Keywords can be helpful, but they can also be hurtful. They can drive good traffic, but they can also drive bad traffic. Bad traffic can be those that are not really interested in your website, but a broad word like “ukulele” can bring people that are interest in learning how to play a ukulele to someone that is wanting to buy a ukulele. If you are doing pay per click, then having broad words can get extremely expensive because your traffic is not even interest in your website.

Good keywords are usually those that consist of at least two words and say something like “ukulele lessons.” Something that will specify what your product or services are. Optimizing your keywords is probably one of the most important things that it can be done. It will bring the right traffic, the potential buyers, and ultimately that is how you will obtain your conversions.

By using Google Analytics one can see what keywords are costing you, which ones are actually working, and the ones need to be changed. Google Analytics a great tool to add and delete keywords.

Google Ads is such an amazing tool that can be used to get your website out there and get clicks, traffic, and ultimately conversions. The only down side about Google Ads is that it can get expensive. For example, I have spent about $50 on Google Ads and I have not yet gotten any conversions. If I keep doing this, then I will go broke soon.

Optimizing your page and obtaining a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) average is probably the most economic strategy that can be done. SEO allows websites to get organic searches in Google, Bing, or Yahoo without having to pay. All these search engines have all sorts of algorithms that filter all the searches and put the best searches on top. How do you know how your SEO score is on your website? One can go to different websites like http://optimizemysite.com and receive an SEO average.

By going to websites like the one I mentioned above, one can obtain many ideas on how to optimize your page and make it better. Some of the different things that can be done is adding a meta tag, site map, or adding good titles and attaching them to the descriptions of your website. This will save you lots of money in your marketing budget.

Doing SEO is not the only route to save on the marketing budget, one can also go through social media to meet the website’s goals. Once a company gets relatively big, doing pay per click may be a better option. When a company or business is new and starting up, then doing social media may be the better route.

Building a website is like a doctor having a patient in the hospital, you have to constantly be caring for it and giving it new things so that it can get better. Optimizing your website it takes time and is just trying a few different things. By monitoring those things, then you are able to realize what works and what doesn’t.

This week we learned about optimizing our websites and how we can modify different things to see what will get us more conversions. The way we make those changes is simple through the optimizing tool that Google provides. We can do those changes by doing A/B testing, multivariate testing, and others. These changes help us see where the visitors are clicking best, or what they like better.

A/B testing is usually what beginners, like myself, start with. This is because we only change one thing at time. By only changing one thing at a time, it helps us know what it cough the potential customer’s eye better. By doing this we save money, because we are able to figure out what works best and then we can get rid of the ads that don’t work.

There’s information everywhere we go. When that information is collected, it is considered data. That data is available to us at our fingertips with one click. Although, this data is available to us, not all of it is useful. Determining what is useful and what is not is critical to our understanding. I will be talking about the data that we can collect ourselves within our own websites and how is relevant to us.

Clicks, time, scrolls, conversions, ads, and others are key indicators of how websites do. In class I have learned how to record these key indicators through Google Analytics, which is such a neat tool to keep track of how my website is doing. This tool is helpful in the sense that I can constantly record how my visitors come to my website, the way they navigate, the different pages they go through, the time they spend in each one of those pages, how they got there, and the outcome of their visit like whether they contacted us or not. All this data is useful because it helps measure our success.

I can be getting a ton of clients from my website, but if my website is costing me a lot more than the revenues that I am creating, then it is not really profitable nor worth it. Measuring how we are doing will help us to make changes and improvements to do better each day, week, and month.

Having this data just helps us learn from our different strategies and will helps us make better plans. This is key because in this way we can obtain more profit, improve our company, ourselves, others companies, have a better income to help our families, etc. The benefits are endless and they all come from being able to gather the data and measuring it.

It’s amazing how much power Google has and their ability to change how things are done with all of their different algorithms. We were sitting in class going through creating a Google Ads campaign and the different groups, when the teacher got a notification saying that there was an updated version of Google Ads available.

It use to be AdWords, but it’s now Google Ads. It continues to change and Google keeps making changes and modifying it. My guess is that  they only want the best for the user, so they figure that  by a continually updating it, it will contain the newest and most updated version, which will allow users to have a better experience.

Just like Google, we must (entrepreneurs) must also update their Google Ads and the different campaigns in them. If we truly want to get the most out of Google Ads, we must do as they do.

In one of our classes this week, we had some visitors come talk to us about various things. They talked to us about finding what we love and doing that which will help others become better people. Some of the things they suggested are; asking ourselves ‘why not me?,’ making sure to drive ourselves, because if we don’t do it, then nobody else will, and they talked to us about constantly seeking opportunities. I will go head a explain each and one of those further.

When anyone see’s a peace of trash on the floor, the question “should I pick it up?” comes to ourselves. Then, almost instantly we think that someone else will pick it up and that it’s okay if we don’t. That attitude will make us hesitant about opportunities the rest of our lives. Taking the initiative to pick up the trash will help us do that hasn’t been done. It will help us be proactive and do that which will help us succeed in life.

