Optimization

This week we focused on Optimization. To optimize something means to make it the best it can be. It will be the most efficient, the most effective. You do more good things and fewer bad things.

In order to optimize your web site and your AdWords campaign, you need to have a goal, or a problem you're trying to solve. Say you have low impressions because your ad isn't showing up on Google. You may have one or two problems.
*Low Quality Score
*Ad that breaks rules
For help concerning broken rules, you'll have to consult Google, since we haven't covered that much yet. The most likely problem is your keywords. If your keywords have low Quality Scores, don't match the ad or are too general, your ad won't get shown often. And if it's not shown, it won't be seen. If it's not seen, it won't be clicked on. Check your keywords for relevance and clarity.You may have to switch them out a lot, but keep finding them.

Which brings me to the next point of Optimization. Say that your ad is showing up, but no one is clicking on it (so you have a bad click-through rate). You probably have a bad ad. Bad ads can mean that you have the wrong keywords, not enough negative keywords or perhaps just a bad keyword/ad match. Guidelines found here can help you make your ad better.

Finally, if people do click on your ad, but no one is converting (doing whatever it is you want them to do) and so your conversion rate is low, the problem comes down to your site. Either you're drawing in the wrong people (and the problem really lies in your ads or keywords), or your website stinks. I don't mean that in a mean way, but really, if you have a good site, people will generally do what you want them to do.

The problem may be that you're taking them to the wrong landing page. Maybe you need a new layout to make things easier. Your landing page should always be relevant to your ad. It needs to be easy to navigate and for people to know what it is you want them to do. On certain sites, pictures and videos are very helpful.

You want to grab people's attention, get their interest, and then lead them to decision and Action.

As a recap, when you're trying to optimize
*Check keywords for relevance to your ad and product
*Check ads for clarity and relevance to keywords and landing page
*Check landing page for ease of navigation and relevance to ad.

All these things are interconnected. If no one is converting, the real problem may go all the way back to your keywords. Make two versions of everything and test to find the better one. Never stop because it can always be better.

Google Analytics and Conversion tracking

Well, I'm a little behind. Should have done this last week. In my defense, I'm getting married in a month and a half, and holy crap that is soon!!!!

Ahem.

Anyway, last week was actually pretty hard for me to understand what we were doing. Google Analytics I got because it's pretty nifty, but Conversion tracking and ROI, while understandable conceptually, I fail to see how they apply to me.

Anyway, Google Analytics is a program that allows you to track all kinds of things in regards to your site like traffic and bounce rates. You can see what pages they stay on and where they exit. You can know where they're from and so much more. I like it and I think I will continue to use it even after I am finished with this class (unlike AdWords, which is costing far more than it's worth to me!).

Also on Google Analytics, you can run experiments to see which version of a page works better. Cool, right?

Conversion tracking helps you keep track of your Return on Investment (ROI) or basically whether what you're doing is worth it. Every time someone does what you want them to do, it keeps track of it. Personally, I don't see how I can do this, since the goal is to have them click on an ad (technically Google AdSense keeps track of that for me. Does that count?). I had a really hard time that class and have to be honest that not much stuck with me afterwards.

There you have it, last week's learning experience. This class is interesting in that I think I'm subconsciously picking and choosing what I retain. I don't mean to, but some things just don't seem to apply to me. Maybe I'm bad for that. I don't know...

Ads, AdGroups and Quality Score

This week, when talking about AdGroups, we talked about how to make our ads better. Well, actually we talked about improving keywords and bids to get more impressions, then about making ads better to get more clicks.

One interesting thing about writing and improving ads is that it actually takes some skills in English! One of the few things aside from my actual website, seeing as it's a blog about creative writing.

Anyway, basically, how good your ad is will determine whether anyone clicks on it, and if they'll stay after they've clicked. If your ad has nothing to do with your site, they won't stick around. My site is about writing advice, so my ad says "writing advice" in the headline. It also mentions creative writing and novels in the body, so that they know what they're looking at. These words refer back to the keywords people will use.

Suggestions for making good ads include:
1. Have a call to action (Buy now! etc.)
2. Put your keywords in your description
3. Have an effective title
4. Have your keywords in your display URL
5. Note how you are different
6. Make it mobile friendly
7. Mention promotions
8. Use Title Caps
9. Use proper Grammar and Spelling (Yes!)

