Social Media and Social Networking

Social Media

So this week we covered more social media and SEO in my business class. I had to write a one page essay covering my long term and short term goals.  Now I won't repost that essay here but I will go through some of the things I've thought about in terms of my social media strategy.

Short term I recognize I need to have more content.  The more interesting and unique content I can post on my website I can also include on my social media accounts.  From my research it looks like facebook will be the very best avenue for me to do my social network accounts due to its ability to micro-target to my audience as well as how people thinking about relationships are actually interacting on facebook.  I also will leverage youtube as I have videos I can reference there.  The nice thing about facebook is that I can also embed some of my quizzes and assessments there and get it going viral.

Long term I need to be aggressive in responding and communicating to the wider community as they talk about me and my products.  Twitter is a good way of leveraging this, but in general I need to spend a portion of my day each day responding to social media.  There's a lot of information here, but I hope to be able to incorporate this more over the long term as I move forward.  The first steps are setting up the facebook account and actively publishing content on it.

Here are the links and there are indeed a lot of them.
 4 Steps to Social Media SEO Success

16 Rules for Social Media Optimization Revisited

 7 Steps for a Successful Social Media Strategy

How to Measure Social Media Traffic with Google Analytics

Developing a Social Media Plan

How to Use Social Media To Effectively Improve SEO

How to Use Facebook for Business

Is Your Website SEO and Social Media Friendly?

Social Media SEO & Analytics Tools Worth Checking Out

Free Tools for Social Media Optimization

Social Media Marketing

Wikipedia’s summary on Social media marketing

Must Watch: 12 Awesome Social Media Tutorials

How Does Social Media Affect Search Marketing?

Omniture / Adobe webcast on Facebook and Twitter marketing

How to Use LinkedIn: Using social networking to further your career

Landing Pages and SEO

Landing Pages

I've decided to change up the format of this and subsequent blog posts.  As I intend this to be a resource for myself to help me review I'm going to start posting the links I find from my class (and my own investigation) on the topics we are studying.  I'll also continue to talk about my reflections.

So we talked about landing pages.  First a few links:

Understanding Landing Page Experience

 Basic Strategies for Optimizing Websites and Landing Pages

Create Better Websites: Introducing Content Experiments

Content Experiments the Benefits

So the first key take away for landing pages is to AVOID POPUPS. No seriously stop using them!  I was happy to find that piece of advice from google that they specifically prohibit landing pages with popups for the advertising policy as I hate them yet I had read (and even blogged) about how people see increases in sales with them.  I'm glad google is starting to penalize people for using them.

The reality is the old way of doing landing pages was to try and keyword spam the page to make it so it was more relevant to google's SEO and advertising algorithms.  Now a days they want you to have content that just flows naturally (so talking about related concepts, synonyms, etc).  If you keyword spam google will penalize and possibly eject you from adwords and their SEO rankings.

I also really liked on the basic strategies link for the tips I had there.  The biggest tip for me on my landing pages was to drive a single call to action.  I thought I was leaving money on the table if I didn't try to throw every possible email signup, product purchase, video watch, etc at people to give them every possible option.  However, focusing on a single thing I want people to do actually increased my conversion rate as well as the time people spend on my pages.  Which was fascinating.

The other element, which I have tried but I am going to when I get a bit more time is the content experiments.  I already do a bit of A/B testing by sending people for the same ad to different landing pages, but with content experiments I can have the SAME landing page and present different tests to see which ones perform better.  I'm really interested in this and I just need to devote more time to it.

Next up SEO.

So here are some links to help remind me about topics of SEO:
 What is Search Engine Optimization/SEO

Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization 

 Backlinks Checker Tool — Backlink Watch - Check to see how many backlinks (external links) to your site you have.

So I actually worked for an SEO company when I first got back from my LDS mission and it was awful because we went through creating these spam landing pages to generate links back to our website.  Our content writers would create tons of articles and post them out on the internet in all kinds of random obscure places in order to drive up search traffic for our clients.  The days of that working are no longer.  Now Google specifically looks at how you are targeting your keywords and the reputation of the links coming back to you.  Highly reputable sites linking to you?  Higher ranking.  Continuously fresh content?  Higher Ranking.  Spamming articles and websites that all link to each other with no external links?  Likely to be banned from google search.

Overall I recognized I need on my business to have better schema organization of my site, target a few specific keywords I've identified from my best performing adwords campaigns and write a lot more content, frequently.

Google Adwords - Translating clicks and impressions into sales.

This week I've been monitoring my adwords campaign and I would have to say that I'm pretty good at getting clicks and impressions on my ads and not so good at getting sales.

My initial campaign had 5 different running ads with over 60 keywords I was targeting and a daily budget of $9.67 a day.  It had 4000 impressions and 40 clicks on Wednesday when I re-evaluated my campaign.  Astonishingly I found out from Google's search term reports (a report that shows the keywords people are actually searching) that I was receiving a lot of clicks from the wrong audience. People were clicking on my ads looking for relationship advice, tips, teenage dating, etc and it was costing me a lot of money - over $20.00 in clicks for people that I was not even targeting.

