Phoebe : Google called!

Hello everyone!

So if you’ve been following from my last post, I was waiting for a call from Google. They needed a few times to have a look at my site: inlovewithluna.com to suggest keywords and to set up a campaign for me. This morning I heard the phone ring and I was like a kid on Christmas Day!

Google Girl was on the other line. She was really nice and walked through what sort of campaign she set up. Basically she did all the work!

So all I did was log onto adwords.google.com (after you’ve created an account with them). The first page is a snapshot of everything. Since I’m only a newbie I don’t have much activity happening. (Google Girl said once I clicked on ‘Pause’ and switched it to ‘Enable’ it’ll take a couple of hours to be effective.

I had a look at the first few lines of my keywords and it looked like this:

This is what the first few lines of my Keyword section looks like

I think the awesome thing about adwords is that it’s effective advertising. I know it sounds really salesy but I don’t know how else to describe it. You’re putting money into an area where it’s talking to the right people. For example, if you’re advertising in say a magazine, (no offence to magazines or anything) you’ve paid for a page in a magazine no matter who sees it or who doesn’t see it. You’re not specifically targeting a customer who wants a niche thing. Whereas I feel online, when someone types in black strappy shoes size 6 and if your shop has those things Google will match it up. It’s sort of like match making. Your customer wants say to have a particular t-shirt and you can provide it then it’s great! You’re paying for each person that comes to see your site!

The downside is that money is the biggest thing when it comes to “winning first place” in the Google world. You pay for what you get really. I guess if you put in $2 worth of advertising, you’ll sell $2 worth of things but if you trust in it and know how to work the keywords and you invest enough to wipe out the competition then you sit taller in the Google Tree so more people can see you. So to stay that way you’d want to be paying above what everyone else is paying. You can see this in CPC (Costs per click). For me though I’m going to try and stay down low and play with the settings and campaigns and then try and learn how to get the maximum benefit from my money! (even though it’s not much yet)

So whoever is worried about launching into getting online and doing these adwords, it’s not so scary once you’ve done it once.

So just recapping my next steps… since there’s going to be more people viewing the site (hopefully) I’d like to create a video of some sort to explain the process of designing your own shirt and upload more artwork.

Chat next time!

Kristi:driving traffic to my store

Hi everyone,

I am writing this from a hotel room in Birmingham. I’m here for the Printwear & Promotion exhibition this weekend. Long way from home and after having dinner in the pub by myself, thought I might jot a few thoughts down here…

I mentioned a while ago how I was surprised to start getting orders, before I really thought my store was ready. This was all due to Google Adwords, and I continue to get orders regularly from all parts of Australia. The cool thing is, I can see what the referring sites were and what keywords people have used.

You do have to be careful though – I ended up spending too much money on the Adwords. This was because I was getting high ranking on very general, popular keywords like “cheap tshirts”. I was also targeting people wanting to make shirts for all the music festivals on in summer and this was attracting a lot of traffic too.

I have scaled down my Adwords, and am now focusing on schools, and sports uniforms, since it’s the start of the school year in Oz.

You can see the effects by the stats shown here.

Speaking of site traffic, I also mentioned last time that I was going to experiment with Facebook for drawing traffic and creating awareness of my store.

Firstly, I figure – I want to show my friends and family my exciting new little business, so what better way than putting it on my facebook status.

And yes, it worked! Look at the top referrals for that week:

Now, these are particular online marketing ideas I have used. But there’s still the best and free way to be found – and that’s through plain old Google search results.

The trick with this is, that Google has to find your site, and think it’s relevant enough to show it in search results.

In order to best optimize your site for what’s termed “Organic search results”  – ie natural, not paid, it’s good to think of it from the searcher’s point of view.

I think of it as hiring a private investigator. I really need to find something/someone, and I dont have the resources or time to find them. So I hire my trusting PI – Google. Now, I need to brief Google on what I am looking for, so – I enter the keywords that best describe what I’m looking for. Often, I am only looking for things in a certain geographical location, so that’s why I might choose to search only UK sites, or only Australian sites.