Quality score is linked directly to specific keywords, but the ads have something to do with it, as the relevance of the ad to the landing page factors into quality score. Click Through Rate (CTR) is also a factor, as well as the overall experience. Quality score affects placement of your ad, and how much you pay. You want to try for a Quality Score of 5 or more, and if it's ever less than 3, you might want to pause or delete the keyword.

Avoid falling into the "death spiral." This occurs when your CTR falls, and your ad falls in its placement, resulting in fewer people clicking your ad, and thus your CTR falls even farther. You basically kill your ad if you don't try to improve it. The opposite can also occur, if you have a really good ad.

AdWords

Wow, sorry for the late post. Halloween, etc...

Anyway, this week, we went back to talking about AdWords. AdWords is a service provided by Google that allows an ad for your website to show up on the search page when certain keywords, that you pick, are searched for.

The highest level in AdWords is the Campaign. At the campaign level, you can change the language, target audience, etc. They consist of AdGroups, which in turn consist of Ads, pages, and keywords.

Our teacher recommended having about 100 keywords, sorted into different AdGroups. AdGroups allow you to hone your ads according to the keywords that will lead to them. You can have different landing pages and different focuses for the ads. Within an AdGroup, you can have different ads. They should be fairly similar so that they can be honed to be most efficient.

Keywords should have something to do with the page they are linking to. The keywords should be in the title of the ads.

Legal stuff and stuff...

Wow, late post...This week we talked about how to make your business legal. There's quite a few different ways to establish a business.

The easiest way to establish an official business is what's called a Sole Proprietorship. Basically, you register a name with the state government. In Idaho (where my college is), you need to register an Assumed Business Name. This is good for a very simple business with little risk of legal liability, like one is run on an advertising model or an affiliate. It gives you full control. It's just you.

Another business type is an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation). This one is good for businesses that are a little bigger. There is limited liability because all legal problems--debts, lawsuits, etc.--are on the company and not you personally. They can't take your personal assets. You can also have co-owners in the business. You don't pay taxes on the company, but you pay it as the owner.

Corporations are much more difficult to establish. So, why would you want one? Well, you can have many owners. C-Corps can go public (like on the stock market). Another advantage is lots of liability protection.

So, stock. Why would you want stock? Usually people who buy stock want either dividends or to resell it. People sell stock originally to get funding. Once it's been sold, it can be used to tell how well the business is doing compared to other companies.

Understanding how to set up a business helps you to understand how to pay taxes, which is very important if you don't want to get in trouble.

Website design and credit cards

Hello there! Well, this week, we talked about designing our websites and how to take credit card payments via PayPal.

When talking about design, we talked about how it's important to make your site user-friendly, using familiar devices to help customers or clients know where they need to look to find things. We also talked about how it's important to do things that make your site stand out as compared to others. These two things have to be balanced. Sometimes, it seems that making your site interesting would mean making it harder to use, but this doesn't have to be the case. Sometimes, just finding the right theme helps. Other times, using the right site builder that lets you do the things you want to do helps.

You also want to make sure you have all the pages you need. You'll want a Home page, and an About/Contact page so that people know you're a real person. If your site warrants it, maybe an FAQ page or one for Testimonials. For now, my site has only the Home, About, and Blog pages. When I adapt it, I would add portfolio work as examples and maybe an FAQ. Of course, when I do Freelance editing, I'll need a Contact page as well so that people can actually use my services.

Which brings me to the second lesson of the week, Credit Cards. We mostly focused on how to use PayPal to facilitate purchases of actual tangible merchandise. It's not difficult, and building buttons can be fun. But when your business model runs on advertisement (as mine does currently) or sells services (as it will in the future), this is less helpful.You can't have a "buy now" button when you don't know how much they'll be paying. It'll depend on what exactly you're doing or how much work they're giving you. But I think PayPal still has ways to help when it comes time for the actual transaction. I'll have to do more research there on my own though.

So that was this week. I've got my website half-up. It's not great yet, but if you wanna check it out, go to rorschachfantasy.com. 

Website builders and hosts

So this week, we talked about website builders and hosts. I actually missed the talk about hosts because I went out of town (and state) for my brother's wedding. I write this from my room in South Carolina, instead of from my apartment in Idaho. For this reason, I'll be short.

Basically, the website builder you want depends on your skills in HTML and what you want to do with your site. Personally, I'm a fan of Weebly and Wordpress because I have no skills and both of those do well for blogs, to which I'm inclined. I'll probably use Wordpress since I want to also expand into a freelance editing site one day.

That's all you get this week. I'm sorry.

