Week 11 Reflection

This week I learned a lot about social media networks and how they work with businesses. I tend to be a person who doesn’t interact with social media a lot even though I look at it a lot. I thought it was interesting how important social media is for business. I realized that big companies use it a lot, but I never thought about how it could benefit smaller companies. I liked how our readings for this week explained how doing business with social media is more than just trying to sell things to people. It is more about trying to build relationships with people. It talked about getting involved and making content that people will want to see and share. I like how this approach is more about making good stuff rather than promoting products or trying to make money. Even though the selling things through your business is the ultimate goal, you have to have that foundation there first. By making things for an audience and interacting with other people, people will see the business as more than just something trying to sell them things. It reminds me of part of a book I read that talked about being a nice citizen on the internet will help get you places.

Week 10 Reflection

This week I learned about SEO and landing pages. The main thing that I got from these lessons is that everything we do with our websites needs to be unified. If we choose a keyword to represent a certain page, we need to stick with that word everywhere, from the headline, to the URL, the description and so on. This helps keep everything on a page consistent so that users see that what they clicked on from a search is relevant to what they found.

I think the most important thing that I learned about landing pages is that there needs to be a good call to action and the landing page needs to reflect the website. In our exercise this week, the example page didn’t really do this. Things that should have been a call to action were lower on the page and it made things confusing. Users need to directed to what they are supposed to be doing on the site. They shouldn’t be overwhelmed.

The most surprising thing I learned this week was the importance of getting your site linked to for good SEO. I didn’t realize that this was what helps build credibility to the site. I think it makes sense because it is the easiest way for a search engine to judge the value of a site. It also makes sense because it is something that people can’t fake very easily, so it makes the search engine more accurate.

Lesson 9 Reflection

This week I learned how to make conversions and make a google ad go live. Conversions are a useful tool because they help us see how successful our ads are in getting people to do a certain action. I put mine on my contact page because the goal in getting people to see my site is to get them to contact me and work with me. I liked the examples of using conversions on a thank you page for when someone orders something. It helps you to see if people bought something when they use an ad, which is handy to know. I would like to try to learn about using conversions on a button. My conversions would be more helpful for when people click my contact button rather than when people just see my contact page.

I also made my google ad live this week. I am impressed by how quickly I started getting visits to my site. Getting click information will help me a lot with knowing how I can improve my ads and get more traffic in the future.

Week Eight Reflection

This week I learned about Google analytics and why they are helpful. I learned that analytics are a program that allows you to see the traffic on your site. It helps you to know how people are spending time on the site. It also allows you to track the usage of your site and how people reached the site. I like to think of it as feedback on your site. It helps you see the trends of what is happening on the site so you can make improvements. I made a comparison to a physical store that I like. When a customer walks into a physical store, you can’t really track where they go, how much time they spend there, or if they get lost. You don’t have statistics telling you things like this customer spent this much time in the show aisle and then decided they wanted to go to the shirt aisle after that. On a website we can have those type of statistics.