Personal Reflection Blog

This was the final week of B250 which was kind of relieving but also sad because I’ve really enjoyed creating my own web business in this class!

This week we talked about ranking and link building as well as ways to optimize our websites. We also were able to turn in our Woorank activity which analyzed our sites and gave us feedback on things we could improve.

Ranking and Link Building

One thing that I didn’t know was that external links, or links that are created on other sites and that link back to your site, are extremely important when it comes to search engine ranking. When you have a lot of back links it boosts the ranking of your website. Back links can come in the form of a blogger mentioning your site or product and linking to your website, or you could also create back links through social media. One example that was awesome this week was when I shared a link to my website to some of my Facebook friends. Immediately I started getting clicks and views on my site and I got over 100 views that day! Once people got to my site they started reading other articles and it was amazing how quickly social media works. I definitely think that for a blog type of site, social media is going to be the key in building the number of links that go to my site.

Google Analytics

We also had to go back and review our Google Adwords campaigns and see what keywords were working and what weren’t. To me, clicks and page views are the conversion for my site so I looked for any keywords that had impressions but did not have clicks and chose them as my lowest keywords. What that means is that people were seeing my ads but not clicking on them so those keywords weren’t getting me anywhere. I’m going to try and think of some other keywords and test them out and see how they perform.

Woorank

I really liked the Woorank website that we used to see how our websites are doing. It would give you a score based on different SEO related factors and I found some areas of improvement for my site. One thing I noticed was my site had a slow loading time so I used a plugin called Smush to try and optimize my images and reduce loading time. I think that tools like Woorank are great because as you use them over time you can see what things work and what don’t.

Overall I’ve had a great time in this class and I will definitely continue to work on my blog. I don’t expect much revenue to come from this blog but this has overall been a great learning experience and I’m excited to use what I’ve learned in the future.

This week’s assignments were focused on Social Media! I’ve been looking forward to these discussions because I am an avid user of social media and I need to implement it to drive traffic to my blog. We started by talking about some SEO strategies using social media.

Social Media for SEO

One of the articles that we read this week that stood out to me mentioned a cycle of developing a good SEO plan using social media. There were four main points:

1. Listening: listen to what your users want
2. Content: create content that’s useful for your users
3. Socialize: share your content via social media
4. Measure: measure the results of your efforts

I thought that these were good steps to take when creating a social media plan.

Social Networking

For the social networking portion of this assignment we had to choose a social media platform that we think would work best for our website and we discussed different social media advertising strategies that we’d seen companies use. For my blog I decided that Instagram would be the best social media platform for me to start on since it would help me generate photo content for my site. One of the contests that I mentioned was how my gym uses Facebook check-ins to generate new customers by creating a competition each month. When you check-in to the gym that post is visible to all of your friends and then my coach can see who is “liking” and potentially has interest in the gym.

This week was an interesting week since we got to really play around with our Adwords campaigns by analyzing our ROI (return on investment), setting up conversion tracking, and then optimizing our Adwords campaign.

Return on Investment – ROI

Return on Investment is basically the amount of money you get back from the money you invest. In the case of this class, we are investing money into our business using Google Adwords campaigns and so it is important to know how much money is actually being generated from spending money on the campaign.

Conversion Tracking

One way of checking our ROI is by doing conversion tracking. Luckily Google has a conversion tracking system that let’s you define what a “conversion” is for your site, it’s value, and then you can place their generated code on the pages of your website that you will be tracking. An example is of a website that is selling different products. You can track if visitors are coming to your site and then purchasing things by tracking when they reach the “Thank you for your purchase” page after checking out. I also like that Google let’s you track when people use the built in calling option from Google search to call your business. You can see that potential customers are seeing your ad on the Google search engine and then keep track of how many sales you’re actually getting from the ads.

Optimizing Ad Performance

I thought this week’s assignments were helpful because in addition to adding conversion tracking to our sites, we were also able to reevaluate our ad campaigns and optimize them based on the feedback we’ve gotten from the last few weeks. I noticed that only a few of my keywords were performing well so I made some adjustments and added some different keywords to try and improve my campaign. I also added another ad group to focus on the Crossfit Open and so far it’s brought in more readers for my blog.

