The Stick Bug

  This week we focused on how you can use social media to spread the word about your website/online shop. This can happen in many ways, but the most important way is to find the social media site that relates the most to your target audience. Younger people will most likely be using Tik Tok, Young Adults will be using Instagram and Snap Chat, while Adults and Elderly all primarily focus on Facebook. After you determine which social media platform to focus on primarily (or, you could do all of them), make sure that you are posting frequently. To ensure that people know you aren't inactive and that you want to interact with those in the community, make sure to post often and in different forms. And remember, it's important to respond to comments and replies to the content you produce. As you build up a community, you will be able to market your products to people who care and share the same interests as what you are selling.

  This week we focused on how we could improve our landing page and make our website show up better on search engines by optimizing our site. We read a few articles on the topic and learned that Search Engines send out crawlers that look for certain information in a website that then tells the server how valuable and unique a website is. This allows the website to be ranked. If you edit a few things on your website, you can help your website traffic grow. Some of the things to edit are the title of your website, and making sure that your landing page gets the user exactly what they expected when clicking on your ad. You can also clear the clutter on your home page and make sure that all the information users are presented with is useful. These changes will help you overall improve your individual personal website.

  This week we focused on optimizing our ads before we ultimately gave into the search giant that is Google and paid them enough money. Which isn't necessarily enough to satisfy them because they said our ads would do better if we paid more. Such is life I suppose. Anyways, we focused on refining our keywords, but also making sure that we had enough different phrases to hit a large audience. We also focused on finding different ways to express what we were selling through different descriptions and titles so that Google could mix and match them. Another way to do more optimization was to create a second ad. Which, was a little tricky because if you aren't selling a lot of products, it's a little tricky to figure out what to focus on. In the end, I decided to make my first ad focused on a more serious audience, and my second ad was to appeal more towards people who are more casual PC accessory buyers. Hopefully I will see results from these decisions in the coming weeks, and...

  This week wasn't too bad, mostly dealing with my affiliate links so I could set everything up and not have Google sue me next week when I run my ad was really my only concern. This week we generally focused on the relevance part of the ad, which was making sure that our ad related to our audience and fit the product that we were selling. Or at least I'm pretty sure that's what we focused on? It's hard to say, because it felt like a repeat of last week in that regard. When it comes to quality score, actually, I couldn't find that on the ad making process. Or at least if I did it was somewhere earlier and I was on a later page. Still, I found ways to improve my ad and make some changes that hopefully won't effect it poorly. Past that, like I said, I mostly dealt with tech support trying to get my affiliate link to show up on my website, and not as a product to sell (which I still need to fix). But that's generally how this week went.

  This week wasn't too bad. The process for coming up with prompts for Google Ads isn't too confusing. In a world where everything is personalized and all of your data isn't really private, of course Google would want to make the most personalized experience for its' users when it comes to the Ads space. The reason you want to make multiple types of headers and descriptions for an Ad is so that Google can combine these words and phrases in as many ways as possible to make sure that those searching for the things that you are selling will receive the results that they are looking for and that your ad makes sense among those results. But other than trying to self generate these headlines and descriptions, the process wasn't too complicated. If only I could get an affiliate to agree to work with me so I could actually make my ads more specific to what I'm exactly selling here.

  This week we learned about Google Ads and Keywords. Now, most of this process was straightforward, there were only a few areas I struggled with. The majority of getting through Ads, was just trying to understand what in the world they were asking me to set up. The instructions from this assignment didn't give a whole lot of clarity and depth and generally jumped around the steps to only tell me certain things I had to set up, and basically left the rest of it up to me. As for keywords, my main struggle wasn't being too broad with my keywords, and it wasn't being too specific either. My main issue was that I haven't set up (until this week) any affiliates, and right now haven't been approved to work with any companies yet either. This is a little bit of an issue because I don't know exactly what I'm selling, which means that I don't know what keywords to focus in on yet. But other than that (and not having set up my business with the state yet), this wa...