So Many Things About Social Media I Didn’t Know Before This Week

This week I made some changes for my website so I could make it a more user friendly and informative experience. The biggest improvement I made was creating a Facebook and Instagram page for TopKnotch Knobs! I am really excited about this update! I think because I created the pages, it just made my business a whole lot more permanent. I am more committed to this business since I made pages for them and I want them to be high quality and functioning for the public.

topknotchknobs.com

Things I learned in the process

• Instagram has Analytics! So cool. I love that its simple and to the point and relatively inexpensive
• I really like posting from Instagram and connecting those posts to other pages. Visual is very important when trying to gain likes and impressions. More people respond to pictures and emojis in posts rather than text only posts.
• I included meta tags in my website for Google and that was a learning experience! I still don’t completely get how they work but I know they are important and will be looking to add more to my site code.
• Found out how to repost other peoples content and give them credit. I did it through a great app. Allows me to add content to my Instagram without coming up with all of it on my own and creates a community feel to the page
• Also found a post scheduling app, have yet to try it though…
• Trying to add content to all my pages- Facebook, Instagram, Website blog… then I will promote them through social media boosting.

Next improvement to check on- gotta make sure my POS is working right and that I can accept payments correctly! Should have taken care of that earlier but now ti more of a priority for me and I feel more knowledgeable about online business.

That’s what I learned this week! It was a lot of learning on my own and I think that was really effective. now that I have a good idea of what I am supposed t be doing I can research it and try things out and improve.  I love that I don’t have to take a formal class to make my pages greater, even though a BYUI class is where I got my start. Its awesome so far! Real world experience right on my laptop!

Thanks for reading- Please, if you have any suggestions for my blog or my website SHARE IN THE COMMENTS! I would love any constructive positive advice!

Making Your Business Social Media Friendly

SOCIAL MEDIA IS EVERYTHING. How else do you expect to be found and to grow? I think it is absolutely vital to have social media connections from your products site to your social media. If people find your site and want to see more they will got o your social media. If someone finds you on social media they may go to your site if they are really interested in what you have to offer. Websites are found through social media and through your network of friends. I rarely come across a random AWESOME site or product on my own, its usually through those I know and follow personally and online. To get your site’s social media off the ground, first you have to find out who is looking for your product or service. Who is in the market to buy? Now where do they go online? Is it Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, blogs, Pinterest, etc. Now what are they looking for and what do they like or not like, what are the demographics? This is important info to find if you want to be able to target your dream customer. You have to know them first!

Some important tools for finding out these things

• Google Trends- who is searching what at what time of year/week/day/hour and where are they at?
• Google Analytics form your website-this has tons of information for you to get to know your users.
• Search out the competition- what are they doing right and wrong? How can YOU do better? Then go make it happen

Other tips for creating Social Media content: If you want to get a greater following you have to be posting at least once every 2 days, once a day ideally. It also takes about a year to create a substantial amount of content for your site and to get going. You have to be dedicated to putting that work in. Always use action words in descriptions and ads, it invites potential customers to take action and to come and see what you are talking about. -Buy, Purchase, Subscribe, Share, Shop Now… etc.

 

These are all things to consider when starting out in social media marketing. Good luck to you and I!

Adwords Launched and Website Running

As you may have seen from my last post, my site is finally up and running! Still improving it and working on some parts but it is FUNCTIONAL! —–>   TOPKNOTCHKNOBS.COM   Its really exciting, I feel accomplished! The most exciting part about this week was seeing my Analytics actually be useful since there was some traffic to my site. it was also cool to see the stats on my Adwords campaign jump because I finally activated it and now my site shows up on Google! Launching Adwords was fairly easy once I got all my keywords in that I wanted and I learned how to write ads. Honestly I felt that I had good ads to start off with and I will be making more to practice and improve that skill. I think I learned the most this week with building my site and taking care of little details there. I had to do a ton of work on the site to get it going so that I could run my ads. I didn’t want to have a crappy site advertised on Google and have people be not impressed. They probably still aren’t haha because its an amateur site but it needed to be working. So i learned ab lot about working on a Wix site and visited many help pages! I learned how to implement Square and PayPal into my shopping carts, I learned how to implement an app that blocks people from right clicking on your images and saving them without your permission (I don’t have a ton of high quality work or anything but my photos of my products are mine and I don’t want others taking them). I learned so many things this week, from class and much more on my own. Lots going on and lots of new developments!

