January 28, 2010

Day 16 :: Muse 1 & Adwords, Port Eighty, Inc

With the micro site for Muse 1 up and running I have not been doing too much in regards to my muses. I have been watching Adwords to see how the muse is performing, but I do not believe there is really much to see. Since Day 13 when I finished setting up the site and Adwords, I have created 2 additional ads that Adwords will rotate out with the first one. This will allow me to test what headlines, text drives the most click throughs.

In the world of Port Eighty, Inc., a colleague of mine and I have been working on closing a very large deal with a property management group. The group is looking to build out an online application for managing their properties. My colleague and I have been working on drafting a proposal to present the the group in an effort to close on the the sale.

I am also working on one of my first “collection” cases with Port Eighty, Inc. Seems a design firm I did work for a year ago only wanted to pay have their bill in 2009, and then banking on my lenience wait until 2010 to declare that they do not intend to pay the remaining bill. The collections process is going well, but is time consuming. At this point it looks like they are planning to pay, though I am skeptical of whether it will be in full.

~Nathan Hein
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January 25, 2010

Day 13 :: Muse 1, Ad is pending Google Review

After about 2 week of work the micro site is up, optimized for my keywords, and I just finished setting up an Adwords campaign. Right now the advertisement in pending approval from the fine staff at Google. Once it is approved, we will be rocking and rolling on market testing. I have my campaign set to run for 30 days, and my site is optimized for the keywords used in the advertisement and the keywords I am bidding on in Adwords.

This being my first true online advertising campaign it’s success is irrelevant to the benefits of learning all the Google SEO/Traffic/Marketing tools. Right now my Adwords campaign is connected to Google Analytics for tracking the success of the campaign. At this point I will leave muse 1 on auto pilot, and see what head way I can make on muse 2. Tomorrow I will working on posting some of my key learnings up to this point on muse 1.

~Nathan Hein
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Day 13 :: SEO Research

I do not feel this is really specific to either one of my current muses, but I am working on some SEO research today. I want to ensure my micro site for Muse 1 is optimized for the keywords I will be using in the Adwords campaign.

This morning I have scoured the web a bit for good tools and articles, and have also reached out to some of my SEM expert friends. Tonight I am hoping not only to get Adwords setup as I mentioned last night, but to also optimize the title tags of the micro site for Muse 1.

~Nathan Hein
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January 24, 2010

Day 12 :: Muse 1, site is live!

Day 11 & 12 have been quite busy. I have been working feverishly to complete the micro site and get it online. I am quite happy to announce it is online, and ready to go. All I need to do at this point is setup a Google Adwords campaign to start driving some traffic. I would post the url here, but I do not want to skew the results of the micro site testing. The goal here is to determine if there is a market for the product.

As I have spent the majority of my Sunday and a good part of my Saturday getting the site ready it has given me some time to reflect on my progress on my first muse. I would like to elaborate on my reflections in a separate post, but I will through down a few high level observations at this point:

  • Limit how much time you spend projecting costs for manufacturing and retailing until the market opportunity is confirmed.
  • Grab a web design from one of the hundreds of online providers for speed’s sake.
  • Focus on the high level priorities when working on rolling out the test site. I have been getting “lost” in way too many little details.

My day 13 game plan is to get a Google Adwords campaign going, and get the campaign setup in Google Analytics. As far as developing a second micro site for a more targeted niche market, I am going to hold off until I see a need for it. I will see what this first site can do out of the gate before investing more time into a potentialy dead idea.

~Nathan Hein
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