W13 Reflection: Ranking, Link Building & Google Analytics

I was excited by the idea of evergreen content over blogging. I am not naturally interested in blogging, and this seems like a better middle ground for me. I have a few ideas for content to develop, the limiting factor being available time and execution. I hope to focus my efforts primarily towards lasting useful content. As a supplement, I could incorporate a blog to review or explain industry tools. There can be a steep learning curve to the large brand businesses, and I think I can offer value by simplifying their tools in a more approachable way.

Guest blogging is appealing too but also feels awkward to pursue. I do not know when I would be ready for that or if I will even be an interesting addition to someone’s blog. I intend to become a credentialed genealogist. Having those initials after my name with help me with credibility among other professionals, but it will be a couple years before I complete the credentialing process.

Google Analytics is an interesting tool. I look forward to being able to implement changes from the data it collects. Currently, it feels more like a novelty and can be difficult to identify improvements. I do think that longer tracking history will lead to better data and make those improvements opportunities a little more obvious.

I am looking forward to building my business presence overtime as I complete my family history research degree and pursue genealogy credentials.

W12 Reflection: Social Media for SEO & Social Networking

This week’s information on social media SEO was really helpful. A few years ago, I worked as a digital marketing assistant for a Chinese herbal company and part of my job was creating and posting the ads for various social media platforms. My job wasn’t creating the marketing plan, I was given assignments to carry out, but now in hindsight I can see all the things that were missed and what could have helped that company even more. I’m excited to use what I learned from that job and what I am learning from this class to be more effective in reaching my target market.

I’m particularly interested to track the traffic sources and learn how to reach my market most effectively. That is something I know my old employer didn’t know how to do and wished they did. Part of me wants to send off a quick email to the owners to suggest using Google Analytics to track their social media advertising efforts would change their lives. If I can figure out a polite way to do it, I might—they were nice people, but we haven’t kept in touch.

I appreciated the emphasis in the readings and video on just taking the time to establish a plan, not to stress out about getting it exactly perfect but something to get you started and update periodically. I do best setting plans to a calendar and following a pattern so I want to use what I learned this week to develop a basic outline and fill in the framework from there. Once I have a manageable system with a pattern, I believe that I can maintain momentum in content creation and segmented, sharable content posts on social media.

W11 Reflection: Landing Page Optimization & Basic SEO

This week I learned about how keywords can affect your landing page and SEO. This was a really helpful week but also difficult to work my way through some of the reading. While full of great information, Rand Fishkin’s article on Keyword-Targeting and Landing Page SEO was a very slow read. Mostly because I wasn’t familiar with some of the industry lingo and acronyms that he used. I had to look several terms up separately and even then, it wasn’t always clear how to understand the information without more additional research. Several times I just wanted to give up, but I didn't. Although, I did have to take several breaks and come back to read more later. I’m likely not his target market but I appreciated the information. Otherwise, he spelled everything out really well and used a lot of great details, examples, and visuals.

I was surprised to see that Keywords are not as important in optimizing a page as they used to be. I hadn’t considered that algorithms were able to evaluate things like user experience (Or UX as I learned today. That one made sense, at least. I still think he made up KW for keywords, which took me longer to figure out than it probably should have). As an internet user, I can see how that makes sense objectively because I really hate it when I can’t figure out how to find things on a website or when they are just was too crowded. I hope to design a website that is really natural and enjoyable to use.

W10 Reflection: ROI & Optimizing Ad Performance

I found the reading this week really interesting but a little tricky to implement. Setting up conversion tracking was satisfying because I was able to figure out the best way to edit my theme safely and that has made these tracking features a lot easier to implement. I had done the header edit last week but this week I was able to figure out how to have it automatically populate in all the headers and then add code to only specific pages for the conversion goals.

I’m still a little stuck on setting the trackers to ignore my own traffic. I figured it out in one area, but it doesn’t seem to apply to the primary one that our class is using. I think I’ll have time this weekend to research that a little more and hopefully find the answer. 

I am currently wondering how to narrow the focus of my ad group to avoid people searching for specific family surnames. That was something I had not anticipated would happen but there are a few last names that populated my ad. These last names aren’t attached to any one keyword and those keywords seem to perform well otherwise. So, I’m trying to determine a way to limit the appearance of family surnames as a category. I’m also wondering if trying to eliminate this is actually a bad idea. I am not currently prepared to do so but I have been considering that instead of trying to eliminate a category (surnames/proper nouns), there might be a way to demonstrate that I’m useful to these researchers.

This week my other class, which is a family history research class, inspired another business niche idea that has been very distracting to me this week. Unfortunately it isn’t something I currently know how to do and likely requires a lot of coding knowledge. But I’m planning to incorporate it over time (sooner rather than later as it is a research tool that I would like to use in my own research and is a tool that I couldn't find anywhere else) and hope that it will be a useful tool to bring in traffic.

W09 Reflection: Relevance & Quality Score

This week has been interesting and gone a bit smoother. I really enjoyed installing and exploring Google Analytics, I can tell it will be a valuable and powerful tool. Plus, I love graphs and data, so this is right up my alley.

