The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. …

Aerrvin

I worked so hard manipulating this art and then never even used it. The title quote above suggests that time spent doing something we love is not a waste of time at all. This can be hard to accept when one has countless other things one should be doing. I have so many things I should be doing and yet I fail to do them…I have all the time in the world each day to do good. Instead I waste it doing what makes me happy.

So yeah I am not sure I trust that quote above…yes it gave me happiness…but was it lasting joy?

Something to ponder for sure.

Food, Glorious Food

We all have to eat. And fruits and veggies should be high on that list of things we consume. Sadly there are people like me who simply can’t make themselves eat the recommended servings every day. I mean, come on, anywhere between 5-13 servings are bandied about. Recently my doctor advised me to eat 7-8 servings.

Here is a sample of what that would look like:

Breakfast:

Oatmeal, banana and a glass of milk

Snack:

Apple sauce cup

Lunch:

Salad (with plenty of spinach and oranges or strawberries)

Dinner:

A main dish with a large serving of broccoli

And then after this I simply cannot consume anymore 🙁 But in reality my diet usually consisted of the oatmeal and the dinner…so really 2 servings of fruit or veggies a day was all I was taking in, so getting 5 servings is a vast improvement.

Even so here is a great fruity dessert that I enjoy from time to time.

My husband introduced it to me and his family called it Apple Snooty:

In a bowl combine a dollop of mayonnaise and a dollop of peanut butter with a teaspoon of sugar. (The dollop is from a tablespoon and is mounded quite a bit.)

Cut an apple into bite size bits and stir into the sauce. I add dried cranberries. The original recipe uses raisins.

That’s it. Enjoy!

 

L 13 Weekly Reflection

My mind is becoming scrambled. Too much information all on top of one another makes these last few lessons and assignments hard to absorb. I appreciate having had this opportunity to learn how to create an online business. I will use much of what I have learned in several different endeavors.

For this week we continued with making SEO rankings better. The use of backlinks has been stressed as a great way to build up one’s rank. I have been encouraged to devise a plan to accomplish this task. So for me the best plan is to become active in online communities relating to writing. This, of course, makes sense. And I enjoy chatting with other writers, but so far some of the sites I have tried have not been as chatty as one would hope. I will continue my efforts as I have had experience with meeting fine writers in the past, so I do know it is possible.

I have changed my AdWord Advertisement from one about contests to one referencing  my Beta Reading Services. After looking back through Google Analytics and Adwords I saw that the only conversion I achieved was from the trial ad I ran based on Beta Reading. So the hope is that it will result in more.

I am in the process of adding captions to pictures on my site as well as creating backlinks from other sites. I still need to make that Facebook page I keep referring to. I think I will go do that now.

The hands on learning has been great and as I continue to muddle through these optimization steps I am confident that I will retain more of the lessons than I think I am taking in.

L12 Weekly Reflection

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SEO ….What is it and why should we care? That has been my focus this past week.

Optimization

op·ti·mi·za·tionˌ Ă€ptəməˈzāSHən,ËŒĂ€ptəˌmīˈzāSHən/
noun
 The action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource.
Search Engine Optimization is how sites improve the odds of garnering more attention to their site over another selling the same or similar items. It includes things like effective keywords used in metadata, ads and copy on the site.
Making sure one is sending a user to the best landing page is important. But making customers aware of the site’s existence is important too. Some ways to do that is to become an active commenter on sites related to the product or service offered.Places like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are among the top places where people socialize. Pinterest is good if the thing you sell has lots of visual appeal.
Simply opening an account at these places is not enough. One must interact and become known — at least familiar in people’s running feeds. Try to gain followers by saying useful, relevant things.
As for me I have accounts at all of the sites I have mentioned. Taking the time to visit each of them would be time consuming, but if one day was devoted to social networking, then it really would not be that much out of a busy week. I have joined Fanstory.com. I had looked at it once before but at the time the cost was more than I had to spare. It did not seem to be very active either, but currently it seems to be far more active than storywrite where I first became enamored with writing my novel.As I gain followers and  build trust it will allow me to promote my services.
By creating awareness I can then share links to my website. Through networking with like minded souls  I can also convince some of them to share my link with their friends and on seo-agency.jpgtheir sites. I of course would do the same for them.
A good tip to always remember when creating new sites is to include social links on your pages so that when a viewer sees something they like they can share it.
These are all doable
things, so I will certainly be organizing my week to allow time for me to get Optimized!

