50 things to do before I die

I had already created a ''50 things to do before I die'' before. As I was reviewing it I realized that I have accomplished a few of them since last year. However, I decided to make a few changes to my list:

Old list:

1. Buy a car
2. Buy a house
3. Invest in the Stock Market - Already doing it
4. Speak German fluently
5. Take a tour around Europe
6. Own my own company
7. Get my Bachelor’s Degree
8. Obtain a Masters Degree
9. Write a book
10. Have children
11. Baptize my children
12. Send my children on missions
13. Visit Ushuaia, Argentina
14. Visit Chile - I sent my wife to Chile for a debate contest for a week and she brought lots of pictures and stories, now I just have to visit Chile myself
15. Take a cruise to Norway
16. Give scholarships to young people
17. Visit China
18. Take scuba diving lessons
19. Go scuba diving in a coral reef
20. Have a salt water aquarium
21. Have a planted aquarium
22. Have a BMW
23. Visit Dubai
24. Finish reading the Book of Mormon in German - I am a few chapters away from accomplishing it
25. Help my wife finish her degree - She's probably going to finish hers before I do
26. Make my wife smile every day - Doing it as much as I can
27. Make someone happy every day
28. Help change someone’s life in my country - I realized that I might have already done it during my mission without realizing but I want to do it again
29. Have an Alaskan dog
30. Earn money in a network marketing company
31. Be an expert trader in Forex and the Stock Market - I'm really really far from being an expert but I know more than anybody I know in person
32. Have a hydroponic garden
33. Go camping in the snow
34. Have time for my family and my dreams
35. Play the electric guitar with my friends and a symphonic orchestra
36. Attend the Wacken open air festival
37. Learn how to ride a horse
38. Take a very long bike ride
39. Start a travel agency
40. Write a blog about places and culture In Mexico - Already doing it: www.saliradentro.com
41. Attend General Conference in person
42. Take my parents to visit Salt Lake city
43. Help people in Mexico invest their money
44. Visit Chihuahua, Mexico
45. Buy an Xbox one
46. Buy a new TV
47. Give a conference on financial education
48. Become a leader so others want to follow me and trust me
49. Learn how to create a website - Already doing it with Drupal
50. Go ice skating with my wife
51. Join the Rotary club
52. Learn how to cook bisquets and gravy

New List:

1. Buy a car without getting a loan
2. Buy a house
3. Invest in the Stock Market - Already doing it
4. Speak German fluently
5. Take a tour around Europe
6. Own my own company
7. Get my Bachelor’s Degree
8. Obtain a Masters Degree
9. Write a book
10. Have children
11. Baptize my children
12. Send my children on missions
13. Visit Las Vegas (Where I served my mission) with my wife
14. Visit Chile - I sent my wife to Chile for a debate contest for a week and she brought lots of pictures and stories, now I just have to visit Chile myself
15. Visit Norway and Iceland and take a cruise to the norwegian Fjords
16. Give scholarships to young talented people
17. Visit China, walk on the great wall
18. Take scuba diving lessons with my wife
19. Go scuba diving in a coral reef
20. Have a salt water aquarium
21. Have a planted fresh aquarium
22. Learn basic Mandarin
23. Visit New Zealand
24. Finish reading the Book of Mormon in German - I am a few chapters away from accomplishing it
25. Help my wife finish her bachelor's degree -  - She's probably going to finish hers before I do
26. Make my wife smile every day - Doing it as much as I can
27. Make a person happy every day
28. Help change someone’s life by offering a great opportunity - I realized that I might have already done it during my mission without realizing but I want to do it again
29. Have an Alaskan dog
30. Visit Switzerland
31. Be an expert trader in Forex and the Stock Market - I'm really really far from being an expert but I know more than anybody I know in person
32. Have a hydroponic garden
33. Go camping in the mountains when it snows
34. Always have time for my family and my dreams
35. Play the electric guitar with my friends and a symphonic orchestra
36. Attend the Wacken open air festival
37. Learn how to ride a horse
38. Take a very long bike ride
39. Start a travel agency
40. Write a blog about places and culture In Mexico - Already doing it: www.saliradentro.com
41. Attend General Conference in person
42. Take my parents to visit Salt Lake city
43. Help people in Mexico invest and save their money
44. Visit Chihuahua, and Guanajuato
45. Buy an Xbox one
46. Buy an HDTV
47. Give a conference on financial education
48. Become a leader so others want to follow me and trust me
49. Learn how to create a website - Already doing it with Drupal
50. Go ice skating with my wife
51. Learn how to sell
52. Learn how to cook bisquets and gravy

Linking and Analytics

This week I learned about the importance of links to my website.

