Ok guys so it has been a number of weeks since I last updated this so over the coming blog I will run through what we have went through and the learnings, issues and how to overcome these issues.
We have been working on Social Media over the past few weeks. Although I knew a lot of this in relation to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube there were areas which I found interesting and had never seen before. The part of this side of things I was really interested in was the analytics part and crunching the numbers. In the past when using the different social media platforms I have created business pages for different businesses but never before had I seen the Facebook Ads side of things. I can see how this could be very relevant going forward as we learned you can promote your page based on Location. Interest, Age and Gender. I found this part interesting where a specific business could promote their page based on a certain interest. Over the following weeks we progressed through Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube and then moved onto Email Marketing and Data Protection. There was a little yawn inside of me when I saw Data Protection but this class actually turned out to be very enjoyable and relative to my current workplace, I have always been nervous when hearing about Data Protection but was engrossed in the class for this discussion and the whole Email Marketing section. So to sum things up although I had previously worked on Social Media in Maven TM I found this week to be probably the most interesting and relevant to me over the past few weeks.
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Week 6
After been away for a week I arrived back to our course where we were about to go through PPC Advertising. I had previously heard of PPC but had no idea what I was about to learn from this class. We begin by talking about why one would advertise online and how the seller needs to get the right ad to the right person at the right time which will in turn create results. I never really thought about this when I thought about PPC or having to factor in Age, Sex, Location, and Service when creating an ad. We move onto talking about the different types of advertising formats both search and display. As we make our way through the slides I have a look and see that there are near 100 slides in the presentation so I get the notepad out and begin taking notes. As we progress we talk about the different PPC Advertising Concepts and terms which I had never heard of before so was very interested in hearing about the likes of Cost per Click (CPC), Pay Per Click (PPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPI) 1000 Impressions. It was hugely interesting in hearing about these different models and different concepts as I had never used these before. Another reason I was very interested in this class was because in my workplace we were about to start work with a new client and some of the work involved PPC and I knew this would come into great use further down the line. As we move on we talk about keywords and how important they are too a website and also when creating a Google Adwords ad. One of the major points also to note for this is the cost per click and this can sometimes be forgotten when designing an ad. We took some time out to see different Keyword Planners and what the cost per click is for some keywords. We then move onto building a Google ad through Adwords which was very interesting and was a huge learning curve. I for one would not have imagined how vital it was for the keywords to be correctly placed but as I looked at my Weebly Website to base the ad around could it was very interesting to see both the correct way to create the ad along with seen how keywords should be placed in websites. To sum up this evening I went in thinking this would be impossible to use PPC( Google Adwords) correctly but saw that with a little work at the creation of the website and some planning around keywords it is very workable to create an interesting Google Adwords ad which could produce a large return on investment if correctly created. Going into this class I was very interested in the topic for the night Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. I have very rarely used this in the past as it is widely known that you can spend a lot of time on SEO and still not be anywhere close to the top page on a Google search page.
As we start the night John introduces Organic Searches which includes both On Site and Off Site SEO. SEO was one of the very reasons I chose this course, so I was instantly interested in the class. Before the night I would have said my knowledge of SEO was “What way can I put this…. Non Existent” and now here I am finding out all this new information about On Site and Off Site SEO which I would later go on to use on our Group Digital Marketing Plan. Although we have briefly spoken about Off Site SEO we will be concentrating on On Site SEO tonight As we progress through the class we begin to talk about On Site SEO and how important Site Tags, Titles and Meta Description tags are to a website. I had previously built websites using Wordpress for various small projects, but I never went into this sort of detail and was absorbing all of this information which I know will be of huge benefit to me over the coming years of my career. Next on the agenda we begin to talk about Keywords and how important it is to use the correct Keywords for SEO and how important both Short Tail Keywords (2 or less words) and Long Tail Keywords(3 or more words)are when creating your content on your website. We also chat about how important the URL Structure, H tags and Sitemaps are to websites which I find fascinating and know I will implement going forward on future website projects. And what feels like only a matter of minutes it is 10 pm, this has been a real eye opener of a class and I cannot wait to come back again next week to find out about Off Site SEO. Second night in and we are instantly working on something I have a passion for, building and developing websites. I have previously built websites using Wordpress but we have chatted about this and will be using a new CMS called Weebly. Having never used Weebly before I was very interested in coming to terms with the technology.
Throughout the night John was explaining that we would be creating a site with at least 5 pages which had to consist of the following Landing Page, Blogs, SEO, Source Code and Contact Us. Some of this seemed very straight forward such as the Landing Page and Contact Us page but I had a little churn in the stomach when I saw Blogs and SEO as I was only beginning to write Blogs for Maven TM and would by no means class myself as a blog writer and had always previously avoided this like the plague in Maven TM. Also, I had heard so many nightmare stories about SEO and how difficult it can be to perfect this. With that been said we created our new email which previously I would have used my own but based on Johns explanation I created a new email account as we will be using it for a lot of signups over the coming months and don’t want my emails filling up with marketing related content. So, I setup my new Gmail account and head over to Weebly to signup. To my surprise I then setup my weebly account “brianbyrne.weebly.com” and use one of the pre-designed templates and BANG I have my bare bones website created. So here I am walking through the doors of IT Carlow again, here I was after finishing my IT course five years ago about to enter a new phase. Why do I bother I hear some of you ask, well the answer is simple. In my current workplace although I am IT Manager the business core work is marketing.
Since I started my position over three years ago I have grown to like the different ideas and the different concepts associated with Maven TM especially with the digital marketing side of things. This is the reason I chose to further my studies in digital marketing was because I want to grow my knowledge of several different areas of digital marketing. These areas include SEO, Blogs and Google Analytics which I have very little exposure to and would like to have a very good understanding of these concepts by the end of the course. I have recently starting writing blogs within my workplace for technology related solutions and would also like to build on this over the coming weeks. With all these thoughts I walk into the class to be introduced to our lecture for the course John Cowper. John introduced us to the course. It is exactly what I was looking for when I chose the course but also will be a challenge juggling both work and the course. Over the coming weeks and months, I look forward to seeing how I progress both on the course and within Digital Marketing in my workplace and all I need to say is “Lets go”. |