Hello September and National Stamping Month!!

I am sooo excited about September!  I don't even know where to begin!  Our new CTMH Idea Book goes live today.  It's National Stamping Month and I love, love, love the September SOTM!

Let's start with the SOTM because I am planning to share cool samples all month long.  This is definitely a stamp set you are going to want to add to your collection.

Here's a beautiful sample made by the artists at the Home Office.  I love how they made it look like watercolor!

Next Up:  Three fun stamp sets to celebrate National Stamping Month!!

September is National Stamping Month, and this year Close To My Heart has something to help every kind of papercrafter say a big “hello” to life! Available only during the month of September, these exclusive C-size My Acrylix^® Hello, Life! stamp sets can be purchased for $13.95 USD / $16.50 CAD each! Or, for an even better deal, you can purchase all three for only $34.95 USD / 41.50 CAD—a savings of $6.90 USD / $8 CAD! Each stamp set is designed to fit with a specific type of papercrafting, whether that’s scrapbooking, cardmaking, or pocket scrapbooking. However, all the stamp sets coordinate with each other and can be used together to create dynamic artwork. These stamp sets also coordinate with shapes from the new Cricut^® Artistry collection to help expand your artwork options even further. Remember, these stamp sets are available for one month only, so get your orders in for one stamp set—or all three—before these gorgeous stamps disappear! Make certain to follow Close To My Heart’s blog, Instagram, and Facebook page for artwork inspiration featuring these lively stamp sets all month long. You can post your own artwork to your social media channels using the hashtag #ctmhHelloLife.

Dates: Offer valid September 1, 2015 (9:00 am MDT)–September 30, 2015 (11:59 pm MDT).

Shop here to get yours today!

But wait - Did I say NEW IDEA BOOK?

Not only is the NEW idea book live today, but our Fall Seasonal Supplement is too!!  If you're like me, your wish list will be HUGE!!  Don't worry though!  I'm always here to help you get the most for your hard earned dollars.  You can order a little bit each month to fit your budget or... you can host a party and get some of it FREE and even earn 1/2 off items too.

Woo Hoo for Woo Rank!!!

This week we ran our websites through Woorank to find areas where we can improve and optimize our sites so that we can improve our ranking and online visibility.  This was probably my favorite assignment of the semester!  Why?  Because I feel like I have a handle on most of the items, but I miss the mark when I forget to incorporate all the different tasks.

For instance - I always include alternate text when posting pics at work, yet somehow I missed it on my website.  It might have just been an oversight when I posted the picture, or it might be that the place I enter that information wasn't obvious and I have to research how to do it on that system.

Another area that I have to improve on is my meta tags.  I felt like I was being too "wordy" when I added mine.  Turns out, I was too brief and I need to add more.

I appreciated how quickly woorank gave me the results and now I have a nice little checklist of things to improve.  I love checklists so that works for me!

Power of social media

This week real life, my job and my school all coordinated together!  It was time to study social media for my class, I have been working hard to be more consistent and develop my social media presence and I am currently at a convention where we talked about...social media.  It was like a little in depth social media education for me this week.

I am super grateful that we learned about google adwords and analytics and everything else we have studied this semester, but I truly feel like social media is the place where I can truly impact my business.

My goal is to continue to post consistently on facebook and to expand my postings on instagram and pinterest.  In addition, I want to make sure I am promoting my products.  While I think there should be a good blend of posts that just provide information, with promotional type posts... I think that sometimes I just post info and I don't really ask for the sale....

In a weird coincidence, I also saw the power of social media this week.  While we were at convention my buddy Gail and I decided to post a few videos about our experience to our team page.  Well after just one or two silly one minute videos, we suddenly had a following.  Even people here at the convention had seen them and asked if we would doing more.  We even had people volunteer to be "special guests" on our" show.  I posted all these videos on our private team page, but I am definitely trying to figure out a way to capture that same enthusiasm so I can do something as rewarding to promote my website.

Landing Page Optimization and SEO

This week we spent some time analyzing our landing pages to make sure that they contain the information that users are looking for and that they match our ads.  It can be frustrating for a site visitor to follow an ad to your site, looking for the promotion from the ad, but not see it right away.  If they don't find the information quickly, they will typically jump right back off your site, making the money you spent, worthless.  Therefore it's important to protect your investment and make the experience better for your visitors.

We also spent some time studying SEO.  Once again, this was just a little look and it will definitely require more study.  I discovered that I will need to spend some time getting some backlinks to my site, in order to increase my rankings.  I believe I have set up my meta tags correctly, but now I more fully understand why and how they work.

Sharing what I've learned

I think this week ended up being about sharing what I've learned....

We added Google Analytics to our sites this week and worked on our Adwords campaigns.

I added analytics to my blog a few years (?) ago.  As with all things, I go through phases when I work hard to learn and implement new skills, then I slack off, then I work hard... Kind of sounds like those Nephites hanging out in the wilderness, doesn't it.  (There are more than a few things in my life where I see that pattern rear it's ugly head....) Anyway, I added analytics a while back and periodically I'll go and check to see how people find my blog, which posts/links they are clicking on, how many hits I get, etc., but I haven't done much else with it.

Now that I am moving along on my web design/development education, I am looking at all of these things more thoroughly and attempting to understand them better.  As part of the discussion for class I was able to share some of the things that I found interesting in the stats for my blog. 

And then...

Today, I met a friend at Starbucks to chat about our businesses and blogging and instagram and periscope... and I was able to discuss affiliate marketing and adwords and analytics.  Not only was it great to be able to share what I've learned, but it helped me to realize what I have taken away from all the things we have been studying. 

I know that I've just scratched the surface on these topics and I'll have to continue to study them and implement them in order to gain a better understanding, but it looks like I have a new "geeky" friend to chat about it with.

Ads that work

This week we worked on creating our google ads.  It was interesting to think about how to say what we want to say in just a few characters.  I really enjoyed reading my classmates ads and getting their feedback.  It was interesting to see how different our perspectives are.  It was a great reminder that everyone sees things differently.  We might think our message is very clear, but often, it isn't.

I tested a couple of my ad ideas with my classmates and they gave them top marks, so now it will be interesting to see if they generate hits for my site.

Speaking of my site.... I love it!!!!!  I am having so much fun finishing it up.  I have so much content to add, that I am sure I will be working on it for a long time, but it's really starting to look the way I want it to.  This weekend, I'm taking photos and adding a few more things to my for sale pages, but really...it's pretty much ready to go.

I gave one of my customer groups a sneak peek and they loved it!  They were excited to see that I was incorporating some of the things they had asked for.

Keywords...Keywords...Keywords....

It's time to start advertising our websites.  I am hoping to learn some techniques to help me drive the "right" kind of traffic to my site.

In the stamping and scrapbooking industry it is easy to get tons of hits.  You simply have to post cute projects, participate in blog hops and share on social media.  The problem is, lots of hits doesn't actually equate to better sales.  Many of those hits are from people looking for ideas on how to promote the products to their own customers.

As I move away from a blogging site and focus more on promoting my business, I hope to discover the keywords that will attract customers to my site.

This week we learned

• Think like a customer when building keyword lists
• Good keywords that are short phrases perform best (2-3 words)
• Determine whether general keywords or specific keywords suit your topic better
• Group keywords by themes

I made a huge list of keywords and researched how they performed.  At this point I'm planning to manually manage my budget so that I can adjust where I spend my money, depending on what performs the best.