Category: Uncategorized

This week we learned more about constructing an effective adwords campaign, and provided each other with some valuable feedback on our ads.

Originally, I thought that I had a pretty good ad put together, but after receiving some student feedback, I discovered that there were some improvement that I might make to my ad.

My original ad read “Meet Jacky-jack, the tiny pumpkin, as he overcomes the challenges of being small”

Another student suggested that it have more of a call-to-action in it like so:

“Join and meet Jacky-jack, the tiny pumpkin, on his adventures. Being small was never so awesome!”

Both ads have their advantages, so I think I might do a combination of the two for my ad campaign.

I can’t wait to see how it goes, but first I need to add some more content to my website, and finish building the Jacky-jack character. I’m using Adobe Illustrator, but I’m just learning how to use the software, so it may be a bit before I have a completed character for Jacky-jack.

This week we learned about online advertising, specifically setting up an ad campaign, and learning about appropriate key words and phrases to promote our website.

I found these exercises extremely helpful, and eye-opening because as we went through the practice of identifying, and then narrowing down the best key words and phrases, I made a discovery; I am actually NOT in the children’s book industry, at least not until I actually sell hard copies of my books. So that changes things a bit, but I was easily able to identify that I am in the children’s bedtime stories industry. Honestly, I didn’t even know such an industry existed, but that’s because it is so specific, it is actually a sub-category in children’s books. So armed with this knowledge, now I can maximize my advertising dollars by driving the right customers to my site, and avoided false positives, or customers who are not interested in what I’m offering.

I’m SO excited to get started on the official ad campaign and start interacting with the public on my offering to see how it actually goes!

Till next week,

Rob

This was perhaps the most fun week yet!

First of all, we studied a lot about businesses, business licenses, legal structure, and taxation. Admittedly, this part was actually not too exciting, it was simply necessary to understanding what we need to do to legally operate our business, and what legal structure to use for our various businesses.

The REALLY fun part was learning how to customize my website, and adding content to it. I was able to add a Q & A section, an About section, a Legal, a Privacy Policy, a Donate, and the Stories section. I realized that as I began to write the first Jacky-jack story I told Lydia years ago, the actual story was much longer than I remember, so I had to make it more succinct to fit it in. I can’t wait to write more, but for now, we’ll just start with the first one. 🙂

If you want to see Jacky-jack’s first story, Why am I So Small, click here.

This week we learned about credit cards, PayPal, and how to create such a button on your website to allow those transactions.

Since my site is more about content than selling merchandise, I went with the “donate” button. I don’t expect a lot of activity on it, but I am going to have some fun writing children’s books, and maybe that will inspire someone to donate a buck or two for our cause.

Here’s a link to the site so that you can see the donate button, though it’s not very developed (the site) at this stage.

http://gojackyjack.com

Looking forward to the progress we’ll be making next week, until then.

Rob

So this week in our Web Business class, we had the task of choosing a host for our site, among other things. I’ve wanted to learn how to use WordPress for a long time now, but I didn’t know there was a significant difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com (the .com one is only for blogging), so now that I’ve figured that out – thanks to some timely feedback from my teacher, I can get back on task of selecting a site-building service such as wordpress.ORG and choosing a host.

Since I already paid for this account, I mean I might as well keep it going right? We need to do a blog using WordPress anyway, so there ya go.

This week I learned a lot about the different hosting services available. There are several of them, and it’s tough to say there’s a “best” one and a “worst” one because they all have their own purpose. Originally I went with WordPress.com because it’s a dedicated hosting service for WordPress, but now I need to find out if they can host for WordPress.org as well, or if I will need to find another host. We’ll see. This has definitely been a learning experience, but as painful as it sometimes may be, pain is a great teacher – you don’t forget those lessons quickly, and they usually motivate learning at an accelerated rate because let’s face it, there’s no motivation quite like “making the pain stop”. I always get A’s so for me to get a C or less on an assignment is painful, lesson learned, look ahead and see what’s coming – even if you’re tired, busy, whatever, so is everyone and time is not going to take into account your busy schedule so get over it (note to self), there’s little gain without making sacrifices, so let’s re-focus and get this done the right way!