Blogspot Project BreakDown
Lately, I have been working on creating a successful blog that would drive users to a business website. Upon creating my blog, I partnered with Baked Beauty Co. and centered all my content around the brand. Baked Beauty Co. is a small business in Idaho Falls specializing in self-care. They sell products such as salve sticks, bath salts, and lotions. Much of my written content is focused on certain products and their benefits. I hardly ever focused on product features. I did this purposely because I thought that users would be more convinced to click on the website and purchase products if I appealed to certain needs. The brand is very focused on relaxing and calming down, it even is written on product labels. I figured that if I focused on things like the needs and benefits of relaxation people would want to find out more and click on the web page link.
Purpose & Objectives
The goal of creating my blog was to ultimately get more users to click through the website through the links that I put in the blogs. My goal was to create sales for the baked beauty company. Following the website Google analytics I wanted to see how many people were clicking on the website through a backlink. Since Baked Beauty’s only marketing is through social media it was safe to say that the backlink metric only applied to my blogs as social media is a separate metric.
Another objective was to make my blogs informative and maybe a bit persuasive. I would focus more on useful information that is related to a product and demonstrated need to the user. I would also make sure to include a call to action at some point in the blog. The call to action would generally be at the beginning of the blog in case people didn’t read the whole thing. I also made sure to add some graphics and videos that I made in adobe programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, and Premier Pro. I did this to give the blog some more substance so that when the user would land on my page it wasn’t just a boring block of text.
Challenges
Unfortunately, I faced challenges early on in my project that hindered my growth. I would battle constantly with bugs and issues on my WordPress site. I believe a lot of my problems came from not having the premium service even though I never had issues with the free wordpress before. It got so bad I tried to switch over to a shopify account that didn’t feature any products. I ended up quitting after a week. Shopify accounts are not blog-friendly I suppose. I ended up going back to WordPress and did more troubleshooting. I ended up having to give up on having different pages on my website because they would not work. Instead, I just put up different blogs on the home page every week. Next time I try a campaign like this I am getting premium.
Process
Before we get into the process let’s briefly go over the steps I took in preparation to creating this blog. My first step started with Qualtrics where I crafted a survey. Since I knew this brand is heavily marketed towards females I needed some more information on this demographic regarding self-care. I crafted a brief survey that just asked basic self-care questions such as, “What self-care product do you value the most?”, that was paired with multiple options. I got people to take the survey by going to different groups on social media platforms like Facebook or Linkedin and asking them if they would take a survey. I wanted to make sure I was targeting mostly females so I went into groups I thought would have the most women in them. They were mostly groups revolving around beauty or skin care. After I collected my data I then launched my baked beauty blog. Since I launched the blog I started writing a blog a week. During that week I also made graphics to add some visual content in the blog as well.I also wanted to add video content however I noticed that didn’t appear on my live site as well. I kept going back to various online groups to promote my blog every week. It would have been a good system if I didn’t have so much trouble in the beginning.
Overview / What I learned-
I really hoped my project would have run smoother but sometimes you can’t catch a break. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake if I am honest. I know now that I should have researched a better platform where I could have launched a successful site for free early on. Instead, I chose WordPress because I used it years before but this WordPress was not the same one I remembered. In hindsight, I am not sure if there even is such a thing as creating a free website. As far as the google analytics go I was not successful in that department either. Since my blog was almost never live due to technical issues, I ended up driving no sales to Baked Beauties websites and had an almost 0% click-through rate on those backlinks. Quite frankly I am ashamed. However, I still had fun writing content that I thought was pretty good. Plus, I got to sharpen my adobe skills by making cool visual content.
Video
Adobe Work
Progress
