Lessons Learned Weeks 03-end

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I am adding these all into the same post as a personal choice, so I don’t overload my site with these posts for Online Business Class.

Week 03

  • This week we learned about how to ship product without actually owning it in your apartment or house.
  • We also learned about Google AdSense and how to affiliate with that and make money

Week 04

  • This week we learned about different kinds of site builders and what kind of tool they can be when you are running an online business.
  • We also learned about hosting, some site builders come with hosting and some do not.

Week 05

We talked about payments online and how to manage them, there are several ways to do it online, you can use woocommerce, paypal, venmo, stripe, and several others. However, I never knew about stripe before we talked about this module.

You have to make sure you are using secure payment system because if anything happens to your customers’ information, you could get sued or lose a lot of business. There have been plenty of examples over the years.

Week 06

You have to be legally allowed to run a business in the united States so the government can tax you. That’s how our system works, but the beauty of an online business is that some states don’t pay sales tax, so you might be exempt if you limit your sales to certain states.

  • This week we went over legal structures.
  • The legal paperwork depends on the size of your corporation. Some legal structures are for small businesses, others are for large corporations.
  • I didn’t have to fill one out since the site I was setting up wasn’t for me.

Week 07

This week we studied good keywords and effective keywords. We also talked a lot about how to make your keywords more specific, more general, or both. For example. adding [] means that the phrase has to appear in the search, and adding “” means it needs to be that exact search term. It’s better to learn about your site from Google, they can tell you what is and isn’t working, and then you can adjust accordingly, even if that means Google suggests new keywords for you.

It’s best to have your keywords broken up into ad groups to maximize relevancy from start of the search to finish on your landing page.

  • phrase match with [] and “”
  • start out with a ton of keywords, evaluate data and narrow down.
  • Type in another url to get keywords (type the url into keyword planner)
  • some keywords good and some not so good
  • 8 to 10 keywords per ad group, 5 ish ad groups

Week 08

This week we talked about Ads and Quality Scores. Basically a quality score is Google saying how relevant your page is to the things people are searching for, and clicking on when they click your ad. The relevance between what the person searches, what the ad says, and if the website matches their inquiry is where you’ll find the best scores. If they all connect cohesively and functionally, then you are likely to get a better score.

  • better idea of what a description is includes a call to action because a call to action provides more success
  • have significant landing pages,
  • make sure you aren’t using brand names in your ad that you need special permission for (trademark) – Some brands are not available for keywords, so you have to be careful about the words that you use – Google will not allow you to use trademarked words.
  • move keywords to specific ad groups if they don’t fit your other ad groups – you have to be conscious of your keyword relevance to your ads. The reason you can have ad groups is to better control that relevance.

Week 09

Conversion tracking is an extremely powerful tool when running an online business. A conversion could be a purchase, a newsletter subscriber, or just simply getting someone’s contact information from a form. In my case, a conversion would be receiving someone’s email to receive publishing updates via email. However, I would have to pay money for the feature in WordPress, and since the book isn’t being published until next year I didn’t think it was worth it to pay for the upgrades on the plugin.

Some of the things we learned about regarding conversions were:

  • how to connect conversion tracking with google ads – if you can connect these, you can track everyone who makes a conversion and see their whole process.
  • how to calculate ROI (Revenue-investment)/investment
  • Having more people convert costs you less money
  • HCFM – header footer code manager
  • It all goes back to keywords and ads: The reason is to figure out what is actually working for your business.

Week 10

  • about the + before a keyword : By adding a plus sign before the keyword, it tells Google that that word needs to be part of the search, so it always includes that word. For example, I was getting a lot of clicks from searches that had the word “Halloween” in it, but I didn’t want Halloween to be the only thing triggering my ad: so I would add plus signs before words like “book” or “childrens”. Adding this signifier can help narrow down the clicks you are getting to be more relevant.

Good Ads:

  1. Call to action – subscribe, sign up, preorder, etc.
  2. Match keyword – keywords have to be relevant to your site and also what people are searching for.
  3. Relate to Landing page – Landing page has to be clear that this is what the site is about
  4. Attention Getter – Interesting headlines that are applicable to target audience
  5. Unique – The site has to be different than what they might expect. Unique is intriguing.