L 11 Weekly Reflection

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These are getting harder to write as the assignments get harder. For me, the SEO optimization is hard.  I already think my page looks nice, so how can I see my own errors? It is the same with writing a story. I can read it over several times and not see anything to fix. Then I take it to my reading group and get my printed story back with marks all over it. In order to REALLY find ways to optimize means another set of eyes ar several sets need to take a look.

In our discussion group concerning the landing page for a running shoe provider it was very apparent that several viewers noticed many different things than I and others did. But the key things I can still look for is to assure that my ad and the landing page it links to mesh. That they both refer to the same thing. The keywords in the ad need to be written directly in the copy of the page or as a header.

Good tips were found here https://moz.com/blog/6-essential-ppc-landing-page-optimizations — essentially the six steps that usually work are:

1) Pre-Populate Cursor – A form a great way to  increase conversion rate, is to pre-populate the cursor into the first field.

2) Eye Contact –  have your subjects look in the directions of your call to action.

3) Testimonials –  Include testimonials somewhere on your landing page.

4) Point of Action Assurances –  Put trust icons (like McAfee) next to your submit buttons more people will click on them, these logos will in fact reinforce trust and increase conversion rates.

5) Match Headline with Intent – Work towards getting a Google AdWords quality score,including keyword relevance and ad copy – you should always make sure you’re getting the most from the headline of your landing page. Specifically, once visitors get to your landing pages, you should make sure you remind them that the site they’ve landing on is in fact exactly what they a) searched for and b) clicked on in your ad.

6) Drive a Single Call-to-Action – One of the most common mistakes we see is people trying to do too much with their landing pages. Focus on driving a single action.

~*~

For my page I decided to simplify by removing the game page, but I added a page for Intangience Magazine. Currently my focus is getting the first issue of the magazine published by the first week of April. Then, of course, I want buyers to be able to easily find it. So I will create ads for the landing page. But I will also make a noticeable ad on the homepage directing potential customers towards taking a look. A call to action on the magazine page will invite making a purchase as well as signing up for a newsletter.

I will look into having an ad with someone looking toward the button I want them to click. That should be fun. So this week’s learning was hard but still quite useful. I will work hard to make improvements.

 

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L 10 Weekly Reflection

 

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Quote for the week: Math Sucks!

Learning how to use Google AdWords could be an entire class unto itself.  It has its own vocabulary that a person needs to learn. Some are a little more self-explanatory than others, but still a person needs to know what to do with them as well. There are words like, Campaign, Group and Keywords. And then there is Ads, Impressions and Clicks. Eventually those all become clear as a person creates their ad campaigns and divides them into groups.

But THEN we learn about conversions. Now getting the math formula down for a conversion’s ROI (return on investment) was tough on my little brain. Essentially it is this:

(Sales – Production Costs + AdWords Cost) / Production cost + AdWords Cost

I did not understand that at first and so my calculations came off wrong. But now I got it. But don’t understand it . . .

I have made one sale of $30 and my ad cost has thus far been $18.60 soooo

(30 – 18.60)/ 18.60 = .61

That means 61% return on my investment ? ? ?

Which is calculated correctly. But it seems to me I really just made 30 – 18.6. And if I continue to have sales at the same rate (I happen to have gotten 30 clicks on this group ad) I would count Goggle AdWords as a near success, but I am losing money. I would want to make adjustments to my campaigns to increase clicks and get more conversions by making my landing page more appealing. Another option would of course be to raise my rates to be in line with other editors so in that case a sale would be $100- $150. But my goal is to help those with less financial options available.

For this class I am taking I have put in $100 so at this rate of conversion I can hope to get five sales  — 150 – 100 = 50.00  Not good at all.

From the info page in Google it says – “If your business generates leads, the cost of goods sold is just your advertising costs, and your revenue is the amount you make on a typical lead. For example, if you typically make 1 sale for every 10 leads, and your typical sale is $20, then each lead generates $2 in revenue on average. The amount it costs you to get a lead is known as cost per acquisition.”

I have to conclude that Facebook may be a better option for getting leads. Nevertheless it has been quite the education learning how to use these tools.