This week was pretty exciting since I was able to finally put the skills I’d learned about Google Adwords to use! I got a little bit ahead and launched my Adwords campaign and the results were very interesting. At the beginning of the week we had to check the relevance and quality scores of each of our keywords of our ad campaign and all of mine were rated at 6/10. After I launched my Adwords campaign, however, my ratings changed a lot based on how well they performed. I had over 2,000 impressions in about 1 day! That means that my ad was viewed 2,000 times but out of those 2,000 only 16 people actually clicked on my ad. I thought this was very interesting and it was really cool to see how Adwords can actually change what goes on with your site. I’m not entirely sure how cost effective it is for my site since people aren’t actually buying anything but in the short term I want to collect data while using a low budget.

The second part of the week we installed Google Analytics on our sites and I used a WordPress plugin to sync my Analytics account with my WordPress site. One thing that I learned and was able to do was link my Adwords account with my Analytics account. This is pretty amazing because then you can use Google’s Analytics tools to see how your Adwords campaign is performing and to see how people are getting to, and using your site. I’m excited to see over time what the different trends are and how I can optimize my site using this data.

This week our workload was a little lighter which was great because it gave me time to play catch up and write new content for my Crossfit site! This weeks readings and activities were focused on creating Google Adwords text ads and it was very interesting getting to see how those little ads on the sides of Google searches actually get made. The process starts with creating an Ad Campaign, and within that Ad Campaign you can have multiple ad groups which can target different things. In my ad group I created a text ad and it looks something like this:

Each text ad has a title, followed by one or two lines of text, and it has the URL at the bottom. These ads are meant to bring traffic to your site so having text that is inviting is very important. I found the following article very helpful with coming up with ideas: Write successful text ads

Since my site is a blog it was a little harder for me to think of instances where I would need an ad campaign, but I could definitely see how this would be beneficial for merchant type of sites where you can target users who are searching for your products.

This week was very interesting since we were able to setup out Google Adwords campaigns for our websites! I’d never used Adwords before so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, or what the costs would be. When signing up, you can create an ad campaign and define what your daily budget will be, what your keywords are that you want to bid on, as well as if you want to manually or automatically be billed each month.

After creating my Adwords campaign I paused it so that I could focus on developing keywords that would be meaningful and effective for my campaign. One thing I didn’t know about Google Adwords is that you pay for the ads that people click on, so anytime someone clicks but doesn’t actually convert on your website, that is money lost.

This is where keywords are very important. If you have specific, relevant keywords than the people who are searching for your product or service are more likely to convert on your site. If your keywords are too broad, you may be drawing in site visitors, but fewer of them are going to actually find what they need on your site. Here’s Google’s video about selecting good keywords:

Hopefully with my Google Adwords campaign in place I will be able to draw in new visitors.

This week was all about the legalities of creating a new business. We focused on two different topics: legal structures and licenses and taxes. One thing I hadn’t thought about before, but that was very apparent in our class discussions, was how different the laws, licenses, and taxes can be from state to state and especially when you’re in a different country.

Legal Structures

There are a lot of different legal structures but I decided on forming a sole proprietorship. Sole proprietorship’s are the simplest types of businesses to setup, but they also have their own risks. A sole proprietorship means that there is only one person involved in the business and can either be filed under the owner’s name or you can file a Fictitious Business Name. Fictitious Business Names are registered through the county that you live in, so in my case I could register online using the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Online Business Filing & Registration System. The only potential downfall of a sole proprietorship is that you as the owner are liable if something goes wrong, so if someone sues the company or something your personal assets are at risk.

Licenses & Taxes

One thing I didn’t know was that business licenses are different from state to state and that only certain types of businesses actually require a business license. In my class the cost of business licenses varied from $15 to $300 so it is very important to do some research before setting up a business so you’re prepared for the initial costs. My business idea, a blog/affiliate marketing site, does not require a business license, but the list of businesses can be found here for LA County: Business Activities that Require a Business License. For a sole proprietorship you are basically considered self employed and can file a 1040 form for taxes. If you make over $600 from an affiliate company, rather than sending a W-2 form they will send a 1099-MISC form for taxes. One thing I also hadn’t thought about was that being self employed means you need to set aside money for taxes every month, otherwise you’ll end up paying a large sum at the end of the year.

