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: 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…

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!