This week we put into practice all the google analytics we have been working on. It’s taken some time to get used to it but overall, we have had a lot of fun. This week we had to coordinate with a group before taking a quiz. We all got the questions before hand and then we could talk over the results we found and came up with. I should have contributed more but that’s ok. We looked at how to navigate google analytics with a dummy account google provides for you. It was a lot of fun because it looked real. They had huge numbers for revenue and conversions, so I felt like I was working for a real big company instead of looking at all the goose-eggs on my website.

                A lot of the blogs for this class are going to start disappearing soon. We did more analytics and research into my page and found out that all these blog posts are skewing my search analytics. My tags have a lot of seo and not enough botany. So, get your fill now before they are all gone.

I hope to add a few things to the social media sites here soon. I spent some time looking at twitter pages like Death Star PR and Bird’s rights activists. All these pages put a smile on my face. They were accounts that took on the persona of a thing that doesn’t really exist, but they had huge followings. I want to my accounts to look like that. So, I’m going to post pictures of things relating to either this week’s podcast or just things that relate to Project Botany in general. I would like to keep up the show on social media along with the podcast. This would make things more well rounded and would keep up my branding also.

Ill be honest, it looks like a lot of fun too. Who doesn’t like world building and having a good time with the imagination of someone else? Especially if it’s about something you love too.

This week we spend a lot of time learning about SEO optimization. And let me tell you, it’s pretty intense. We had a few articles given to us that I’m going to have to go back to and read but that’s for another time. What I learned overall is that search engines work autonomously. Bots will ‘crawl’ the internet and index sites and decide there relevancy and if they will show up in searches. This will work in tandem with any ads you are running. If you are able to build your site in a way that is easy for a bot to read, including some of the meta data or site code, and easy or entertaining for a human to use then you will have stumbled on something great.

One thing that stood out to me was linking. Basically if your site is linked by a reliable source your “score” goes up. This works in reverse to. If you link reliable sources in your website the bots will see that and say “hey this guy knows his stuff and he goes to the right people to get his info” and that will boost your score. What amazed me is that there are so many bots crawling the web if they have find all this stuff. your site could be visited dozens of times and each time if you make changes they will know and put you in searches that fit what you are trying to say. If you ignore these SEO optimizations the Bots don’t know what to do with you and that makes it harder for you to get the traffic you need.

A lot of the assignments have been leading up to this point. We have learned about all sorts of online business styles and how they work and how to make them successful. We then learned all the ins and outs of google ad words. We even got tracking code put in the site so we can see when people visit. (this is the only information being collected). We then got tit all hooked up into google analytics so we can chart that over time. And with tall the prepared we created ads and ad campaigns and on Friday we published those ads! I have had some moderate success over time, but we will see if we can make it better. I have 147 impressions and 2 clicks so far. This is very bad in the grand scheme of things, but I have a dismal budget. Me and my wife decided that we should keep it low as we are working on saving money right now. But if the budget were better the site says I could have about 100+ clicks. That may have to come later. I’m planning or releasing a new episode this coming week so that will be a ton of fun.

We learned about optimization to. We started by having the 10 keywords we made and then adding or removing some. I added a few new words and optimized my adaptive ad, an ad that changes based on the keyword that activated it. I made sure to have a lot of keywords in the ad and in the headings. Earlier today I looked at google analytics and it showed me some keywords that activated after a broad activation and I added those to. Hopefully we will get more clicks out of that. For the next few weeks, I’ll be tweaking the page and the keywords in order to make it more attractive and work better in ads.   

This week I learned that there is more to key words that how often they are searched or what the bidding price is on them. I found out that there are a few things that tie into them. Relevance and quality score. Relevance is a stat measured by google that allows them to direct searchers to good pages that match what is going on. You get better in this stat by having a page that keeps people around showing that you actually are selling what you advertised and that you have good content. This makes google more likely to show your ad to people. Quality score is how well you are using your keywords in your ads. (if I’m remembering right) if you are using keywords that are good and you are using them responsibly in your ads you become more favored in Google’s eyes. You get this by having good copy in your ads. Things that are true and showing what you tell.

I’m sure both of these are in place to keep people or companies from buying out massive amounts of keywords and showing up in all the wrong searches. People would get no relevant info. These scores keep your searches relevant and the sites you come to good.

