Wrapping it All Up

This week my ads were no longer running, so my traffic was much slower.  I was pleased with my WooRank improvement after implementing the changes they recommended.  One problem I discovered was that many of the features in the WIX model are not compatible with the Google ranking model, so even though you make the changes, they will not be recognized.  This affected the mobile speed and mobile viewport.  I was also frustrated when trying to link my Facebook and Instagram pages.  Even though I had both attached and working, Woo for some reason didn’t recognize that I had them, and hence no credit.   I was still able to make changes to increase my score from 63 to 69, almost a 10% improvement.  I would be curious to see my ranking at the end of this week with the AdWords no longer running and driving traffic to my site.  My ad ended my visits have dropped over 50%, and I suspect this number will continue to drop unless I can build a strong social media campaign to drive interest.  This will be my goal over the next few months, as I don’t see the value ofspending money with AdWords when my site isn’t making money.  My primary goal is not revenue, but information sharing, so I don’t see this as a problem.  If nothing else, it is giving me a reason to post stories about my ancestors, which I have wanted to do for years, but couldn’t find the time.  Now I have a forum for posting, and a motivation to get it done, so for that I am thankful.  I have enjoyed this journey of discovery, despite the bumps along the way, and I will remember this class for years to come.

Til next week on the Ramble, stay safe and do something nice for someone.

Rosebush Genealogy

This is the logo for my new website.  There are affiliate links there to purchase helpful books from amazon.com (an affiliate link means that you pay the same price, even sale prices, and Amazon sends me a small commission)
There are also links on the Family History Charts page where you can find links to Family Chartmasters, a genealogy printing company that can use your Gedcom, or your data from FamilySearch to print beautiful custom charts that you will be proud to in your home.
There is also my blog page where I am currently adding bios of my parents and grandparents.  We look forward to your visit, and please feel free to leave your comments.
                Visit my blog

Looking for Improvements

This week my ads ran for the second week.  I made some changes at the end of last week, so I was curious to see if there were any changes.  I was I was happy to see that even though I had NO conversions on AdWords, my affiliate sites were getting some traffic.  I had 50 clicks on my Amazon Affiliate links, but so far no sales.  I was able to add my Family Chartmasters affiliate link to the site and I was hopeful that I would see results because that was my best ad the previous week.  Well, the ad underperformed (down about 50% in clicks and impressions) but I still had a good response on my affiliate link.  The link was up and running just 6 days and received 22 clicks on their site, compared to 58 clicks on my Amazon link in 16 days.  That tells me that I am getting about 3.6 people per day going to each of my affiliate links.  I will need to find ways to increase that if I hope to make any money.  My next task is to visit each task that needs improvement and make adjustments to my page and my ads to improve.  I am amazed at all the tools and things that are available for website optimization.  One thing I found interesting were the people who posted YouTube videos with improvement tips, that were also money making sites, inviting you to subscribe.  I realize that the YouTuber makes a few dollars per 1,000 views, but to make some money you would need to have several hundred thousand views to make any money.  This whole online marketing arena is incredible.  I remember a couple of videos I watched early in the semester where very young men were pitching how they went from living in their parent’s basement to driving a high-end sports car and living in beachfront condos from their internet business.  These reminded me of the snake oil salesman from the westerns I used to watch.  I know that there is money to be made in e-commerce, but as we have learned, there is a lot of work involved in preparing your site, and lots of time to manage and make tweaks.  Plus you still need something to sell.  I have appreciated all of the eye-opening material we have seen, both assigned, and not (after watching one video, there is always another video popping up)  Well till next week when the Ramble reports on our improvements…

Y’all stay safe on the trail (or the information superhighway.) 