This week we discussed two different aspects of creating a web business: your site design and accepting credit card payments.

Site Design

Depending on what kind of web business you are creating, the design of your site will have to match your business. Many of the students in my class are creating merchant type of stores and so are creating sites that will highlight their products. Having a white or light background can help make the pictures of your products stand out from the rest of the site.

Since my site is an advertising/affiliate marketing type of site, and my content to drive visitors is based on blog posts, I decided on creating a traditional blog style of site. The main area of the website will have my posts, and the right sidebar will have links to my other posts, different categories of blog posts that they can look at, and also advertisements and affiliate links. Since its a well established design people will be comfortable navigating through the pages. It will be my goal to make a good color scheme decision in order to set my blog apart from other blogs.

Credit Card Payments

We were also tasked this week with creating a PayPal button that would be relevant to our site. I created a Donate button and getting the button setup through PayPal was really easy! You just have to put in what the name of your site is, the email address that PayPal will be sending the payments to, and then you can copy and paste the code into your website.

PayPal has it’s pros and cons. It is definitely easy to setup and use, but the transaction fees are higher than other payment services. Comparable services that we discussed were Square and Amazon. I like Square because its easy to scale if your business expands and they also have very competitive prices for processing fees.

My site won’t need any sort of payment buttons or shopping carts, but it was fun to practice creating a PayPal button in case I need it for the future. I was actually able to use PayPal for my friends non-profit and got it setup really quickly and easily.

This week was pretty exciting since we had to submit our “Choosing a Product” worksheet. It was really an amazing spreadsheet that had us generate 20 different business ideas, and then rank our top 5 ideas using objective criteria. It was interesting being able to apply our demand and competition skills using Google AdWords to a real situation. In the end I decided on my idea of creating a Crossfit blog. I had this idea initially because I don’t have a lot of free time to deal with managing an inventory, but I am very interested in SEO and how the affiliate and advertising business models work.

We also discussed this week the different site builders and hosting products available. For this project I will be using WordPress so that I can get a better handle on how to use it for business. I have people asking me to build them websites all the time, and if I can master using WordPress it would be really simple to throw together a website for them if they just want a simple page.

I’ll be using my JustHost hosting and I purchased my domain for my Crossfit blog: watchmecrossfit.com I think it communicates what the main message of my site is, and it sounds fun. It will be interesting to see how my business expands this semester and how I will be able to apply the things I’m learning to *hopefully* make some revenue. As I’ve shared my experiences thus far with my friends they are very interested in creating their own web businesses too!

This week was very interesting and I learned a lot about some of the behind the scenes of business. We started the week off by learning about wholesalers and international brokers as ways of getting product at low prices. One of the best things was we learned how to “quantify and compare” each method to objectively make a comparison of the two. When you quantify and compare methods its important to:

1. Choose objective criteria
2. Rate each option based on the criteria
3. Create weights for which criteria is most or least important
4. Total up each options scores with the weight adjustment

I found this to be a very interesting way to think of decision making. I’d never thought about creating an actual system of rating different options and this will definitely come in handy in the future. We also used this method when learning about the difference between affiliate marketing and drop shipping.

Affiliate marketing is when you add links to your website that leads potential customers to your affiliate site. You earn a percentage of whatever they purchase from the affiliate site when they click and buy something using your link.

Drop shipping is when you create a website and sell products from another company. When something is purchased, your drop shipping partner will ship that product directly to your customer. You don’t have to have inventory of any of the items, but you do end up paying that company a certain fee for their services.

Both methods were brand new to me and it was amazing how many well established businesses have affiliate marketing programs available. I wonder how many of the websites that I visit are actually using these methods. Affiliate marketing is definitely the safer route of the two, but you can see profits a lot more quickly from drop shipping.