Well my class is coming to an end and I am a little sad. I learned so much from my class. Starting out it was so scary and I was so worried about how the heck I was going to make a good website. But over the whole course my fear turned into excitement as I learned about all the intricate things that go into having and maintaining a website. There were times I was surprised I did certain things right because there were a few confusing things in there, but I did it and I am proud of myself. I hope you all are proud of yourself too as you took this journey with me. Now before I go, I want to talk about a couple things that I learned this week. 

This week was my class learned about how to get a return on investment (ROI), which is revenue, and how to best optimize our ads. Learning about this was good, setting it up was a struggle for me so I did not like this week as much. For getting a return on investment we had to set up conversion tracking that we used from Google Ads. I tired so hard to follow the instructions and I had a hard time connecting it to my website. I was at a loss on how to do set up conversion tracking. The good news is that I wasn't the only student how struggled, thank goodness, and I finally got it up and running after a couple days. So unfortunately when I put my data in for results the first two days of running my add is not going to have a conversion on in, but I think that will be ok. I don't have real advice on the best way to set up your conversion tracking because it depends on your website builder if it is easy or not to connect it to your website. A lot of my classmates said that using Wix was pretty easy to use at set up and it made me wish I used Wix instead. So I recommend going to YouTube and see how others set up their conversion tracking to the specific website builder you are using.

This week the class mainly focused on how to keep our websites relevant and at the top of customer searches. We have learned about two tools we can use to do this. The tools we used were Quality Score by Google and Google Analytics. 

This week in class I learned about how I can make my website get noticed. We started off with learning about Google Ads. Honestly, it was huge learning curve. It took me awhile to understand how it worked, but thank goodness my teacher provided videos and notes. I think the best thing to start off with understanding keywords. It is super important to know that keywords are words that customers use in internet searches and results pop up from that keyword. For example, I am selling dog products and one of them is shampoo so the keyword I would make sure to use is "pet shampoo". That way anyone who searches "pet shampoo" my website will then pop up. I learned that there are different types of keyword matching categories, meaning they keyword you use will match to your website. There is phrase matching, broad matching and exact matching. Phrase matching are keywords that shows anything that can include the meaning of the keyword. For example, if I were selling tennis shoes my website would pop up if someone searches "red tennis shoes" Broad matching will give results for anything related to what you are searching (i.e. searching shoes then the website for tennis shoes will appear). Exact matching are searches that are specific like men shoes, all websites with men shows will show up. There are also negative keywords which are keywords that you use so your business doesn't show up (i.e. selling tennis shoes you don't want your website to pop-up when someone searches dress shoes).

Welcome back to another great week. This week my class focused on legal structures, licenses, and taxes. For legal structure the class focused on what type of business you should be. For example, do you want to be a sole proprietor, partnership, Limited Liability Company (LLC), or a corporation. For me it depended on how big your business is. For me I am starting off as a small business so I am going to be a sole proprietorship and then as I get bigger I might move to being an LLC.

Now that I figured the difference between being an affiliate and drop-shipping and looking at other ways to market I can now start to choose a website builder and a webhost. In my class we looked at different types of web builders, and oh boy there is a lot. Again, I looked at the criteria that I wanted and ranked which web builder I wanted. For me, I wanted a website builder that would be easy to use, has all the marketing tools I needed, and how much it would cost to build the website. During my search I found a web-site builder called Ecwid which had a low cost, the marketing tools I wanted, and it was very easy to use with guides and tutorials. In my matrix system I made for my class Ecwid ranked first. However, WordPress was a very good web builder too. They had a decent low cost, it is easy to learn once I watch tutorials on how to use it, but it kind of lacks in the marketing department. The thing that makes it interesting is that a lot of host sites support WordPress, which brings me into searching for a host.

Hello everyone. My name is Kirstin Stevens and I want to share with you all the process of choosing a web business. I will be updating this blog each week, so be sure to tune in.