A Costume for Agnes Case Study

A Costume for Agnes Case Study

Social Media Style Guide Case Study

18Day-CaseStudy-Ashley

Lessons Learned Weeks 03-end

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.