Links not only bring visitors who follow them into the website; they also improve the site's relevance for search engines. Search engines like Google analyze how many ''backlinks'' connect to the site giving it credibility and relevance so it shows higher in search results.  Quality is also important since Google knows tricks people use and punishes bad linking practices. It is important that the links are relevant. Links coming from famous and highly visited websites benefit much more.

Useful resources:

Intro to linking

Linking strategies

More linking strategies

I have also been using Google Analytics and exploring it almost every day for the last few weeks. 

It is really a great tool that that now I can't imagine living without. In order to install it you have to place the analytics java script code on the site, or in the case of Drupal users, install the Drupal Analytics module that places the code automatically in all pages.

Analytics allows website owners to track visits, trends and how their goals (conversions) are being met. This data is more useful when used to determine trends. This way I have been able to determine what actions and changes have worked on my site, which campaigns are being more successful and how visitors interact with my site in general.

Useful resources:

Introduction to Google Analytics

Guide to the Analytics interface

Interpreting reports

Social Media - Continued

Essential to any marketing effort for a product, company or website today is a Social Media Strategy, especially if it is looking to market to young people.

There are many social media courses, articles and tutorials out there that explain the technical side of it. Here are some of the lessons I recently learned about the generals points for social media:

Be different. It is important to stand out from the crowd. The average person today is constantly bombarded with advertisement. It is not enough just to show your product anymore; you have to make them understand why it is different and cause an impression that won’t be overlooked.

Be authentic. Customers are not easily deceived anymore. They look for multiple sources and know when a company is just ”trying to sell them something”. Answer their comments, interact, be a person and engage your customers and visitors so they recommend you to their friends through their comments and interactions.

Be creative. This goes hand in hand with being different. Don’t just do what you learn about social media but look for ways to innovate, to create new things.

Have a strategy. It doesn’t help to spend money and time on this if you don’t have a goal or purpose for it.

Use your tools. Take advantage of Google Analytics and use metrics to measure your social media ROI so you can learn what works and refine your strategy.

Useful Resources:

12 Awesome Social Media Tutorials

Social Media for SEO - Goals

Social Media for SEO - Goals

The way we do business has changed. Not only do we have online businesses nowadays but with the arrival and widespread of social networks, businesses have become social. A business, especially one that sells to young people, now has to develop a social networking strategy to serve its customers with personalized service and improve its SEO at the same time.

I am used to using Facebook. In fact, my session is always open in my mobile device and I use it as one of my primary means of communication with friends and family that I don’t see often, interaction with communities that share my interests, and assessing the trustworthiness of a company I just discovered. For example, I am trying to change my Internet Service Provider so after finding some companies I could choose from the first thing I did was looking them up in Facebook looking for customer comments and reviews. If a company doesn't have an official Facebook page it’s easy for me to ignore it. If customers are happy with the company and mention it on the company’s Facebook page I gain confidence about their quality. If I ask the company questions through Inbox and their answers are useful to me, then I am much more likely of becoming their customer.

With these facts in mind, I came up with a list of goals for Social media and SEO:

Obtain ‘’Likes’’ and relevance. After I ‘’like’’ a company’s Facebook page, I will start seeing their publications in my wall and they will be present in my mind. The first step is to get visitors and potential customers to ‘’like’’ the company. A Facebook Ads campaing can be used for this. My first goal is to reach 100 Likes as a first stepping stone, then use an ads campaign and organic growth through interaction to increase its number to 500, and then 1,000.

Create content that is ‘’likeable’’ and ‘’shareable’’. Publications that are liked, shared and commented will have a greater and wider reach. Sharing content from related but not conflicting sources can also be good to keep social interaction up. The goal is to have at least one publication a day in order to remind visitors of my site’s existence.

Engage with the community. The Facebook page is the ‘’face’’ of the business where customers can ask questions and give suggestions. Friendly and warm interaction is the key for visitors to return. My goal is to answer comments every day, and invite people to interact if comments are scarce.