This week was actually kind of interesting. We shared the ads we had been working on with the rest of the class. It was a little nerve wracking but it gave me a chance to put my work out there and get some good advice. I was also able to help a person with a question they had about how to set up, edit there post. This is the basic understanding class so there are a lot of questions like this and I am part of that group of people. It took me a few days to figure out how to put Tags on my page so I could get google analytics to work.

We also learned a lot about the wording of our ads and what that means for SEO and how to make it interesting to read and make people want to click on it. One example was using power phrases and present tense to make things urgent and that you should do it now. I hope to spend some more time digging into SEO specifically but we will see where the class goes.

We started working on setting up a google ads campaign. There was a video provided that was very helpful. In fact, it was made by Google and explained what ad words do and how to group them into ad groups. Basically, you can have several ads that look differently and target different sub-target-audiences and help make your campaigns denser and more profitable. Making these groups is hard and takes some time but I can see the benefits. I am working on how I could make different groups and how to make them more useful to me.

We also had to create a list of keywords. That was difficult because I felt my podcast was a very niece topic and hard to keyword. But with a little bit of effort and the use of some tools on the Google Ads site, I was able to see all sorts of new keywords that would help me out a ton.

You must think outside the box and really set some time and brain matter to this to make it work out. I can see the benefits and I am excited to figure this our for my podcast and the apply this to a potential career.

Sorry about last week. I missed the blog because I was out of town on family business. But I’m back this week.

Speaking of this week we learned about the legality of starting a business. because my model is s cross between a podcast and an affiliate business I have chosen to align with WordPress and anchor as my affiliates. Right now I’m in the approval process. Back to legal stuff, because I am going to become a legal business I’m going to have to look at getting business licence. Where I live that shouldn’t be a big issue but it may cost some money. Hopefully the ad money will pay that off.

We learned about taxes and how to get those squared away. You have to pay income tax at a state and federal level here in the US. I have to do some more reading on how to pay that but it shouldn’t be too hard.

My dad started a small LLC for his job and I want to talk to him about my options and what might be best for my business.

This week was where I decided how I was going to monetize the website. In tandem with advertisement in the podcast I am hoping to use an affiliate model. This means I will team up with a larger business like amazon or google. Most likely google and put advertisements on the website. The advertisements will be targeted to the general population of the website. Things like audible or botany related advertisements. The other thing in the title is drop shipping. This is a model that involves you being the middleman between a large wholesaler and a single person. Basically, you advertise that you are selling an item and when it is bought you just have to pay shipping and then it gets sent to the customer. That didn’t really fit what I wanted/ hoped the website would become. The affiliate model also looked like a lot less hassle.

No new podcasts yet but I hope to get a new episode up by the end of next week. I have a big field trip with one of my classes this week and that kind of put a damper on making an episode for this week. So keep an eye out for that one. Until then keep learning, you never know what will happen.

I know not many of you listeners may be wondering what happened and why the episodes stopped for a while. I had some real life issues pop up. Now those things are sorted and I hope to resume podcasting as usual. In tandem with that I have started taking a web creating class at my college and I hope to use this site and my podcast as my project for this class. As part of that I will be posting blogs about my efforts and what I am learning in this class.

This week was all about business selection and how to go about doing that. First we looked at google ad words this was a lot of fun and very insightful. There are a few statistics that come with keywords there is competition which is ranked High to low, cost which is the bid you would need to have you ad show up when that keyword is looked up. next is traffic. This is how many people on average are looking up this word or how often it looked up or googled. As part of the class I hope to advertise using google ad words and now that I have the cursory look at what it takes I feel pretty confident that I could make it work. On a beginner level.

We have looked at a case study of a team of students who wanted to make a website so we have looked at all the diferent kinds of websites there are at least the ones that are focused on making money. there are merchendising sites that sell a product. Advertising based sites that hope to bring people to the site and service based sites that have people sign up for a monthly subscription. There were a few sub-sets of each type too. I hope to use the advertising model for Project Botany. This however, does mean there will be ads in the episodes from now on. My podcast hosting site is Anchor and they make advertising easy so we will see how that goes.

I hope at least a few people stuck around during the drought because Project Botany is open again! Now get out there and explore the botanical world around you. You never know what you’ll find.

-Dave B.