W13 Ranking, Link Building and Google Analytics.

            I can't believe this is the last full week of classes this semester. I feel like there is still so much to learn with running a business. I do feel like I have learned a lot this semester on how to run a successful online business. 

          This week We learned how to rate our sites for free and feedback on how to make it better. I think this is a great tool!  woorank.com - Once a week this site allows you to check it for free. As a business owner this along with Google analytics you can learn so many different ways to make your website better every day.

          Something else that we learned this week was link building. The idea behind link building is finding sites similar to yours and add your site link to that site. You can do this in a variety of ways you can add it in the comments of some of their pages or you can ask to be a guest blogger. This is something that I wish we would have spent a little bit more time on. I plan on spending more time looking into it in the future.

       Overall I am very grateful for this course it has taught me a lot and has set me up for the future.

W11 Landing Page Optimization & Basic SEO

This week we looked into how important landing pages work. Landing pages are important so people who are brought to your website are brought to the place in your site that they were looking for. My favorite page that we were brought to help us this week was straight from google. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2404197?hl=en This site taught us the basic steps to having a good landing page.
Google knows what helps people stay on your website and they separate it into simple steps.
Step 1. Offer relevant, useful and original content.
Step 2. Promote transparency and foster trustworthiness on your site.
Step 3. Make mobile and computer navigation easy
Step 4. Decrease your landing page loading time.
Step 5 Make your site fast.

The next thing that we taught was the basic SEO. This just means the simple things that keep the website better than others. Many of these things are what you would think like making sure your site loads quickly and that you have all your links working.
This site mentions a lot of things about the deal and why they are important.
https://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization

W10 ROI & Optimizing Ad Performance & Google Ad Campaign

There was so much that was involved in this week's class!

First of all, Conversion tracking and seeing how well your site is doing compared to the people that are visiting the site. Hopefully, I put the code in correctly and it will show me how much time people are spending on which pages so I can improve the pages that people aren't spending time on.

I started my Google ad Campaign a few days ago and already had things that google told me I could improve on. I have been in aw with how much Google does for free. I could spend hours on this site with the amount of information. I will continually keep checking back and changing things because google knows what works on google.

I am so grateful for this "test" run of owning a business online. I fell better to prepared for the future if/when my husband and I open up a company together.

W09 Relevance and Quality score / Google Analytics

This week I was blown away with the information that Google gives you.

The first thing that we learned this week was relevance and quality score. Basically, that means how good your ads will do based on everything in your ad. So what demographic your ad is being advertised. Do you have the right landing page for every ad? Does your ad have the right keywords to attract people? All of these questions get rated by google and it gives you a score. This way you know areas where you can improve to get more traffic to your site.

Then we learned about Google Analytics. I was surprised that this is a free tool that google allows anyone to used to track their site. Everything that you would ever need to see how your site is doing is on there. You can see how many people are visiting your page. What pages people are viewing the most. How many comments there are, the average time that people spend on your website and so much more. I am still not done checking out what it all does. This tool makes it easy to see how your website can be better for consumers.

W08 Ads

I forgot to post last week... Oops.

This last week we learned about the importance of ads and how they should look. I think the most important thing that I learned was having the landing page match what was on your ad. Instead of having your ad bring them to the main menu of the page. I think this very important to keep the users on your website. After learning this I monitored how I looked up stuff on the internet. This was a great time for reflection when thinking about how to make my ads attractive so that people click it.

The next thing that I learned that would help visitors get to my site is making sure my keywords are on the ads that I match with them. When people are looking for a site they are more likely to click an ad that has words that they used to search for than ones that don't.

Both of these things I wouldn't have thought about if it wasn't for this last week's lesson.

W07 Keywords and Ad's

Before this class, I didn't recognize that there were so many steps involved in advertising for a business. This week the most stressful and hardest part about this week was trying to find the right keywords to promote my website. After several minutes of adding random words, I realized that I wasn't being specific enough. Instead of just adding words that kind of made sense I sat down and thought about what my website was offering to people.

After I narrowed it down I am offering moral support to people through hard times in their lives. Once I had a theme the Keywords came a little easier. I am not sure I have exactly the keywords that I want yet but I am getting closer to the words that I would be willing to pay for

Another aspect of what we did this week was choosing what regions of the world we wanted to advertise for. I know that I am not ready to advertise to the entire world so I left that out. I definitely need more content before I open my site to the entire world. I also feel like I don't have enough information to advertise to the entire United States. I  decided to pick a few states where I recently have received stories from, this way my readers could identify easier with the authors. Overall this week was a great week for learning and growing my knowledge of the advertising world. I know understand that opening a business definitely takes a lot more effort than just an idea.

W06 Legal Structure

This week was an essential week in the classroom. We had the opportunity to learn about how to successfully find a way to start a business while following all the legal requirements. I am grateful to know how to find this information for my future buisness endeavors. This week was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I found that Salt Lake City doesn't make it easy for you to find the type of business license you need. 

The blog I am doing right now doesn't necessarily need to be licensed but it would be a good idea just in case I decide to do more with it in the future.