It has been an extremely busy, very interesting week. Not only are stuff piling up on top of each other because, for some reason, finals is destined to be that way, but it’s also that most students at this point just want to finish stuff and get done with everything and enjoy a mug of eggnog. Or some other holiday-y stuff.
I’m definitely feeling it. However, I’m always enthusiastic to do stuff for MKT 250 because it’s genuinely helpful and is something that I really think is valuable. Cue music: website optimization.
Earlier this week we learned about ranking and link building. I have some background on this one, but I’m thankful I was reminded of how useful link building as an SEO tool. I’d say it’s very underrated, but people who value it are on the right track. We had to map out our link building strategy as one of our activities. I learned plenty from the discussion board as well.
Later this week, we also did a bunch of stuff on Google Analytics, trying to figure it out and read reports through a demo account. We also had a quiz that measured how great we are at finding out where stuff is on that darned thing. Just Kidding. Google Analytics is great. And then, we had Project 5 due, which is what I enjoyed the most because it gave me insight on how my website is performing when it comes to SEO. We had one of our pages get SEO audited. It was pretty cool.
I was ecstatic when I saw the title for this week’s module. I’m all about Social Media, enough that I’m taking it as my major. I absolutely love learning about the nuts and bolts about it, how it works, how we can be social media practitioners than just merely being users. It’s all so interesting to me. It’s pretty cool this web business includes an introduction on how to use social media as a tool to put your business out there.
I didn’t learn anything new from this week (that’s because I’m well deep enough into my social media classes, and so the terminologies weren’t unfamiliar anymore) but I was reminded pretty well about the fundamentals and basics. We learned about SEO strategies for social media and of course, social media networking.
Towards the end of the week, PROJECT 4 was due. It was a report on how you optimized your campaign. Seeing the numbers was pretty interesting. But not going to lie, I was constantly checking how it’s doing so the end result didn’t surprise me that much anymore. It’s pretty cool how you could guess the turnout yourself. But then I realized, it’s because you pretty much have control over it, as well.
This week was super interesting. We dived into the world of Search Engine Optimization. I have a little bit of background on this, and learned a little bit of it in social media classes. Albeit basic stuff, I was reminded of some of the fundamentals when it comes to SEO and how we can use it as a tool in web business creation.
I’d like to share one of my absolute favorite infographic on SEO. I found it on an article here a few years back. It basically likened SEO with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Importance is in ascending order. Basically, the foundation of any good SEO is crawl accessibility. I recommend checking out this article for a more in-depth explanation on this one. But, I like to keep this chart for when I have to do some optimizing on my website, or on any content I put out there.
We also touched on landing pages earlier this week in relation to the ad we created the past week. It was a great week overall. Oh and, Happy Thanksgiving!
This week we learned all about ROI (Return on Investment), Conversion tracking and Optimizing Ad performance. We also had Project 3 due this week, and it’s safe to say it was pretty exciting.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be sarcastic. It was definitely a little bit challenging to figure out google ads, analytics, pasting codes and snippets on site pages. Fortunately, with the help of brother Scott’s weekly videos, some plowing through articles and extensive watching of YouTube tutorials, I have a fairly good idea of how all of this works. Hopefully what I know is correct, and the YouTube videos I watched were worth the hours.
In summary, I was able to set up conversion tracking on my website (Thanks, Wix). I chose to monitor subscriptions to my blog’s newsletter for my conversion. Then, towards the end of the week, I created two ads. We’ll finally be running them, and it’s safe to say I’m stoked to watch how this goes. Overall, pretty fun week.
This week we learned about ad relevance and quality scores on Google Ads. It was really interesting as the confusion I with last week’s lesson were clarified, and I was able to understand how to go about writing ads and setting up campaigns. It turns out, Google Ads has a pretty nifty feature where they score the quality of your ads on a scale of 1-10.
The scale is pretty elaborate, but Google made it clear that it’s more of a diagnostic tool rather than a performance indicator. It helps you determine which best practices you are failing to do and need to start doing. A lot of things weigh in on how your ad is scored, but it’s important to know that higher quality ads are favored by Google and puts it higher up in rank.
Despite having a fruitful week, there’s been a lot of things happening in my home country. I live in the Philippines, which is notoriously placed in the Pacific Ocean and is constantly hit by typhoons every year. Just yesterday, we were hit by a supertyphoon, Typhoon Ulysses. A couple of cities have been submerged in 15ft floods, lost homes and loved ones. It’s quite a devastating time.
I’m grateful the city I live in wasn’t that affected, but I feel sadness for my people and the struggle they have been going through. I was distracted this week with schoolwork, because I felt the need to help as much as I can online, donating on flood drives, sharing information, connecting with people who needs rescuing and getting them the help they need.
I personally apologize, brother Scott, if you are reading this, if the performance of my work has been subpar this week. Now you know why.
Ads. It’s everywhere. Everyone seems to be trying to sell anything and anywhere. Including me. However, where it is the most saturated isn’t on the streets like the picture above but ads are on the web everywhere. Specifically, on Google.
That’s right. This week we finally created some ads through Google Ad Campaign. It was an interesting process, not as difficult as I thought it would be, but I’m sure there’s layers to it that I haven’t touched upon yet.
During this process, however, I realized just how much little space and word count we’re working with. You certainly cannot write an A4 page essay. You have to know how to choose the write words, be really crafty with it to at least make some people read it and click on it. Sounds easy, yeah?
One of the valuable things I’ve learned can be found in one of the links we were provided to learn how to write the copy for your ad:
Exaggerations Aren’t Helping Anybody!
Making bold statements with a huge red font and a yellow highlighter aren’t going to get your message across any better. It’s fine to draw attention to some things, but too much exaggeration just dulls the impact that your words have on people. Dig a little deeper and try to find a word that says exactly what you want without going overboard.