I also noticed that a few people were clicking on my ads that were searching for quizzes or tests which is one of my products but no the one I was trying to push people to.  I started an adgroup for tests and targeted some of the keywords people were searching for and I had over 30 clicks in 1 day (compared with 5 days of running and 50 clicks total) also my costs for those keywords were much much lower.  However, my keywords are still not translating into sales.  So I either have the wrong audience still or my landing pages are not functioning as well as I want them to.  I know there's a lot of data and I just have to sift through it to try and identify where things are a problem.  I'm also considering giving a free offering of a portion of my products that people can try out for free and then purchase.  I wonder if people are not wanting to spend the money I'm asking for without actually trying out the product.  However, this will take some time to build so I'm not sure I'll be able to get it done in the context of my class but I can look at it as a future plan for my business.

Overall I am very happy with what I have learned about google adwords.  I've found that by narrowing my focus I have a much higher click through rate.  For example a keyword I was targeting that only has 70 searches a month, has a click through rate of 20%, others with volume under 500 all have much higher click through rate as well.  These people stay on my site longer (as I can see through google analytics) and look at more pages.  Somehow I just have to figure out how to get them to convert (hence my free offering idea).

Again I know now know how to get traffic to my site, I just need to find the right audience / right product fit.  I may find out eventually that my products just aren't wanted / desired but I think based on my click behaviors that there is a market I just to have to refine the message and the product to meet people's true needs.  I'm excited about the journey ahead!

Google Adwords Relevance and Quality Score

So I think the business highlight of this week has been learning about google adwords quality scores and improving my advertisements because of it.  When you advertise with google adwords they will tell you the quality of your advertising efforts for specific keywords in your campaign.  They look at the keyword, your advertisement text and your advertisement landing page and give it a score.  If your keyword is average or below average it can lower your position on the search pages as well as increase your costs.  It also gives you clues into whether users will actually click on your ads when they see them.  All of my keywords ended up with scores around 6 out of 10 which is considered average.

What I learned from my class and ended up implementing was creating specific landing pages to target each of the groups of keywords for my advertisements.  I created unique and specially crafted keywords to target areas such as relationship problems, another one for how to save your marriage, another for no intimacy in your relationship.  Each one a different experience.  I then customized my ads and had specific text for each ad group.  Originally I had the same ad verbiage and same landing page and that gave me average scores across the board.  I haven't seen the scores update yet so I'm assuming it will take some time but I have a lot more confidence that my relevancy and quality will be much higher.  In turn this should increase the number of sales we have.

I also installed google analytics on the site and experimented with the e-commerce integration.  I've used analytics a lot for technical and functional analysis of the performance of the website but never really for advertising and conversion tracking.  I really enjoyed learning more about goals and setting monetization values for my campaign.  I'm interested in exploring that further although sadly we won't cover it much in the class.  The week has been busy so I'll cut it short at that but I'm feeling really excited to start seeing how adwords will translate to sales!

Get feedback from others than yourself and the value of mentoring others

This week I'm so grateful that my school work was a bit slower as we just moved and are trying to finalize up our home sale.  What a relief the break has been.  I am grateful though that I've been able to get a lot of great feedback on my ads.  For my business class we had to create our advertisement and post it to our discussion group to get some feedback on it.

What I've learned once again from this experience is how important it is to get other's feedback because you think differently than they do.  No matter what business idea or thought process you might have you need to vet it with other people, the best ones would be actual customers.  Just throwing money at an advertisement without at least getting a few other opinions is just flushing your money down the toilet.  My group helped me identify a way to change a few words in my ad to make it better and more appealing to people.  I also got to see a lot of good examples of ads that were very creative and compelling.  If I ever sell actual inventory products I have a lot more knowledge on using action words such as including the sale or product price in the add (30% off spring sale), recipes for even the pickiest eaters.  I really like how the ads catered to a specific market and communicated clearly.  

We also had a chance to peer review our group's websites and I've come to realize how much I enjoy mentoring people on website design / website building.  I saw a lot of good websites and also was able to give some good feedback to people who are just starting out.  I've come to understand how enjoyable it is to pass on knowledge to people who don't know as much as I do in website development.  I would like no matter where I am at in my businesses in the future to continue to participate in mentoring groups and to be mentored as well.  

This post is shorter than my others, but I expect future weeks to be a bit longer.

Simplify, Ad Groups, and Keyword Advertising

If I were so sum up the most important point of this week it would be to avoid juggling so many balls when you are starting a business.  To give some background currently I work full time as the principal software engineer for Dynactive Software building online education.  I also am in the middle of selling my primary residence home (hopefully closing on March 1st!) and we just moved into our home that we were renting out.  I also have five children with various needs, school homework that must be done (fortunately which is about building my business), and my business Discover and Change that I am trying to launch with my partner Kevin Skinner.  Realistically if I had thought things through I would have tried to juggle a few less balls at the start of the year.

