The Stick Bug

  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...

  Setting up a business is hard. Setting up a business legally is even harder. As someone who is just starting a business, has no employees, spouse, or government number for running a business, the amount of paperwork that they make you go through is absurd. I mean, I get it, they want to make sure that I'm running a business properly and not laundering money. But would it kill them to make the process simpler? I mean, I know the main reason people run businesses illegally isn't because the process is rough, but it sure does seem like it could be a factor (for legal reasons, this is a joke). Running a business through the government means that all the associating parties can be dealt fairly with (the customer and the business owner), and that's very important, especially for earning trust and for not getting sued or sent to jail over. All in all, as long as the United States Government is around, running a business through them so you don't spend the rest of your life i...