This week definitely was interesting! We tackled some of the basics of making a google ads campaigns, making ad groups and choosing keywords. It definitely was an interesting learning process and I’m a little bit intimidated, quite frankly. However, I’m excited to learn more and the module for this week definitely was good primer.
For the first preparation and discussion assignment, we had the option to choose the geographic location my ad would appear in. I chose Europe, North America and Southeast Asia as the geographic locations I want my ad to show in.
For the next prep assignment, we did some keyword planning. Some of the metrics I used to choose my keywords are the following:
Relevance to my business
Measurable performance
Broadness and Specificity
Conversion value
Search Volume
Competition
All in all, it definitely was an interesting week of learning. I can’t wait to dive into this more!
This week I had to learn stuff about being an adult. Well, not that I didn’t know of these things previously, but I was forced to stress about it. This week we talked about acquiring business licenses and figuring out taxes. Fun. Fun. Fun.
To say the least, I spent about 3 hours reading articles on business entities, licenses, which ones to get, when to get it, and what applies to my blog business. I learned it was very different to get licenses here in the Philippines and in the United States.
One thing I did figure out is I do not need to acquire any license yet, unless I want to register my business name and be formally recognized as a “web business” under a sole proprietorship. I will do that, but there are other things to worry about first: building the website and getting it out there. Get traffic, grow enough until we can get people clicking on affiliate links. It’s technically not a business yet until we are earning.
At the end of this week, the dreaded project 2 is due. I was like: what?! Two weeks to build a website with everything on it? What, do I suddenly have all the time in the world? Kidding. But I did try my best, and hopefully it’s good enough. It took me hours. HOURS.
However, it was pretty fulfilling. It’s a great opportunity to be in such a class where they expect you to do and figure out everything by yourself. Again, just kidding! It’s a great learning experience. It made me have some form of carpal tunnel, but I know it’ll be worth it.
This week was interesting! I learned a great deal about the nitty and gritty details of what it takes to actually start a web business. It’s frightening, but at the same time, exciting. I think I’m actually onto something with this one.
Our professor, brother Thomas Scott had a very inspiring video for us at the beginning of the week. He spoke about passion and priorities, and how the two things should always go hand in hand.
BEATING A DEAD HORSE
One of the things brother Scott mentioned in his video was his story with this kid in a school not liking CDs like he does. He said, “Passion is incredibly difficult to transfer from one person to another.”
This is an incredibly important thing to think and consider in the world of entrepreneurship. And he stressed that you shouldn’t just follow passion for passion’s sake.
Here is the summary of what I learned from brother Scott’s video:
Don’t let the passion take over you. Passion alone does not make money. Solve pain points. Boil down to why you are passionate about it, and think about the results of your idea and what it can do to those who consume it. Match it with their priority. Ask:
WHAT IS SOMETHING PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR THAT YOU ARE GOOD AT?
WHAT’S A PROCESS YOU CAN IMPROVE?
Take your passion and pair it a priority. BOOM. Profit.
A couple of things we learned this week as well: Site Design. I didn’t think there was a lot of psychology behind designing a website, but it turns out, it has a lot of psychology. Humans like to study other humans to get the other humans to do what the humans want. Makes sense, right?
But some of the things that I learned were highly valuable things to consider when I start building my website. Here are some of the things i gathered:
1. Paying attention to consistent branding throughout the website. In previous classes I’ve had and personal experience from previous jobs, I learned the importance of having a style guide when it comes to everything. Decide on which color palette you’ll use throughout the website. Write a list of types and font colors that you’ll be using for every single thing: headings, dates, subheadings, body, etc. Consistency in design makes it easier for your audience to become familiar with who for and what your website is about.
2. Compress images as much as you can. Make your website load faster. If you can load it even a millisecond faster, that counts. Compressing image sizes makes your site load a little faster.
3. One tip I learned from my past design classes is to add an element of humanity to your website. No matter what type of website it is, human faces are comforting to see. This can influence your site visitors how they feel about your website. Use this to your advantage when it comes to driving visitors to your site, and making them stay.
On top of that, I got to plan what I want to do with my own website by comparing two websites, and pulling out design elements I want to include in mine. We also talked about credit card payments, but I won’t go into too much details in that because we’d take all day.
Overall, great week in this class. I learned a lot. I’m stoked to start building my own website!
This week’s assignments and discussion boards were juicy. We had to determine which site builder and hosting provider were the best fit to the business idea we had in mind. Finally, we’re going to get down to business.
WEBSITE BUILDERS
I didn’t realize there were a lot of site builders on the market that were one-stop-shop things (meaning site builders, web and domain hosting all-in-one) for people who are complete beginners. I’ve always seen them on YouTube ads, but never checked them out until now.
There were Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, GoDaddy as popular all-in-one site builders. Of course, there’s still WordPress, which is obviously industry-standard. It honestly just boils down to what you value the most: ease, customer support, price, etc.
HOSTING PROVIDER
Okay, so. Here’s the part where it’s a little bit confusing. There is a lot of types of web hosting out there. Cloud, shared, VPS, etc. This could also be confused with domain hosting, which is a totally different topic.
Basically, if you went the Wix-Weebly-Squarespace route, when you build your site there, they are also your web-hosting. However, you can have a domain from another hosting provider but point the DNS to whatever site builder you chose, etc. Confused? Yes.
However, there’s WordPress.org, which is self-hosted. Which means, you have to buy your own domain name, and hosting provider. Lots of hosting providers have one-click installation for WordPress, so that’s convenient.
In conclusion, it’s like building a lego castle, and both are your lego pieces. You just have to find which ones actually fit. So the verdict? Green legos.
waffled 