So I might tell it: sports uniforms, and search australian sites only

Now, how does Google find results that are going to be useful to me? Well, again, they’re not experts on the subject matter and they dont know who the best sports uniform suppliers are in Australia so they rely on:

- what websites contain those keywords

- what sites others have recommended (how many times has this site been listed or mentioned on another website or in a blog, forums etc)

- it also looks at how active the site is and how often it’s content it updated. This is a good sign that it’s a useful site.

There are lots of other more technical things it does too, but let’s not get overwhelmed here

So, essentially, I ask my PI for some sports uniforms suppliers in Australia, and Google gives me a whole list of results, ranked in order of relevance.

Back to the site owner: what does this mean for me?

Well, it’s the same:

- make sure the keywords your target market are using in searches, are well covered in the body of your website. This doesn’t mean dodgy lists of hidden keywords, but useful, well written content that describes the products and services you offer. (This is one reason why sites made of just images are not good at returning search results)

- submit your site to local business directories, or any site related to your business. Ie, a sports uniform supplier might be listed on the Sports Assocation websites for example. Also, the more your site is talked about in forums, or blogs, the better. Google is moving towards relying on social media as a source for relevant search rankings.

- make sure your site is updated regularly! Google visits your website to see if there are changes. If there are none, it will visit your site less and less, meaning your search ranking will go down. Basically, it will see your site as not relevant. On the other hand, the more you update, the more Google thinks “this is a happening site, I’ll keep checking back on it for updates”.

So there you go. I don’t profess to be a SEO expert (Anh has a lot better knowledge than me) but just sharing my experiences and th0ughts. Also – I refer exclusively to Google in this post, but just for simplicity sake. You could replace it with Yahoo or Bing or whatever, bearing in mind that each search engine works a little bit differently.

So long for now!

Kristi

Anh: Tips On Creating Designs

Hello again,

The good thing about DecoNetwork is that you can change your website anytime you want – quickly and easily. With the new version 2, there are more new cool design templates to choose from. I have changed my logo and site look and feel – hope you like it.

For a Fulfillment Center, you will need to set up and define the printable regions for your products. The DecoNetwork Help site is a great resource on how to set up your Fulfillment Store. From an affiliate store perspective, the products have been added and set up by our Fulfillment Center, so we just need to focus on creating and adding our designs to the store.

This is the stage where we would need to invest most of our time and effort to. After all we want our site to have a combination of already “created products” to sell and “store designs” for our customers to use for their creations.

As a newbie, I’ve discovered a few things along the way – that will ensure the whole process will be a lot quicker and easier going forward. The secret is to practice and do a few test designs first to get the feel for it, before you start uploading all of your designs – incase you discover it isn’t what you want (this has happened to me a number of times – now that’s the time consuming part).

Here are some tips:

1. Work out your design categories – just to have an idea what you will be designing and how it is going to be structured on your site (doesn’t have to be a complete final list, you can change later if needed).
2. Use Firefox as the chosen browser – found it quicker than Internet Explorer.
3. Choose and copy a good small selection of “stock designs” to your site for your own use and for your customers’ use – choose the designs that are most likely to be used as this will appear in your “store designs” library and on your homepage for customers to choose from – the “stock design” library is still accessible for your customer usage too.
4. Focus on the easy and quick design first – build the momentum and experience. You can work on the more elaborate designs later.
5. Try to save your individual elements/motifs separately – so you can add them to your “store design” library (provide customers more choice) – customers can reuse different elements for different products/items, plus you can use them too when composing your designs, as they can be overlapped (providing you save the file with a transparent background).
6. For graphics or vector artwork, best to save them as a .png or .eps file – for background transparency. So the designs will look good against any coloured background.
7. Saving files, ensure they are in the following format:
   • .eps
   • .png
   • .jpg
   • .gif
   • .emb (for embroidery designs – only available for Fulfillment Centers only)
8. If you are stuck with some design ideas, try creating some designs using DecoNetwork “stock designs” just to get you site up and running, so there are some items for sale while you think, plan and work on the more unique designs for your site.
9. Refer to online graphics and design resources for inspiration like Smashing Magazine, CG Textures (free texture site), Colourlovers (colour & pattern ideas), Color Schemer (work out color palette), Absolute Cross (good Photoshop tutorials and textures), CreativePro, Design Meltdown 2010 and fotolia (stock images – more affordable than istockphoto).
10. Consider using different brushes and effects to give your design a new dimension. Have you downloaded the 50 Must-Have Photoshop Brushes?

