Running an Online Business

This week was interesting to say the least. To look at how our business had done as a whole we got onto google analytics and looked at all the states. For instance how many people clicked on out page how long those people stayed on the site and how our keywords were doing, stuff like that. I am really kind of sad to say that I thought that my site would do a bit better. We also worked on link building which I am not going to lie I thought would be easier than it actually was. I thought when we started talking about it that link building were the links on your site that lead to other people’s sites, when in reality it is the other way around. Which means a whole lot more research than I had anticipated. Now I am going to be building lists and putting them into spreadsheets and figuring out who I can get to link to my page. All this time I thought putting together a business was easy, man was I wrong there is a ton more to it than I thought.

The World of Social Media

Social Media in Business

I thought that I had social media under control until I read those articles about optimizing my social media. I realized that I didn’t know anything. I want to use both Facebook in conjunction with a blog that I am creating. This way that I can link the blog into a bigger audience and hopefully draw more traffic. I having having trouble getting my blog to publish but I am hoping that I will be able to fix that pretty easily. I am trying to follow the rules of social media by making it easy to consume,  I want to link it to a couple of places and I want to post often. When I say often I want to post often I mean that I want to post once a week because I feel like posting more that once a week for a blog is a ton. I am excited about this weeks work it has been a learning experience. I think that the most important thing to keep in mind when working with social media for a business that you want to hit your target audience.

 

Optimizing SEO

The more that I learn about creating an online business the more that I understand about how much goes into it. Some things I would have had no idea that it affected anything. Things like the title of the website in the actual HTML, no one really even see’s that so I was surprised when it affected things. Also another thing that I never would have thought of was links how it can make your site more reputable. I think that one of the girls in our class put it the best reputation is kind of like popularity the more popular that you become the more the more people see that. I believe her words were “you have to be seen to be seen more.” Which I can agree with people congregate to websites that do have a good reputation and high traffic.

Landing page optimization was also something that was hard for me. I wasn’t sure what all I could change about my landing page. For a while I thought that it might be a good idea to change my landing page to the shopping page however I ended up not doing that because my company isn’t a very well known one so I want people to get to know the company and then want to shop with us.

Making Your Ads the Best!

This week was a little bit harder than I anticipated it being. It was still really important to understand though because it can help refine the people that click on your site to who you want to click on your site. In a nutshell we worked on a few things. We worked on tracking conversions and return on investment. Which was a bit harder for me to understand but it wasn’t a ton of work I had to install conversion tracking on my site. which is a code that you place into the HTML of your website. Then we optimized our ads. The means that we refined them. I added a few keywords that I thought would be helpful. Some negative key words like installation and floating floors. Then I had a ton of words that weren’t getting any statistics so I deleted the words that weren’t getting any statistics, which I am going to be honestly were a lot more than I thought it would be. I had a lot of keywords that actually weren’t doing anything. I feel like this week I have learned a lot about how I can make my ads better and only attract the people that I want to attract. I am getting a lot more impressions than clicks and I hope that after this week I can change that.

 

 

Web Presence

Having a strong web presence has become increasingly important especially where shopping online is such a huge deal. There are so many things that we can do to improve our web presence and this week we have been doing just that. We set up our adwords account and made sure that we had the words that we wanted and we had our ad set up the way that we wanted that. We also set up a Google Analytics account which is awesome. Basically what Analytics does it show where people spend there time on your website. In short it helps improve usability because of that. I thought that setting both of these things up would be more complex but they are really quite easy to use which was so nice! In short use the tools that you have and or research good tools to use! I am finding that these tools are already out there for us to use we just have to take advantage of them.

I’m a Business Women! Well Sort of…

One of the things that has been a off again on again dream of mine is to open my own business. I didn’t think that it would be so soon but I guess that I can say that dream has been accomplished throughout what I am learning in this class. I am not going to lie working with google ad words I thought would be more complex than it actually is. In reality google adwords has been an amazing tool! One of the things that adwords does is lets you create text ads, I had no clue about any of this before I started this class! Another thing is keywords. Which basically means that you try to predict what people will type when they search for your product, this helps people to actually be led to your product. This week we have been working on our ad words campaigns and refining them and out website. I thought this would be harder than it has been but I can honestly say it has been kind of fun.

Just how cool is Google AdWords!

This week was a very interesting one and honestly one that I felt like at the end of the week I fully understood all the information. Which hasn’t happened in this class for me so that was really cool. I feel like in previous I weeks I have consistently been going back to review the information of the week. In fact I am still doing that with previous weeks. Google adwords is a very interesting program and a very helpful one as well. One thing that I got out of this week was the important of choosing keywords. A good keyword will guild the right kind of person to your site. If your keyword is too specific your site might be hard to find however if it is too general you won’t get the right kind of traffic to your site. It needs to be a happy medium. I think that what helped me the most was trying to keep in mind what I would search for. The other thing that just blew my mind was negative keywords! It makes so much sense that if you don’t have a specific thing to not have that traffic directed towards the site. I also think that it is cool that you can limit the area of your account. All this time I feel like there has been this amazing tool that I have never known about.

 

Week 6 Reflections

I honestly never thought that starting a business would be so challenging. I defiantly thought there would be harder things but this is nothing like I would have imagined. The license and tax information was the hardest for me to find. I had to dig through the Washington state licensing website to find the information that I was looking for about which kinds of license I needed, from what I could find a general license for Washington state is what I need, if I needed a license for my city, my answer is no and how often taxes are due, the answer to that is it depends. This kind of legal information doesn’t come naturally to me, although I am very grateful to be learning it. It seems to all be important information that I could use later. Building the website was the fun part of the week, or at least that is what I thought. I am defiantly more of an artsy type of person so this was a little bit more in my comfort zone. Overall I think this had been a week for growing, which I am grateful for. I believe that when we stretch ourselves we are better people for it.

 

Week 4 Reflection

This week was the hardest week in the class so far. At least I think that it was. We worked on finding a website builder and a host site. After all of the research I actually decided to go with weebly.com as both the site builder and the host site. Just because it is harder to integrate a different host with weebly. I played around with weebly and decided that I really did like how it was set up. Then however after I started to build the actual site I found that weebly would not be as easy to use as I originally thought. In fact even after all that research I ended up switching to a different site altogether that I decided would fit my needs a ton better. So, after all that hard work and research I ended up changing to wix. Even though it was more expensive all around I found that it was way easier to use. Not only that this site is actually for a business that we do want to build and promote so I felt that it would be okay in my case to go ahead and buy a yearly subscription for wix. Which was expensive but fit my needs very well.