Expand your reach. I am not really using Twitter, Instagram, or other social media sites to promote my site other than Facebook and I have been suggested to try it. My goal is to open an account in those other sites and becoming familiar with them.

Success can be measured from this using Google Analytics. With it I can know how many visitors are visiting my site as a result of social media interactions (which is the first goal), and how many of those clicked Adsense ads. Links to Affiliate Networks can also be posted on social media publications advertising special offers.

Useful resources: 

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/08/social-media-optimization-redux/

http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/07/4-social-seo-success/

SEO

Here we come to the mystical world of SEO. 

I have to admit that I had heard about ''SEO'' for a long time but I never knew what it meant until a couple months ago when I started learning more about Search Engine Optimization, or how easily can search engines find your website.

There are a few factors that can affect your website's SEO:

Keywords: Include Keywords that people are looking for but are also relevant to your website. It is important to focus on quality rather than spamming the website with the desired keywords.

Back-links: How many links lead to your site? This is a very important point too, and these links must be high quality links too, not just spam.

Site optimization: How long does it take to load? Is it easy to see in all screen sizes? What about mobile devices? All of this affects visitor experience in your site and how likely they are to return.

Be unique: Not only create original content; make that content so unique that your site stands out from the crowd.

Make it shareable: If you were a visitor, would you share what you found on Facebook or another social network? Make your content interesting, and make sure your URL's are simple and reflect what your content is about.

There are much more ideas to be applied on a site for SEO.

I recommend this guide.

And if you use Drupal you might want to take a look at the SEO Checklist Module

I still have a long way to go for my site. I'm learning and applying these things by trying and making mistakes.
My site (In Spanish): www.saliradentro.com

Improving my ads, analyzing with Analytics and seeing some progress

Very slowly but very surely, my business project is getting up there.

My wife and I went out on the weekend to get more pictures of some places I wanted to write articles about and we ended up visiting 7 different free museums in downtown Mexico City that afternoon alone. There were a lot of museums we didn't have time to visit since we were very tired after that but now I have lots of pictures and experiences to write about.

I installed Google Analytics in my site using the Google Analytics Drupal module. It's amazing how much information I can obtain with it and I have been using it to improve my site. I especially liked being able to see the bounce rate to see how effective my landing page is after visitors get there as a result from my Adwords campaign.

I am also working on a new version of my site trying out different Drupal distributions and themes before I make changes in the actual website. 

I also started my Adwords campaign. At first I was having a very high bounce rate as I was sending visitors to my home page, but I found much better results as I created more specific ads that lead to specific sections of my site, especially to the ones that are better connected to products from my affiliate networks.

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453976?hl=en

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6080602?rd=1

Ads, getting traffic and getting ready

The website (in Spanish) is taking shape, although I really want to make some major changes on it. I found some interesting Drupal distributions and modules that will allow me to do a complete makeover for my website and make it more like what I want it to be but I haven't had the time to do it. Another obstacle is that I don't want to lose what I already built doing an experiment that might or not work.

The solution: I am creating a local website using XAMPP to create a server and installed Drupal there, then I will create a sample of the website layout and features that I want and see how it works before doing it in my actual site. That way the process will be smoother and faster and I won't miss revenue and visits now that I'm about to start my Adwords campaign.

I am also happy to say that I just earned my first $0.10 from Adsense and I started having clicks on my affiliate ads! It's not a lot but it is an important milestone for me. I got this little traffic by creating a Facebook page about my website, inviting my friends and my wife's friends to like it and then posting links to the articles in my website.

This week I learned a lot about Adword ads. I had some experience creating Facebook ads campaigns for a couple business projects and this is quite a different system with a few things in common. With Adwords I choose the keywords I want to associate my ad to rather than purely demographic information. Adwords also provides a lot of feedback on the effectiveness of my ads and my Keywords through the ''quality score''

I am very excited about officially starting my Adwords campaign tomorrow. I also have a lot of ideas for articles and sections that I am about to create as well as a YouTube channel associated with my site and turn it into a whole online magazine.

Tips for Adwords Ads: http://www.addme.com/newsletters/issue269.htm

Getting started with Adwords ads: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1704392?rd=2