Now that there are some development and some designs on our site, I am really excited about creating more designs for the store. My next task is to design some patterns for the fabrics and wall decals and include more fancy designs for the t-shirts.

If you have any other tips on creating designs for your site or have any recommendation on design resources, please do share with us…

I hope you find the above tips useful.

Happy designing!

Anh

Anh: Setting Goals

Hello again,

It’s February already! Time sure flies….
(I apologize for not making any entries since December… I had work commitments that required me to do extra work over the holiday period). But now I am back on deck!

I’ve been listening to some Anthony Robbins motivational CD’s the last few weeks (on a daily basis) and have purposely listened to the “goal settings” section repeatedly all this week. I can’t believe the last 2 years I have not set any written goals… no wonder, I didn’t achieve much

Anyhow, the audio have inspired me to take serious action this year, especially on the business side of things – one of them is to grow and make money from my DecoNetwork web store – stickkers.com. It is so important to map out goals and objectives for our business so we can develop action plans to achieve them… otherwise we allow other external factors to take over the important things. It’s like driving a car to a new destination; without a road map – we need a map to help us get there.

Tony Robbins states, “I believe that setting goals empowers us. We can cast our dreams into the stars but we need to reflect on those goals, break them down into actionable elements and move toward them every day.”
Thank you wise one!

Here are my goals:

• Redevelop my logo and branding for the site – 7^th Feb
• Set up store items and make the site at a sellable/ready to purchase state – 14^th Feb
• Designs prints, motifs, elements and statements for the site – 28^th Feb
  • Real Estate
  • Game console
  • Parking stickers/tags
  • Car tags/stickers
• Site optimization, social media marketing and activate (turn on) google Adwords – 1^st of March
• Collate / revise relevant keywords for bidding – 31^st March
• Create Ad groups and relevant landing pages – 31^st March
• Competitive analysis and research – 31^st March
• Promote site on twitter, facebook, forums and other social media avenues – 31^st March
• Launch a “limited time special offer” to encourage sales, allow customers to test drive and build site awareness – 12^th April
• Aim to generate $1,000+ (each month) in sales for April and May
• Site update, create new designs and categories (with the flavour of the month/time) – 1^st June
• May – September: aim to generate between $2,000 – $3,000 in sales each month (may require Ad groups tweaking / additional special offer for encouraging sales)
• Site update, create new designs and categories (with the flavour of the month/time – special holiday season theme) – 1^st October
• October – December: aim to generate between $5,000 – $10,000 in sales each month (special Xmas / holiday season promo)… repeat this for the following year

Now, I am going to re-tweak on the logo and the site look and feel…. Stay tune for my next week’s post.
Chao!

Anh

Kristi: Having a fresh storefront

ok. It’s been a while.

Well and truly back from Christmas/Summer break (we’re in Australia) and from travelling for work.

Since then, my DecoNetwork store has been updated to version 2. This makes my site look more snazzy, with some cool new ways to create a fresh store front. Things like featured products, most popular and more flexibility for image sizes, etc.

I’ve chosen one of the new themes, and simply updated it with my own colours and banner. What’s cool is I dont have to worry about coding or anything – just click where I want to change and enter the details:

Simply use my browser to customize the look of my page. The red outline appears when I hover over anything that's editable.

I’ve also let my friend and family know on FaceBook about my new site. I’m going to see how much my site traffic goes up from this! I’ll let you know how it goes…

Post again soon…

Phoebe : New Look and feel of inlovewithluna.com

Hello! 

Happy belated Australia Day to those in Oz! 

I had some time to think about the branding of inlovewithluna.com. I like more imagery and I think showing t-shirts and explaining how the website works and what it can offer helps a lot. So I changed the home page graphics and kept the pink and simple colours. So here it is! 

At the moment I’m arranging and setting up all the products and also designing some more prints! DecoNetwork has recently launched their second version so the backend of managing products and adding products has become better. 

