Starting to get the hang of things
This week has been pretty technical since I am trying to make changes to the site suggested by woorank.com. However, I am starting to get the hang of reading the reports and seeing how customers interact with my site. I am kind of sad that this semester is going to end and thus my business will not necessarily end but my constant attention and catering to it will slow down a lot. To date I have spent somewhere between $100 and $125 and have netted $37 from my affiliate site. All in all, not too bad for a craft website in only six weeks of advertising. I still have credit on facebook and bing to keep my campaigns there running through the rest of this month so I should still get some traffic. Hopefully, I can even get some last minute Christmas sales!
Busy Week
So I had my first sale this week. (See previous post.) And I implemented some new social networking tools on the site. There are now buttons so that people can share various articles and pages with their friends. I also shared some pictures on Pintrest and a couple of articles on Facebook. I then used credit I got when I hosted my site to set up ads on facebook and on bing. I have already seen a jump in traffic on Google Analytics. I got a lot of information from woorank.com. Per their suggestion I am going to get some more content on my blog and possibly see if I can get my site to load a little faster.
My First Real Sale
Up ’til now my business hasn’t created any real revenue. I get $2 for each “lead” I provide for Craftsy. This means any person who clicks through my site onto Craftsy and then signs up to receive their e-mails. I have had one or two relatives do this (it’s free) in order to help me out with the business. However, there has been no real business generated through my site. Until now.
I logged into share-a-sale today in order to replace some banner ads for Cyber-week. I was elated to find that my balance had jumped from $6 to $33. It turns out that someone had not only signed up for e-mails but also purchased a class from Craftsy’s site. Although the class was only $24.99, I still received a $25 commission for it since it was a new customer. I am so excited to see actual revenue come into my business.
It is amazing to me because the clicks on my ads has gone down significantly since I retooled the ad. It went from 15-20 clicks to 3-4 clicks a day. This is costing me less but now it seems that this new ad is also more effective at getting customers who will actually buy the products offered on my site.
Need more meat to the site
I really need more substantial content. This, I am afraid, will only come with time and persistence. However, I have learned a lot this week about how to shape that content so that it gains the notice of search engines and, hopefully, customers. I would very much like to have my patterns linked to from http://www.crochetpatterncentral.com but I’m not sure how they choose their patterns and right now I only have 1 unique pattern on my site. Again, it just takes time to create these patterns and test them out. I think that adding keywords to the back end of my site, images and page titles, is a good place to start my SEO. From there, it will just be a matter of keeping the blog up to date with interesting and engaging material.
Watching the clicks roll in
It has been fun to watch people clicking onto my site. Many of them are there for only a few seconds and some of them have even clicked through to Craftsy! I have yet to make any real sales, though. I added an ad for cake decorating that I thought would be pretty popular but it has only gotten 7 clicks as opposed to my crochet ad which has gotten over 100. Even given the disparity of time the two ads have been running, cake decorating is still far behind. I will probably suspend that campaign since the cost per click on the ads is higher and I am getting less traffic from it. I can’t tell which ads are getting clicked through to my affiliate site but I am pretty sure it is the crochet one. (I have had 40 clicks to affiliate sites according to Share A Sale, the third party affiliate coordinator. This is more than all of the clicks for cakes combined so I am pretty confident that these clicks came from people wanting crochet classes.)
Frustration with Ad Words
So I am finally ready to go live with my adwords account and I find out that I can’t use the $100 coupon that came with my web hosting. It says that my account is too old. After much searching and harassing the customer service people, I find that the only way I can circumvent this is to set up another gmail account and use that to create a new adwords account. In the meantime, I got my first ad out there and had about 20 people click onto the site. I am pretty excited for it to be seen at all! I think I may also need to create additional ads for those looking for knitting and cake decorating classes. If my experience at Michaels has taught me anything it is that people ALWAYS like the cake decorating classes.
I am also excited to learn more about Google analytics and how to use them to make my ads and my site better for my customers. I only hope that I can make it to the end of the class before I go broke.
More Posts
Now that the site is essentially done it is difficult to remember to keep up with posts. I could do a bunch more cookie recipes, and I probably will, but right now the “crochet” part of the blog is a little thin. The problem, of course, is that it takes much longer to crochet something than to bake up a batch of cookies. It takes even longer to come up with something original to crochet. So, I have begun making things for Christmas from some of my favorite patterns. Then I can take pictures of them and link back to the patterns. They are free and most of them are on other blogs. I still have a credit to take a free class from Craftsy and I need to use that and review the class soon. I am excited to actually start my campaign and get traffic to my site. My secret hope is that my pattern will be added to http://www.crochetpatterncentral.com’s free pattern directory. I don’t know why I think that would be such a big deal but I think it would be really cool.
Getting Ready to meet the World
This week I set up an my first advertising campaign in Adwords. I chose my key words mostly from suggestions they offered. I tried to pick the best ones from there to put into my assignment. I really think for this site I will need to run 3 campaigns: one for crochet classes, one for knitting classes and one for cake decorating. Crochet and knitting my overlap but cake decorating will certainly be its own set of adwords. Other than that I have been working on a vest for an 18″ doll using the crochet techniques I learned in the free crochet class I took on Craftsy. These are really good classes and I hope that people will want to take them.
Ready to turn in
The site is ready to turn in now. I have uploaded the classes for crochet and knitting and even cake decorating. I separated the links into beginning, intermediate and advanced level classes. I wrote a review for one of the free crochet classes offered. As soon as I can watch some of the other classes I can write more reviews. I also have more recipes that I can upload. I’m just waiting to have pictures to go with them.
I also signed up to be an affiliate with Shutterfly. I figure that there are a lot of holidays that mean lots of pictures and lots of greeting cards of one sort and another. I will add banners for free prints, etc. to my site. I can also write one or two reviews of Shuttterfly products that I have used in the past. I have been approved to apply for other affiliate partners through share-a-sale. However, I don’t really want to clutter up the site with too many. Craftsy is labeled as a top 100 company on share-a-sale’s site and I am already affiliated with them. Their banners and ads are tasteful. And all of the classes are links to Craftsy classes.
I can continue to add to the blog portion of the site but the rest of it is up and ready to go. I am excited to see what we do next.
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