In terms of my ad campaign, I’m think I’m on track but I’m a little concerned about my keywords. I think I came up with a list that will be okay for a starting point but it’s hard to find a wide range of applicable words for genealogy. Especially when so many can be considered industry terms that beginners might not be familiar with and that are just plain trickier to spell.  Even I had to re-type genealogy two sentences ago and again just now. If I go any broader, I risk my ad appearing for completely unrelated searches from uninterested people. Any narrower and it’s unlikely to be triggered at all.

I appreciated Brother Beck’s recommendation to incorporate a blog into my website for traffic. I can see how this will help as I could focus on specific subjects and create ads around those posts. Thus solving my keyword dilemmas. I do worry that I won’t have anything new or interesting to say to draw in the traffic as the major brands already cover most topics really well. Although, I think I could compare and analyze the tools these websites offer effectively. Ancestry has a few shortcomings that I find frustrating and are amplified on their premium subsidiaries despite the high subscription costs of Fold3 and Newspapers.

I do have many different directions that I’m excited to explore with my genealogy business overtime, but I’m trying to limit my focus for the semester so I don’t end up overwhelmed and spread too thin.

W08 Reflection: Ads

I really appreciated the assigned reading from this week. On the “Edit you text ads” page, just after the intro, there was a mention of Google Ads Editor and verifying that it was updated. I’ve been thinking that Google Ads was not very intuitive, and I misunderstood this to mean a Chrome plugin or something that could need updating. Ultimately, I ended up downloading a program, which was unexpected, but I am glad I did. The Google Ads Editor was a lot easier for me to navigate and resize my windows. The web based one feels like it would work better if I had two monitors. 

The keyword insertion feature is also really interesting and I would like to explore it more in the future. I wasn’t confident enough to try it out this week. Plus, most of my drafts weren’t dynamic enough and would stop making sense with a few of my keywords. But I think in the future, I could have a more tailored ad group and try this feature out in an ad to see how it performs for me.

I sort of enjoyed creating my ad this week. It was strange to be both limited by characters but also struggling to fill the space. But as always, balance in all things is good and should be expected.

W07 Reflection: Google Ads & Keywords

I found the readings this week helpful. They provided an interesting way of considering keyword choices more thoughtfully than just a random assemble of synonyms. I particularly like the information on negative keywords. I have often searched for various things on Google where I needed to include the “-“ in front of a word because I was getting bogged down with the wrong kind of results. I love the idea that I can do the same sort of thing on the advertisers end to streamline my campaigns effectiveness.

Personally, I originally felt that marking the major brands as negative keywords would be helpful. Thinking that if a person is already specifically looking for FamilySearch then I don’t want to waste my money in those search results. However, I find myself turning this concept over in my brain, maybe eliminating these brand words isn’t the best way of narrowing the market in that it could be beneficial to leverage the brand notoriety.

As far as I can tell, I’m not exactly anyone’s competitor because I haven’t found anyone offering the same exact service. Mostly, professional genealogists are offering the actual research as their service. So, distancing myself from these companies might do the reverse. Now I’m leaning more towards the idea that these brands presences would help drive traffic my way because people who might want my service would likely be familiar with the main Family History brands.

Tomorrow I might switch back again but I really like the analytical approach to choosing keywords. It’s like an entertaining never-ending riddle.

W06 Reflection: Legal Structure

This week has been exciting and a bit complicated. I am excited to be figuring out all these legal particulars as it means I am that much closer to launching my business. Which is also a little terrifying. I find myself (almost) hoping that I won’t have any clients. Partly because I’m nervous about doing a good job and partly as a defense of setting my expectations low so I’m not disappointed. I’m doing a sole proprietorship because that seems like the right choice for my business, but the liabilities make me a little nervous, so I almost wish I was doing an LLC. My current plan is to start as a sole proprietor and the make the transition to LLC. But even that is a little unappealing because it would mean paying the one-time new business start-up fees all over again, plus the LLC fees. It still seems to fit my current situation the best.

It’s complicated because of the sales tax. I have many hours trying to unravel my legal tax obligations. I think I have figured out my state obligations for an interactive analyst service. Although, learning about retail sales tax has introduced a question that I haven’t been able to answer yet.

• I am to collect and remit a “Service and Other Activities” B&O sales tax for the state of Washington.
• Retail sales to out-of-state buyers require recipient specific state sales tax to be collected and remitted for each different state, but only if a certain sale quantity threshold is met.

Which makes jumbles my brain into asking:

1. Do I follow this pattern for the “Service and Other Activities” B&O type sales tax and collect and remit sales tax according to client billing state? Are there thresholds before the tax applies?
1. If not, do I collect the Washington state “Service and Other Activities” B&O sales tax from everyone, regardless of what state they live in?
2. Or do I only collect that sales tax from Washington state residents?

I’m also interested in participating in digital download sales on my website in the future, so figuring out the digital sales tax issue is interesting to me as well.

The complication of out-of-state sales feels pretty overwhelming. It’s almost a tipping point of if I bother with an online business or not. I really want to move forward with this, but the out-of-state sales taxes are so complicated as to be disempowering and excessively time consuming.