Week 11

This week we learned about  how to optimize our landing pages. Some key things:

  • You can set up Google Optimize on your page through your Google Analytics account and it will show you important data about your landing page that can help you make important decisions.

My landing page isn’t doing super well, but here are some of the reasons why:

  • People aren’t searching for something they can sign up for
  • Halloween has passed, so it’s not as interesting as it would be if it were like August or September.
  • This website is so specific to a certain project, that it’s difficult do get people to understand its purpose so briefly.

 

Case Study – Seasonal Spot Illustrations

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Intro

These are my seasonal illustrations. These illustrations were used in product mockups based on their season. Winter I used wrapping paper, spring I used tissue boxes, summer I used water bottles, and fall I used a beanie.

Process

When I first started this project, I was thinking about doing my mockups on pajama pants. I couldn’t find any professional looking mockups anywhere. So when I reached out to my professor he said to try and think about things that generally get sold in higher volumes by season, so that’s when I decided to change my mockup for each season. This made it so that every few days felt like a new project.

Once I did my sketches I saw room for improvements, and new that I would pay attention to certain things as I worked in Illustrator. Some, like the lemonade and the birdhouse I changed specifically to better fit the overall style of the whole.

Overall Evaluation

  • I learned about my style and I how I think about light.
  • I learned that some “consistency” rules must be broken for the sake of the overall design.
  • If I could go back, I would have made notes on specific things to pay attention to for the creation, and maybe even a time estimate so I could better break up the amount of time I used for each illustration.

Example Mockups

Lessons Learned

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Before starting this class, I assumed that the first day of class would be all about learning how to setup a website and how to start a business from the first day.

You guessed it, I was wrong. Instead we are learning about:

  • Business Models
  • Google Ads and Ad Campaigns
  • Keyword Search
  • Quantification and Comparison
  • Investigating Suppliers for our ideas

If some of these look like difficult words, they aren’t. If there’s anything I’ve learned about the business world it’s that there are a bunch of fancy words that have really simple meanings. If that doesn’t make you want to roll your eyes, then maybe go learn French. Even if it’s not true, here are a couple summaries of the concepts I have grasped over the last two weeks.

Business Models are basically a framework in how the business you want to run will function. In any given business model, there are a TON of important questions to ask regarding customer value proposition (how you will differentiate yourself in the market, therefore gain customers), the technical operations (what you will make yourself, manufacturing, etc.), market strategies (advertising, target audience, virality strategies), and of course, the profit formula (how will you make money, what will it be priced).

Google Ads, Campaigns and Keywords are all intertwined into advertising. Google ads is a way to get your advertisements out to the public or the target audience. Campaigning is the process of doing so, and keywords are the things you are hoping people are looking for. Keywords are the identifiable pieces of data that are tracked by Google to tell if people are going to want what you’re going to sell. To quantify and compare the options just means to weigh them against each other based on their risks and you’ll do the same for suppliers.

Suppliers are people who either manufacture and sell the product to you or just match you up with manufacturers who do want to sell to you.

In essence, business doesn’t happen until you’ve done your research. All of the terms above are just research terms. #businessisnotforchumps

Communication in Relationships

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For the reading this week it was quite difficult to pin down only one concept that I felt was meaningful. At the beginning of the semester, we were asked to decide which principle was the most important in a marriage. I chose Communication, so I thought that this week’s reading was very applicable to my choice.

I enjoyed the reading for Chapter 3, and thought that many good principles were discussed in depth. Particularly, I pondered the advice at the end. The author thought he had cracked the code to a healthy marriage by understanding what caused divorce, but instead realized that saving a marriage was about focusing on what is going right in the marriage.

That’s something I noticed about that whole chapter. The whole chapter was about what the two were doing wrong, what was falling through, and what commitments and responsibilities were being met. When asking couples to argue, he neglected to think about what they weren’t arguing about that might have superseded the arguments themselves. When we focus on and communicate the things that we appreciate about our relationship, problems to be solved become less important than someone to be loved.

Problems do need to be solved, though, we can’t just dance around it all day as Mark Ogletree notes, that partners should be active listeners in meaningful and “validating” conversations. And then as the chapter reading says: to rekindle what you had when you were dating, to nourish that heart of friendship that lies at the center of your marriage.