New Homepage for inLovewithLuna.com : I changed some of the graphics in the top hand side but kept the logo the same

Adding products is quite easy. Inlovewithluna.com is mainly going to be different types of garments like t-shirts, hoodies and tops so I’m going to start of with these products and go from there. 

Adding products with DecoNetwork : You just keep adding products by clicking on the button and choosing the colour and style you want displayed.

The next two steps are to finalise all the products and then set up some google adwords!

Phoebe: The results from the Poll

Hey everyone!

I apologise as it’s been a while since my last post! Just thought I’d give a really quick update on how the poll is going. So far 71 people have voted. Thank you for your votes!!! It’s exciting hearing other peoples’ ideas and inspires me for more interesting prints. Since the poll a couple of people have emailed me and let me know what they like and are waiting to see what’s online so they can make a purchase. All I need to do is actually start designing So here are the results from the 71 votes…drum roll please…. 

Here are the results from the Poll!

 

So there are more results too! Quite a few people made suggestions which is great! The more specific the better hehe  My absolute favourite is a “Centaur punching a unicorn in the face” and “Retro cartoons like superted.” Omg what a crack up!  

So thanks so much to everyone who voted. (More votes welcome at any stage as I’m always interested in new ideas!) I’ll keep working on the designs and send out another poll for voting on designs soon!

Have an awesome Christmas!

Suggestions from others!

Anh: Design Ideas

Hello again,

Ah December *sigh* – the busiest time of the year.

I love it, because it is the holiday season – with Christmas approaching, parties and social events galore. The flip side on the other hand – it is demanding and stressful period also – juggling work, social and personal commitments and deadlines!

Anyhow… I will endeavour to create some designs this weekend and finish of some final touches on the site layout. Looking forward to spending more time on the site after December 18, when we go on annual leave.

Some of the designs I will be creating for the site are based on the following themes:

1. Real estate / property theme for t-shirts
   I had this idea over 7 years ago, when I discovered I had missed the opportunity of making some money in the property market before it peaked… The t-shirt slogans can be interpreted in two different ways – referring either to the person or the actual t-shirt itself!
   • “I am for sale”
   • “I am for rent!”
   • “I am available for a short term”
   • “I am available for the long term”
   • “Rent me – I am cheap!
   •  “Do you want me? Just ask… !”
   • “You like what you see?”
   • “Wanna borrow my t-shirt?”
2. Game consoles for t-shirts
   I had my hair done last weekend for a wedding – with every hairdresser, interesting stories are shared. My hairdresser mentioned there is this new Mercedes car that has no wheels and brakes. The whole interface and vehicle controls are based on gaming console buttons – buttons that you find on your Wii, Playstation or Xbox… This new car fits in well with the generation Z…. With this, it prompted me to design t-shirts based on those gaming console buttons. Eg. The arrows, play, stop, pause etc… buttons… I think it will be cute for kids and teenagers, don’t you think?
3. Parking stickers and tags 
   My frustration and anger over 7 years ago within the 5 years that I worked for one particular company, I had accumulated  a number of parking fines, one incident which brought me over the threshold was a day when I arrived to move my car (5minutes late), when an inspector claimed he cannot let me go because he has written down my rego number and cannot dispose that ticket… So from my frustration… I thought about creating some tags and stickers to be placed on my window screen (in view for the inspectors next time). Surely I am not the only one who feels this way? Anyone, do u feel me? This doesn’t guarantee that you won’t get fine, but it will surely make you feel heaps better about it! LOL
   • “Thanks for the ticket! Can you give me another one?” (this is when they have just given you a ticket)
   • “Please book me!” (teaser to the inspectors)
   • “No way can you book me now!” (when you know you will be parking under the time limit)
   • “Can’t have my number, take my car number instead!” (another teaser)
4. Car permit stickers and tags
   About 10 years ago, I had a thought of customized number plates – in different colours (cause you can’t change numbers and letters). The legalities and the authorization made it impossible…. Five years later, the RTA  introduced coloured number plates…. Great!..There goes that idea… I am now thinking, what other things I can do to capture this huge potential market (there’s millions and millions of vehicles on this planet)…. Why not create inspiring and funny tag permits? Taken from the theme of “elderly, disabled people, parents with children” symbols, why not have the following:
   • Mother’s Club (women silhouette with hair sticking up)
   • Workaholic (silhouette sleeping next to computer screen)
   • Lazy husband (a man’s figure on couch)
   • Shopaholic (shopping bags, high heels, clothes  etc… think on a symbol/icon to associate with this)
   • Tv addict (tv box)
   • Sports fanatic (need to think of a symbol for this? Any suggestions?)