Online Store Now Live!

Hey guys, I have been working on my online store now for a while now and its finally up and working! Please feel free to check it out! This is what I have been working on with all my posts about Google AdWords and Analytics and similar things. Its been so cool to learn so much! I feel like I really have some useful tools under my belt now and its extremely exciting! I hope you will check it out. I love feedback, so don’t be shy to comment here or send me an email on my website about improvements or comments. Thanks for staying!

topknotchknobs.com

 

Google Analytics

Learning about Analytics this week was really great! I saw how powerful this tool can be. Not just for my site but also as a businessperson in general, if you know Analytics you can get certified and become a great asset wherever you go. I haven’t had too much traffic to my site so it was hard to comprehend exactly how valuable the program is but I know it’s very detailed, even more so than WordPress statistics which I monitor pretty often for my site here. Analytics was really easy to set up for Wix, my host site. I didn’t have to copy and paste and possibly mess up the code, I just typed in the short digit code from Analytics and it was ready to go. I also linked my Adwords account too, we will see how that goes when I get my ads going. All together it was a really great learning experience and I’m excited to learn more about it. 

Google Advertising

Learned a lot about using Google Adwords and creating advertisements to show on Google. Its such a. Simple thing to create but it is challenging to fit your whole company or product into 3 or 4 lines and make an impact on potential buyers! Every word has to be precise and clean and the phrases have to flow. Your condensed message really has to grab attention but also reflect what you are selling well enough for people to stay interested. Starting out, I found it the most easy to grab attention with a sale headline of 15% off. I couldn’t think of much else and I feel like people wouldn’t be interested in my new site unless I had something to offer and differentiate from already established sites and companies. As I publish more ads I will see what works and what doesn’t. It was cool to experiment with this important part of running an online business. 

Legalities and License Madness

This week was a lot more challenging for me. I can make changes on websites and I can be creative, but figuring out legal systems, taxes, and licenses was difficult. I learned about different types of business on a surface level and I learned that there is an endless amount of licenses and permits to apply for and tax numbers to get and apply. Its a mess! How do business owners figure it all out and assure that they have all the proper paperwork to run their business without incurring a fine? It seems like a ton of work! Thankfully online business is a bit easier to deal with, less to account for and require permits for and such.

The main material I learned this week as what an LLC and Sole Proprietorship is, and some basic ways to look up the requirements for a beginning business. LLC’s and Sole Proprietorship are how a business is structured. A SP is an individual who is self employed and the owner of a small business and one who takes on all the risk and responsibility of the business on their self. It is a simple way to run a business. You are the boss, you call the shots, you do all the work, you are in contact with customers, you pay taxes… and you also stand in for the business when something goes wrong. You ARE your business and if something goes wrong, if there are debts to pay or someone sues you, there is no buffer because you are the business entity. Bu there is very little paperwork to fill out and its very simple to get started and is a prime choice for those who have a low risk product and are operating on a small scale. Not much can go wrong there and its not too overwhelming. An LLC is a business structure that is a mix of a partnership and a corporation. It is a more flexible business model and is for a bigger operation and most likely more than one owner. I have chosen to go with a SP for my small online business because I don’t really need a partnership and I am very small beginning entity. I have a low risk product of drawer handles and cabinet  knobs. I think this will be the best way to go!

I have more research to do on obtaining the proper requirements for this business but there aren’t too many. Ready to go!