Optimization

This week we were looking at ways to improving the optimization for our website, and the landing page specifically, as well as improving our visibility on search engines.  There was a lot of good material to cover, and strategies to employ.  After reading I modified my ads to be more representative of my keywords, and changed the landing page for each had to the page on my site that was most relevant to the ad.  Prior I had them all going to the home page which after reading didn’t make sense.  I also learned about alt text for pictures as a way to improve SEO.  On one of my landing pages, the pictures are links to an affiliate site, but I was able to add alt text featuring a relevant keyword from my ad.  This will hopefully improve traffic to my site.  I was also able to turn my second ad back on.  I had paused it because it was focused on an affiliate link that just became active.  This should improve traffic on my site and may even lead to some conversions as people visit my affiliate partner.  It wouldn’t break my heart to actually see a sale of 2 come out of this experience, though that is not the main point of doing this.

Well, we will see you next week here on the Ramble when we get to discuss social media and social networking, and hopefully, we will also be able to report increased traffic. All y’all stay safe on the electronic highways this week.  See ya soon

We Are Up and Running

This is an exciting week.  We turned on our AdWords account and started getting results for our sites.  How exciting it is to see that people are actually finding our site with a google search, and some are even going to see what we have to offer.

Of course, now the real work begins.  We need to review the performance of our keywords and see which ones are generating hits on our site, and how much each hit is costing.  We can analyze our ads to see if we think they are directing people to our site.  This is fun and exciting, but also a little overwhelming.  As an Affiliate marketer there isn’t a real easy way to track conversions, or cost of conversions.  Fortunately, I can see some of this at the Amazon Affiliate site and make some assumptions.  The big key is to see which keywords are getting people to click to my site and see how long they are staying.  The longer they ae there, and the more pages they look at, the better chance I have of them seeing a product they are interested in and making a purchase.  I am very glad that we received an AdWords credit for doing this because my site isn’t primarily about generating income, but for sharing advice and my joy of family history.  I am hopeful that some of the links will interest people, and that they make a purchase, but that would be icing on the cake.  I am just excited to see that people are looking at the site and hopefully learning something.  I am anxious to move forward and see what other tools are out there to help improve my ads and keyword choices, and maybe even make a few dollars.  Have a great week, and if you have a chance drop on by and check out my site.  I will happily share the URL with anyone who is interested, and I look forward to seeing you all next week here on the ramble….

Analytics

  What an exciting week this was.  We explored the relevance of our ads and keywords, and we installed google analytics on our Websites and our Google AdWords account.  This is a tool that will help us improve our choices of keywords and ad content, and thus improve our traffic on our websites. 

This week also brought some challenges.  In the process of writing the second ad and checking the quality scores, I added my payment information to the site.  This caused my ad to start running for a day.  The video “Choosing the Right Campaign Type” gave great instructions for choosing a start date and an end date for the campaign.  Unfortunately, this video was a week too late, as we wrote our first ad last week.  This video needs to be a part of the previous week’s assignment since you can’t edit a start date.  I was able to pause my campaign, so no real harm was done.  Just another case of putting the cart before the horse. 

I am very excited to start running my campaign next week and studying the results from the analytics to find ways to tweak things to improve my traffic flow.  We will finally be up and running in the ‘real world’ and have information we can track and analyze. 

Next week here on the ramble we will be reporting our results for the first few days of our online experience.  Until then, stay safe on the trail…..  

Ads and Ad Groups

Further adventures in AdWords this week.  We wrote an ad for our campaign.  This entailed quite a bit of reading about creating an ad, and the rules and policies involved.   This was a real challenge because of the strict word count.  I really needed to do some serious editing to keep within the limits.  It was also hard to think in terms of an ‘ad’ when I am not selling a product.  As an affiliate, I will have links to related materials to my blog, but I am basically selling myself.  This will get easier when I have more content in my blog, but at first, there isn’t much to advertise.  I hope in the near future to pick up another affiliate connection with a company that prints fun materials using your family tree.  Once I am accepted, then I will focus some attention on their wonderful products.   It will be fun going forward to see how successful my choices will be. 

There are times when this class is very frustrating.  It seems that we are asked to do things before we really understand how to do them, but then in subsequent weeks we learn more and see how it all fits.  We also have a chance to refine our work before we go live.  I have to say, overall I am enjoying this journey, even though I often have no idea where I am going.  It is a nice challenge, and I am anxious to see it through to the conclusion.

So until next weeks adventures, I bid you Adieu.  See ya soon on the Ramble.