My Entrepreneur's Journal

For the past few weeks I have been playing with my Google advertising trying to get someone to purchase my goods to no avail.  I finally learned about the power of social media on your business and I have decided that social media is where it is at.  It only takes one person to write a good review to get many more people interested in the product.  It only takes, one bad review to bring down the business too.  I really need to start a Facebook, and Pinterest campaign and see if I can get some momentum going for my new business.   

I sat down with my kids last night and gave them the talk.  You know the one...I started out asking them what they knew about SEO and how to get your keywords to show up on a search.  I took my computer to them and showed them some data I gathered from Google Analytics and asked them to help me interpret the data.  After reading up on SEO and Landing pages this week I decided to tweak my keywords a bit and make some changes to my website.  First, I changed the title of my photos to include some keywords.  Second, I added some keywords to my landing page so that the customer would know they came to the right website.  I want to watch these changes for a couple of days and see what the net result is. 

Everyone wants a good ROI (return on investment), but what does that mean to the laymen?  If you run a small business you want to get as much profit out of the business as you honestly can.  So if you sell hot cocoa for $1.00 a cup, the cost of the cup, cocoa, and advertising should cost less than $1.00 per cup to make a profit.  Now this is where the strategy comes into play.  Let's say that you can get the cups for .50 cents each normally, but if you buy 1000 cups you can get them for .30 cents each.  Your business savvy would come into play to determine if you can sell 1000 cups of cocoa, and if you have all the other supplies to make that happen.  If it is worth your while to buy the 1000 then it could save you money in the long run.  If you can only sell 100 cups, then you have overspent and you will be getting a smaller ROI that if you had only purchased 100 for .50 cents.  When factoring the optimization of advertising online you need to consider your ROI and also what your

I have been learning about the wonderful world of Google for weeks now and I have determined that they have quite amazing things happening over there.  This week I learned that you can check your quality score in regard to the keywords you place in your advertising on Google.  This quality score lets you know if you are reaching your target market or if your information is not relevant enough.  If you score higher than a seven on your advertising you are right where you want to be in regard to your target market and advertisements.  If you score below a five you have some relevance issues that need correcting at once.  Sometimes you have too many generic keywords and the marketing plan is too broad.  If this happens to your business you need to get more relevant content to help you succeed in advertising on Google.  Once you choose more relevant words your score will improve.   

So really, what does it take to run a successful online business?  I have been pondering this question for a few days now as I work through my ads for my campaign online.  I think you need to have some basic tech skills, and you need to know how to make your ad stand out above the rest.  In the video I watched this week they suggested making each letter in your ad a capital. While this goes against everything I learned in 2nd grade English class, I think it came in handy for the ad building.  Not only did it make my ad stand out, but it was pretty easy to read.  I also put a few keywords into my ad so that it would trigger the Adword coding and get me to the top of the search.  Now I am ready to launch my first ad campaign.     

Once there was a small business that wanted to sell online.  The owner of the small business didn't know how to get customers to purchase her amazing product so she researched it...online.  What she found was information overload.  It would seem that to have an effective advertising campaign you need specific keywords that help your customers find your website.  But they can't just be any old keywords.  They have to be specific enough to link people to you, and broad enough not to let anyone fall through the cracks.  If the business owner can manage this small task, then she will make a million by Monday and it will rain gumdrops from the sky. Now off to brainstorm keywords that could make or break me.  Wish me luck.