I think I have it sorted out that digital retail sales only count in certain states and retail sales only count after certain thresholds in each state, so if I don’t hit those thresholds I don’t collect/remit state specific sales taxes nor do I collect/remit WA state sales tax from out-of-state residents. And I think that is also how I treat the B&O sales tax.

W05 Reflection: Site Design

I really appreciate mindful web design when I am a visitor to a website, even when I have not fully recognized what I liked about a website. I can generally identify what I do not like about a website before I can spot what appeals to me, so the reading materials this week helped me understand what I was responding to.

I am concerned about images for my website. My job a few years ago included choosing stock images to use for articles and various areas of the website. I was always struck by how redundant the selection was for my assigned topics, so that worries me. However, I am hopeful that it will be easier to design the website now that it is my own and a topic that I am passionate about, instead of working to illustrate someone else’s passion. I really enjoyed the design element of that job, but it was often a struggle to figure out what would make my employers happiest.

I also enjoyed experimenting with colors through Paletton. My mother is an artist and loves the science behind the color wheel, her paintings always have amazing colors. She taught me about this growing up, I am still aware of it to some extent, but it was never something that I could intuitively manipulate the way she could. This tool is so helpful in overcoming uncertainty in my choices. It makes quicker work of choosing what I like that also works well and eliminating everything else.

W04 Reflection: Site Builder & Hosting

This week was confusing. Everything started out well enough with choosing a website builder. The module items had some solid information and guidance for choosing which really helped me understand my options and the types of products that are available. I appreciated the few specific ones that were highlighted with videos as well.

In contrast was the material about choosing a hosting company. I felt basically abandoned to collect data on this topic independently. Which was fine, I am willing to put in the research time to find information and solutions, but this ended up being a disappointing rabbit hole that quickly left me with 30+ internet tabs open. None of which really improved the situation. The reading material provided by the course was limited and other links lacked guidance on the various types of hosting companies and ways of narrowing down the options. I think it would be helpful to have some reading material on hosting categories to better understand which types are useful or acceptable for certain generalized parameters to better narrow the selection pool.

I connected with a tutor for some help with understanding the hosting world. It was a little helpful and she was able to help me feel more comfortable with my choices. But it's not a true comfort, more along the lines of thinking it will probably work out but I still have no idea why or how. I just still don't understand what my hosting needs are or how to assess what they are and then find a company that fits those needs. In the end, she seemed more confident that I knew what I was doing then I am. I told her that, but she felt my defined business scope was a significant asset for this process. I understand that in terms of the overall project, but it doesn't seem to eliminate my hosting confusion.

I look forward to financially committing to a hosting company and moving on to the next challenge.

W03 Reflection: Sourcing the Product

Even though I chose drop shipping for Joe's group, I don't think it would be right for me. Learning about the risks associated with drop shipping made me anxious while also being intrigued by the idea. The affiliate method just didn't seem to have enough opportunity for a diversified business experience. I really think Joe's group should plan to use multiple models for the same company. Maybe start with affiliate while they build their brand and content, then add drop shipping for experiences dealing with customers.

The material this week had me wondering how either of these methods would apply to the genealogy world. I did some research and found a several options quickly. This surprised me, I am probably not imaginative enough because when I read about a few of the options they seemed obvious in the end. Drop shipping mostly involved research books or fill-in-the-blank family tree posters. Affiliate programs were mostly connected to Ancestry.com and its subsidiaries or DNA testing companies. 

I'm not certain either appeals to me for my future but I want to keep an open mind at this point. There could be some potential with either. Maybe drop shipping specific family history research books if I became passionate about their contents and usefulness. I am already enthusiastic about Ancestry.com and could incorporate an affiliate relationship with them and a few other companies into my business. But I don't think I would enjoy either as my primary business model as I really want to work with people on their research somehow. I feel like these options would take me away from that if it was my main source of income. 

W02 Reflection: Choosing a Business

This week has been an interesting one filled with new perspectives to consider as I move forward with my plan to become a professional in the family history research world. I have a few generic ideas about my future in genealogy, but I haven’t considered how the business model plays an important role in setting up the business.

I have felt that Heavenly Father has been leading me to this career path for a long time. Now more than ever I want to make sure that I listen to the promptings of the Spirit when choosing how I want to contribute to genealogy and the best way to set up my business so that I can be most effective.

My major right now is Family History Research and the past two semesters have opened my eyes to the vast quantity of alternative careers within genealogy that I had never considered or heard of before. I think taking the business model into consideration will help me narrow down my choices and find something to begin with that fits my interests and skills.

An Affiliate model appeals to me more than a Merchant model, but Merchant is more likely the one that I need to use when contracting with clients for the various services that I’d like to offer. I can see potential in layering these together and using an Affiliate model in helping connect people to services they want or need that I don’t offer. My favorite is some sort of Community model because I love bringing people together to inspire each other about genealogy and teach beginners ways to get started that fit their interest and lifestyles. I’m only a little stuck about how to develop a business around that without recreating what FamilySearch and Ancestry already do, it seems uninteresting to me to simply overlap with them.