Week 2

This week, we only had one class. Brother Lundin, our teacher, had to go out of town, I believe, so we had no class today.

However, since we still had class on Tuesday, I still should have something to say, don't you think? I guess you could say I learned a little.

Okay, to start with, we discussed the differences between the Affiliate business model and Drop Shipping. Both involve selling things that you don't actually physically have in your possession (wow, that sounds a little seedy. But it's okay, I promise!). But that's the end of their similarities.

With Affiliate, what you're doing is actually linking back to another website that does the actual selling, and you get a commission. A lot of places seem to do this, like Amazon, Barnes and Noble and ThinkGeek.com. Basically, you're just a salesperson. It's very easy to set up, costs nothing, and you don't have to deal with finding a supplier beyond a company that's willing to let you do it. On the other hand, commissions tend to be pretty low; you'll have little to no customer loyalty (unless you have a really good reason for people to go to your site instead of the original), and the other site sets the price, not you. Still, it depends on what you want out of your web business. If you want it cheap and easy, and are okay with not making tons, then this works!

Drop Shipping, on the other hand, is more like a regular merchant system, except that you don't hold the merchandise; your supplier does. Your supplier holds on to everything. In fact, you don't even buy it from them until a customer has bought it from you. Someone makes a purchase on your website; you notify the supplier, and they package and ship it out. You build more customer loyalty, and you get to set the price. You also don't have to deal with having a ton of stuff in your living room, especially if its gone out of date/out of style or is otherwise undesirable. Disadvantages here...well, you have to find a supplier. And negotiate with them. And beware of scams (you've got to do that with almost anything though...). You've also got a little more responsibility, like having to deal with returns. It's all trade-offs. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but they may be better at some things.

Outside of these things, we talked about the need to find a niche and a little about fulfillment (which is kind of like drop shipping, but you have to start out with the merchandise). There was another type of business model, which I didn't catch the name of, where you gather information about people who might be interested in a certain thing and sell the names (with their permission) to the people who actually sell the product. On your site, you would provide information about the product. I think it's called infomediary, but I'm not positive.

Anyway, that was this week. Wow, for only having one class, we still talked about a lot!

To Start With

Greetings to any who may stumble upon this blog! You can call me Cece. I am an English major, taking a class in web business. Not a bad idea, right? Personally, I'd like to be a freelance novel editor, so this class is going to help me learn how I would set up a business like that. That may not be the business I set up right now--I don't have much time as a student--but that is my goal eventually.

At this point in the class, I have not yet made a business. Instead, one of the requirements is to create a blog in the which I will record the lessons I've learned (hence the title). As a disclaimer, I'm sure I miss a lot. The best and worst thing I've noticed so far is that when we get talking, I start thinking about the business I want to start. This is good because I'm applying what I learn to that idea, but it's bad because I don't actually hear everything because my own brain is too loud.

This is the second week of the class. The first was really basic, class-setting up kind of stuff, basically familiarizing us with what we're going to do. This week, we started in on case-studies, trying to decide which web business these fictional business people should go into. We used a program called Keyword Planner, from Google AdWords. In order to use it, you have to have an AdWords account. There are plenty of places around where you can learn how to set that up.

In Keyword Planner, you learn about average searches (how many times people use Google to search for search terms in a month), clicks (how many times they click on specific ads), and bids (how much you would have to pay if you wanted an ad). I was actually confused about bids at first because we had also talked briefly about advertising as a business model--putting ads on your website in order to get revenue. I thought the bids were how much other people would pay for you, so when I searched my own keywords (writing, editing, creative writing, etc.) and saw bids in the range of $2-3 per click, I thought that was a good thing. As it turns out, that would be not so good, actually, since I would be paying that, not having it paid to me. Bids go out, not in.

The class after all that, we talked about finding suppliers for those planning to sell inventory. We looked at manufacturers (which may not be so good for just-starting-out businesses, plus there's high risk involved), US based Wholesalers (very simple and lost cost, but everyone can get it there, plus it's often low-quality) and International Brokers (Business-to-Business sites that put suppliers and businesses in touch with each other. It kind of looks like a bulk-Amazon). We looked at Alibaba.com and discovered that buyers had better beware. There are plenty of scams out there. It's like going to a market--everyone wants you to buy their thing. Some are legit, some are just trying to con you. You can negotiate. You can sometimes get samples (doing so is recommended). But sometimes, you'll still get ripped off.

So there's that. There's a lot of thinking and research that goes into starting a business. You can't just make one without thought, or you'll end up with big problems.