W9 Weekly Reflection

I really value the lessons I have learned so far in this class. There are people all across the internet charging big bucks to take their course to learn this stuff. But it is hard to know who to trust and whether what they want to teach will be sound and ethical. So I am grateful to have this class offered.

This week we have been working on our AdWord campaigns and linking analytics to our pages and our AdWords. It has been interesting to see where and perhaps some of the whys for failing to pull in customers.

But I have made a few tweaks to my keywords and raised my click rate…the amount I pay per click. The last two days or so my average number of visitors has remained above 10 …..hey it’s a start. I now need to keep people on my page since the average American stays for only 18 seconds. My bounce rate is 75% so enticing my viewers to look at my other pages needs to be considered as well.

Using this tool makes a person want to improve and I can see it even becoming something like a video game challenge to work towards raising the total number of visits until one actually makes a sale. It is certainly something that can capture a techy at heart’s attention.

Based on my quote above by Steve Krug it is apparent I need to be less subtle and move in a little closer, without being in your face.

L8 Weekly Reflection

This week the workload has been light as it is a continuation of the previous week. My adword campaign has been approved and I am getting hits. But because I chose the home page as the landing page it means people looking for the contest have to search and I assume many do not like doing that. On the one hand asking a person to explore seems like a good idea because they then see all that is offered. But on the other hand many people want instant access to what they are looking for and do not want distractions and hassles.

I do admit I do not have a direct link to the contest page showing on the page… a person must click the menu first and then the contest link is there.Nevertheless I do not want to change my adword campaign just yet so I will make a link on my homepage  and see how that goes.

I appreciate the education through practice. Even if this endeavor does not offer any sales it will still help when I apply it to my husband’s BBQ sauce site.

For my Entrepreneur class this past week we read about a concept by Eric Ries called the Five Whys in essence one must keep asking questions until one gets to the root cause…which is generally human error. Admitting  I am wrong is tough but I know that when I do, I can then be better able to remedy the issue.

 

 

 

L7 Weekly Reflection

This week is tough. We are to get our adwords account set up. It is very sad to me that the class curriculum asks us to get our website and host found so far back and now we finally are asked to set up the adwords, but the free adwords we were offered for signing up with the host is now expired. They need to update the curriculum to either tell students to NOT activate their account yet…or to teach the adwords creation first so that students can take advantage of the $100 worth of free campaigns. *sigh*

But of course when one spends $25 they can still get $100 worth of advertising. So I had some difficulty getting my campaign to work but it is finally ready to go. So I will activate it soon.

We also discussed the importance of choosing the best words for advertising one’s site or page. It is important to be general enough to not exclude potential customers who may think you offer only one item. But at the same time not so general that people get frustrated when, for example someone is trying to find paint brushes and not hair brushes. Also we now have digital brushes for photoshop and other digital drawing programs. . . so clarity is important.

Borrowing from my other business class where we read about mastery…we learned that instruction is good but it is practice which makes the master. So here I go off to practice ad campaigns..and when success happens I will keep on practicing and never give up.

L6 Weekly Reflection

This week in my business class has been the least appealing to me. Legal entity and corporate structure and taxes. Ach! All subjects nearly equal to math in their ability to garner my attention. But in case I have readers who really want to know here is what I learned for Washington State residents.

But first for anyone, to get an EIN – Federal Tax ID Number – one needs to go here:

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/apply-for-an-employer-identification-number-ein-online

To become a legal entity in Washington one needs to fill out the appropriate form here:

https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/Forms.aspx

One also needs to register with the Department of Revenue which will allow one to also register or pay taxes for each location in the state where work is done. Including links to register with the city where business is located. Not all cities require registration so research on each business owner’s part will be needed.

http://dor.wa.gov/content/doingbusiness/registermybusiness/

From the Department of Revenue in Washington State it says that I need to collect sales tax even for digital products such as an online magazine.

http://dor.wa.gov/content/FileAndPayTaxes/BeforeIFile/Def_TxClassBandO.aspx#0004

If I ever got to the point of having employees then I would contact:  https://esd.wa.gov/employer-taxes/EAMS-SecureAccess-Washington and http://www.lni.wa.gov/  . Then I would be pretty much all set.

I am glad to have this behind me. For now. I do intend to move to one of the southern states in the next ten years or so
at which point I most likely will want to create a business there. So these skills and this list of steps to take will certainly come in handy.