I sometimes think that business risk is much like that.  On many of my business ventures if I had known how HARD it was going to be when I started the business I don't think I would have taken the risk and moved forward.  If I had known on my first business venture that I would lose 80K trying to launch it I would likely have just passed (since my intent on that business was to actually make money...).  I think on any given business venture or anything in life there has to be a certain amount of unknown, even a bit of unrealistic optimism that allows you to make risks that you wouldn't have taken otherwise.  In all of the things that I have taken major risks in the dividends have been huge.  I may not have been financially successful but the experience and knowledge that I gained both technically and in business is irreplaceable.  None of which I would have taken if I had not gone forward and done some REALLY HARD things.  I would still advise my future self and any others reading this post to thoughtfully consider if you are spreading yourself too thin and change things up if you can.

The other points I would review and summarize is how ad groups function.  Google groups similar keywords into ad groups and you can create specific advertisements for that ad group.  That means you can create a unique landing page and targeted advertising message just for those ad groups.  I really think that's a powerful tool, in addition the ad group has a large number of suggested keywords to include in your campaign that allows me to see keywords I wouldn't have thought to target increasing the number of people I reach out to.  The other thing I found interesting was being able to put in negative keywords so I can exclude people searching for cheap, free, discount etc.  These people would cost me money as they click, but don't actually buy anything.  One point I found interesting was if people have more than 10 words in their search phrase google stops including negative keywords so you could still get a few false positives this way.  However, I think I and a few others are the only ones who put in so many words into a single phrase.

Website Launch! Business Structure and Taxes

Well here I am one week later and one completely awesome website up and running (with a few minor adjustments being needed).  What a journey this has been since last August (nearly 6 months ago) when my business partner, Kevin Skinner, and I started working on this.  We've had to take a few shortcuts to get a minimum viable product but we actually have it!  How awesome that feels!  We have some tweaks and some changes to make things look, work, and flow better, but we have three product offerings that we can actually sell and the site is setup to sell them!  You can see the site here at https://www.discoverandchange.com/

I feel like I have accomplished so much more than my first startup from 9 years ago (wow how time flies).  I built the site using commodity components and in such a way that I can quickly make changes to both the assessment software I built and to the overall website.  That is one of my key take away messages that I think I touched on briefly before in one of my prior posts.  Do NOT RE-INVENT THE WHEEL.  I know that much of the plugins from wordpress I've chosen to use I'll probably throw away or re-write or find a better (purchased) plugin, but pulling together a bunch of existing functionality we have a minimum viable product that we can test with actual users.  Instead of spending another year building our website I was able to focus on the core business product which is our assessments and spend about 25-30 hours on the wordpress site (compared to the several hundred for the assessment product).

I'd also mention how important it is to have strategic partnerships.  Kevin and I have a partnership with Kevin's other company Bloom for Women and they produced fantastic professional videos for our education series.  They will use the videos on their platform and ours and we saved tens of thousands of dollars on video production with the condition that we will license our assessments to them for use as well.  I've been in startups where they partner over everything and end up making nothing.  Making key limited strategic partnerships have benefitted us in creating the educational components of our product offerings.  For that I am grateful.

This last week we had to look at our legal frameworks and I learned a whole lot more about sales tax and corporate structure than I ever knew about.  When we started Discover and Change I had always run businesses as an LLC and so I was confused when my partner Kevin wanted to do an S-Corp.  I pushed back on it, but finally agreed to it when our accountant said it would make the taxes simpler for us.  After studying the different legal structures for my class I came to realize that I like the advantages of an S-Corp.  I can pay myself a salary as an employee and defer my earnings in the S-Corp to a subsequent year and continue to draw from that as a salary.  This means that I can save myself on taxes rather than having it all pass-through like it does with an LLC.  The other nice thing I really like is being able to sell or transfer my ownership without approval from my business partner.  I've been in an LLC before where I was stuck and partners did not want to disolve it. Things got nasty and I didn't have a good way of getting out.  Having an easy exit strategy without requiring approval from my partner I really like.  On the flipside he could do the same and I could be stuck with someone I don't want to work with so there is that downside.  Now I like my partner Kevin and I don't see myself having the same problems as I did with my other business, but I still want that protection.  The downside of the S-Corp is there is more paperwork I have to file versus if I went with an LLC.

Now if I was running my own business without partners I would probably still go with an LLC.  A lot of my classmates want to go with sole proprietorships, however, I have enough assets (and children that have needs) that if something went wrong I do not want to lose everything because someone gets sue happy.

The other thing I would mention is how much paperwork you have to file when starting a business.  To get my s-corp running I have to file articles of incorporation, get a business name, register with the city, register with the tax commission, with the federal government (to get an EIN).  I have to register for unemployment insurance and workers comp if I want to treat myself as an employee.  I also have to file quarterly sales taxes and earned income taxes.  Just a ton of paperwork.  It makes me appreciate how much using an attorney and an accountant can save you to make sure you've done everything correct.  After going through our business exercises I've realized it's worth the $300-$500 to get things setup with an accountant and a lawyer.

Well It's been a very, very long week and so I'll just summarize with how glad I am to see my dream business launching.  I don't know that I would have pushed through with all the other hectic things in my life right now without my business class pushing me, so for that I am grateful.