Employers and Human Resources (HR) are constantly seeking for talent. Many in this world have talent, but sadly many of us don’t know how to make it known or make others see it. Companies want employees become better employees and help them succeed, because by doing that they’re helping their own company be better. As employees drive themselves, they will thrive at their jobs. If employees can’t seem to find the drive they need, nobody else can give them that which they lack. Employees drive themselves, nobody else can.

We live in a world of opportunities. They’re all around us, but sometimes they’re hard to spot out. We were encouraged to write down in a piece of paper every single opportunity that we came across, and after 20 or so that we had written down, we would start to acknowledge those opportunities that were of bigger importance and that would make a huge difference in our lives.

All of those things help me see that there’s much that I must do from my end to improve as a person, employee, and business owner. This things require time and effort, but now is the day to start. By striving to  do the things mentioned above, we we were told that we would start creating habits of success.

 

The country is run by the people and their money. Taxes are the oxygen of a country. That’s how the government is able to run the country and support all of the different programs, cities, and communities that exist.

Throughout my life, I’ve heard people constantly complaint about how much taxes they pay. In reality, only about 50% of America actually has to pay taxes. Even though I don’t completely agree with that, and I feel like the system discriminates to those that make a lot of money. Even though this is the case, the government still needs everyone to pay their taxes.

As a business, one has to pay taxes. It’s not a hard process in reality, and it’s actually simpler than what it seems. Understanding it is easy part, but actually doing it and knowing all the little details may require the services of an actual accountant. With s small business as a Sole Proprietorship, Limited Liability Corporation, or Partnership, taxes aren’t complicated. Once we get into the Corporations and S Corporations, is when we get into the more tricky stuff.

Setting up a business correctly as a registered business with your local government and setting up your tax system is key to running a successful entity in the future. Although, setting all of that may not be required at the beginning because there is a minimum of income an entity has to earn in order for it to make a huge difference.

There’s many concepts and specifics about creating a business, but it get’s even more complex when one creates a web business online. Building an online business has more pre-requisites because it requires having knowledge about computers, creating a website, and managing that website. Having all this knowledge prior to starting a business, puts the person way ahead than others.

I personally don’t hold the computer skills necessary, but that’s one of the reasons why I took the Web Business Creation class. I learned a bit about hosting, servers, domains and how they all work. They’re all interrelated and work together to have a successful running website.

I have been the opportunity to research the different business that provide the services mentioned above. It takes time and a little bit of digging, but having the correct host, with correct server, and with the appropriate characteristics that will meet my business needs, is key to succeed.

Thinking back in time, who would of thought that you could create a whole business or career from just putting ads on a screen? Learning more about advertising in the internet, has been opening my eyes to a completely new world. Knowing how human behavior works plays a huge role on whether you make money or not.

The internet is filled with ads, but there’s game rules and tactics that one has to play by if one actually wants to be successful. This is because ads have a sort of negative connotation and can drive potential customers away. If ads are inserted correctly into people’s daily web surfing, then they actually do work. This is possible because ads catch people’s attention and with the algorithm’s that different websites like Google, Facebook, and others have, they try and satisfy people’s needs.

There’s so many different ways to make money with ads like being an affiliate, running a page with ads per click, or having ads per thousands, through e-mail, and others. By having the right content on a website, there’ll be sufficient flow of traffic and that website will start to generate more and more income every day. This traffic from various types of users could attract a certain type of people and will make it perfect for the ads on your website work.

It takes time to develop all the different aspects of having ads on a website and actually being able to make money. The more one dives into this market, the better off you will be.

Restless nights, as a constant flow of ideas come rushing through. As I close my eyes, great ideas happen to just show up and not leave. At times, I’ve had the need to actually get up and write down some of those ideas. I know I’m not the only one that this happens to.

I’ve realized that if I don’t write down the ideas that I constantly think of, they promptly vanish, and I can’t remember them no more. That is why writing them down is so critical. Once the courage comes to do something about the idea, whether that’s a new recipe for next day’s dinner, the new social media platform that’s going to change the world, or the local business that’s going to revolutionize the small town’s economy in which I currently live in, Rexburg, Idaho, I don’t know where to start. In my Web Business Creation class, we started talking about the different business models that exist and the differences between them, when all the sudden it was mentioned; A PLAN.

A business plan is foundation, or the pillars for a business. Without a plan or an organized way to bring to live an idea, it will never happen. Creating a business plan and going through all the different aspects of a business, like the model, the product, the target market, current and future resources, the objective, and purpose will make wonderful ideas a reality.

As the discussion in class progressed, much was mentioned about how in order to come up great business plan and address a lot of those different aspects mentioned above, some research needed to be done. We needed to figure out what we really wanted to do and if it was possible to accomplish what we wanted to do in the current circumstances that we were in. We need to be realistic and go with our passion, what’s financially reasonable, and with something feasible.