PayPal and Design

How to add a professional and legitimate aspect to your site: include a “Buy Now” or “add to shopping art” button from PayPal! I loved learning about this feature because it it such an easy way to turn a cookie cutter website into a trusted and working online business site. PayPal is a trusted source for transactions and adding one of their buttons to your site can really connect interested buyers to your product and content. The link I used to create a button for my site was fairly simple, it did not require any coding changes. I literally just clicked on what I wanted for my button and it appeared! I did have to copy and paste the code to get it to work which is not hard for any level. I do not recommend using the HTML link if you are using a Wix website. Wix has its own app for buttons that you can use. I had a hard time getting the button to appear when I added it to the site and then previewed it. I learned that if I pinned the button to the site, previews and then went back and unpinned it it would stay. When you pin an app it stays in that position when you scroll, so that would not be beneficial for a “buy now” button but possibly for a “subscribe” button. So I unpinned it after I saw that it didn’t move when I scrolled. The app finally popped up where I wanted it to in the preview. Before, it was there in the site editor but would not show when previewed. I don’t know if there is a better way to make it appear, that’s just what I found that worked. 
One trend I observed while searching through other websites of my potential competitors is that none of them had very trendy or modern websites. They were alright looking, but none that were too up to date. When they are a little old like that, it makes me hesitant to buy from them because it makes them appear as though they don’t know how online commerce works and I don’t know if I’ll get my product. So I made the decision to try to make my site as up to date and modern as I can for my product. That’s going to require some personal photography and outside work to get genuine change onto my site but I think it will really set me apart from other sites and companies if I do it right. I want the site to feature how well your home will look with custom and unique knobs on cabinetry and pulls on drawers. Its really a great accent to a home and that needs to be shown for people to see the benefit. 
That’s a summery of the week in online business 101!

Site Builders and Hosting

This week I explored the wonderful complications of choosing a site builder for my online business and a host for the site. There were so many options and things to consider! I felt a little lost at first. I learned a lot though. I knew that I needed a place to build my site. I did not know where to find that though. I also thought that hosting was built in or like the same thing. BUT THEY ARE NOT. They can be separate and they are different. I looked at iPage, HostGator, Weebly, and Word press for hosting and I am still looking for a good solution. I was impressed by WordPress the most for price and service. My problem is that I only need a website for 3 months and not many places want to host that, or the price starts getting steep. For site building, I liked Weebly and WordPress. Weebly is for anyone really. I think WordPress is for people whoa re already experienced in WordPress, which I am, so it takes some time to get used to and I don’t recommend it to everyone. Many hosting sites offered Adwords and search engine SEO credit, which was a huge perk to signing with some servers. Overall, I am going to do some more research to pick a  final site but I know I want to stick with WordPress if I can. Those are my thoughts from this week!

Exploring Wholesale, Affiliate, and Drop Shipping Online

Where do you get started in selling online? It is so difficult to see the available options out there that can enable you to open retail space online. This week I learned about  finding different avenues in acquiring product. One option was to contact a wholesaler and find a huge amount of product at a low price, ordering the specified unit and then shipping it to your work space to distribute later. There were a few websites to choose from Like Alibaba.com, smallvolume.com to name a couple. These were international distributors and had many options for products and vendors. The next option was to team up with another online distributor as a drop shipping online business. This one seemed like a tricky option to get into in my opinion. You have to contact someone already in business and set up a deal to order form them when a customer orders from you initially. You turn the sale around to the drop ship company and agree on an assigned percent or commission. It seemed like a lot of unofficial behind the scenes work to make a sale that wasn’t completely official. But it would work well once you got a system running and the agreements in writing. The last option is my favorite one (in my head) and its being an affiliate. The business that has the m,sot information for being an affiliate is Amazon, surprisingly. When i found out I was so excited! You can be an associate for Amazon by signing up, using their codes and promoting their items online. Whenever someone buys a product within 30 days of clicking on your promo info, you get a percentage of it from Amazon. Pretty easy right?! So awesome! I already buy things from Amazon, if I just create a website to talk about these products and promote them and make money off of it I have nothing to lose! So cool! So yeah those were my takeaways this week, lots of options for carrying or promoting product. Options to think about…