builder.
     It seemed that many of my classmates just added to their paralization by too many choices, and maybe a more direct, hands on approach could give them experience as a foundation to build on.   What's the worst that can happen, they would abandon a site that they built with a minimal amount of time and paid nothing for.  There's my two cents.

Sell something or sell nothing, just SELL!!!

     This week we are learning about ways to run an internet business without being a typical merchant or even digital storefront.
     As we started thinking about how a business without a product could actually earn revenue, the 2 models we focused on were affiliate or drop ship.  Drop ship would be a site that actually has items for sale, collects payment and then has a supplier or drop-shipper complete the sale.  Depending on the margin of the product for sale, and the ability to get orders, this can be very lucrative, however each time a product or price changes, the website would need to be updated, and fees for accepting payment, return shipping and customer care all whittle away at profits.
     When we started out the week I had the typical business model of buy something, put it in my garage and then try to sell it.  While this may work for some, it made me think of having a garage full of items that don't sell and lots of money invested that you may never get back.  While drop shipping gets your garage back, you are still tied to the business.  I never want to be owned by my business again unless it is truly worth it.
     In comparison, the affiliate model is elegant in being able to provide recommendations, blogs, youtube videos or any other content on your website and profiting from it through banner ads linking visitors to products.
     A moral/ethical question I had was related to supply/demand.  While the affiliate mode is ultimately the model I will choose for this class, in a merchant model, is it ethical to say a product is out of stock (because you don't have any stock purchased yet) and allow consumers to back-order until you know how many customers will actually buy?

Everyone needs a garbage man.

     So, it's week 2 of Web Business Creation MKT250 at BYUI.  Time to start a reflection journal.

     This is one of those classes that you know you need, but you really don't want to do it.  I love to create, but when it comes time to market what I have created let's face it, I am awful.  The approach for this week isn't so much just a straight dive into marketing efforts, but looking at keywords that will drive better results, and estimating advertising costs to get someone to actually click through.  What is becoming painfully obvious is that it is nearly impossible to create a new inexpensive (under $5) product.  When you consider the cost to get a click can be up to $3 and the ability to convert a click into a sale is even tougher, it's amazing that a dollar store is even possible.

     I do like the demand and cost based approach of deciding what portion of a given market you should pursue.  In another class, we had an interview with the entrepreneur that developed the heated jacket.  He talked about how many ideas he went through a test marketing campaign before he found one that people were actively searching for and he could produce.

     Right now, looks like everyone needs a garbage man.