I got plenty of stuff to work on…. The question is, how much can I do this weekend? (Got a all day Christmas flower workshop on Sunday… mmm)

Wish me luck…….
( I shall re-listen to my Anthony Robbins CDs)

Kristi: I got my first sale!!!

How exciting.

I haven’t finishing the look and feel of my site yet, so I was reluctant to do too much promoting. However, I did the minimum I thought was necessary to make it live. Think is important I think, as otherwise you may never think it’s ready! You can always add to it later. I try to remember – a website is never finished

So really, my only promotion has been word of mouth and a few Google Adwords I set up last week. You can see how people have found my site, by the stats provided in the DecoNetwork dashboard.

I can see the websites that have referred my site and the search terms people use to find my site.

Now I need to get serious so I can get some more sales!

Anh: Getting traffic to our website

Greetings,

Sorry folks, it’s been awhile since my last entry… Been so busy and preoccupied with a lot of things…

Still working on the branding and the store look and feel – I will endeavour to get this done this weekend (it’s a promise! So tune in next week for the results)… Going for a vibrant, strong, colourful, fun type of theme

In the meantime, with Christmas fast approaching (more people are shopping online) we need to act fast and start setting some ground work for encouraging traffic to our store.

I will be focussing on the following things:

1. Add the URL / domain to search engines and online directories.
   • To Google
   • Microsoft / MSN / Bing / Live
   • Yahoo
   • DMOZ
   • Other search engines
2. Set up a fan club /group or account for social media sites like:
   • my facebook account
   • my twitter account
   • Blog site
   • Ning site (if time is kind)
3. Create and add XML sitemap to the main search engines
4. Come up with 20-40 good keywords for our site and add them all in the “Site Config > Site settings – Keywords and Metadata” section of our store. Will use the following tools to help with choosing the right keywords:
   • Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool
   • Google Search-based keyword tool
   • Keyword Discovery
   • Word Tracker
5. Set up Pay-Per-Click (PPC) account with the 3 main Search engines.
   • Google AdWords
   • MSN adCenter
   • Yahoo! Search Marketing

The good thing about using DecoNetwork is we can add in our Google Conversion Tracking Id (in Site Settings) to track our purchase conversions for our Google Adwords campaigns.

As a bargain hunter myself, I’ve remembered seeing so many of those $75 Google adwords voucher floating around… If you haven’t signed up for any of those PPC account, maybe consider registering for one. Do keep an eye out for those special vouchers and promos that are constantly circulating all the time. With all promos - terms and conditions do apply to all of them.

Below is a complied list to start of with:

1. Google: USA – Free $100 USD Google adwords advertising
   http://www.google.com/ads/analytics/100.html – expires on the 30 November 2009 (hurry only few days left)
2. Google : Australia – $75 AUD free advertising
   https://services.google.com/fb/forms/displayau09/ (expiry date not specified)
3. Yahoo / Ninemsn: Australia – Get $50 free advertising http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/en_AU/arp/internetmarketing.php?o=AU0033 (using promo code AU0033)
4. Yahoo : USA $75 USD
   http://apps.facebook.com/visabusiness/adcredit/yahoo
5. Facebook: USA $100 (need confirmation / readers’ help)
   If you have a Facebook account, consider joining the visa business network – http://apps.facebook.com/visabusiness/sign_up. There is a $100 advertising credit for Facebook and a $75 Yahoo voucher. I’m waiting for the email with that offer code for $100 credit for Facebook… Did it work for anyone else? Or is there another Facebook promo floating around?… Will search for some facebook advertising vouchers.

I’m sure there are plenty of promos out there, please do share if you know of any other… in particular for Microsoft/MSN/Bing – couldn’t find any recent ones (may need to search abit more).

If the links are not valid by the time you are reading this – worth investing an hour to do some searching for current promos for all of the search engines and social sites.

Till next week…
Enjoy!