Week 10

Here is a link to mpowerpoint presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Uu946nHV5hmmmIMKvm1bxafFaDFd2yXtbWo3Y3Wube0/edit?usp=sharing

This week has been one of our busiest and best weeks yet. I am so excited to share with you all what I've been up to :) 

In chronological order, my week started with the launch of our Group 60% off ad. We had previously done a deal with Groupon that had completely, and I mean completely tanked, so we lowered our price again and hopefully things will pick up soon. We also worked on our Fractus Learning site bio ( I've been ghost writing for my boss David so that's what the name is under). Ghost writing simply means writing for someone else. While it's definitely prohibited in school and other environments, it's a little different for bloggers. Most often, blogs have a certain audience to appeal to. So while the content might not matter as much, the image of the writer does. For example, a site that focuses mostly on Scottsdale Dads would want an article written by a dad, no matter the topic. . So here is our published blog post. I am so happy with how it looks. Plus, it's another backlink for our website!! 

We also started up our Woobox sweepstakes! We shared it on our CodaKid page and I made sure to personally share it on my Facebook as well. What it does is people can enter to win a free online course by submitting their emails. So while we're collecting emails for our list, they have a chance to win something.. and it also works as some sort of advertisement-- so people see and actually might want to buy our product!!

I also spent my last day working on the website-- and got to learn a lil bit about what website editing is by doing some basic stuff like rearranging the drop down menu to make our camp types and locations clearer to users. I also made a list of even more blog sites that might potentially let us guest blog for them. 

It's really been an amazing week and I'm so glad I have the opportunity to learn some marketing, some blogging, and some website editing skills! 

Week 9

It's been another great week at CodaKid, it's sad to think this SRP is almost over :(

This week has been super interesting! We spent the majority of Tuesday working on our guest blog post. Since we wanted it to be completely original we stuck to what we knew best - coding. We also found an article from a well known blogger on how to make interesting titles and found a couple of our next post ideas that way! Since we submitted our article the day before it was due, the editor will publish our piece next week. ( I'm also going to pitch one of our upcoming article to a bigger website so we can get backlinks and some press!! :) )

I also spent some time improving our press page and adding in links to all the press releases we have done since CodaKid opened. This is because since we hired a PR firm, we are going to release a public press release in the coming weeks! We'll be able to add that link when we have it released but this is the first time CodaKid has done something like this ever, so I'm very excited.

We've also had an increase in sales for camps and classes! At least 10 per day which is incredible compared to last year ( I don't have the exact number for that but I'll try and make a comparison for next year). Also, here's a look at two of our PPC ( pay per click) campaigns that we set up on Perfect Audience:

You can see how many people have seen it ( Impr.) which I find awesome and how many clicks back to the site each add has. It goes to show that ads take a lot of volume to get people clicking and actually going back to our site.

Can't wait to share more with you guys next week!!

Eve

Week 8

Today concludes another great week at CodaKid! Although I spent most of my Wednesday in crutches ( a running injury from Tuesday), we still managed to get a lot of stuff done!

Our week started off by setting up a portal on a site called educents. This site hosts different companies and products and is like a more specific amazon. In this case, educents provides more educational products for children in elementary, middle, and high school as well as teachers and parents. I was happy to set up our online store there so I could get some hands on experience. We put up our online course and added tags so that users that searched for specific age ranges could find us more easily! This is a great addition for us because it allows us to reach a wider audience, and get our name out even more! We also started application for portals/guest features on other sites like certifikid and homeschoolbuyersco-op!

We also made our first Facebook promoted post, which got 99 likes and 19 shares-- our highest stat so far. What really made me happy was that our post contained my latest blog post, which you can find here! But that's not all we did in terms of advertising! After waiting on one of our guys to set up our Perfect Audience account, we decided to take matters into our own hands. Real quick if you don't remember what that is-- it tracks the amount of visitors on each page you want ( you have to specify it), and you can create campaigns with targeting ads that are specified to people that visit certain pages. For example, we set up some banner ads to be shown to users that have clicked on our online page website. This ad contains a discount for our classes ( 40% off for a limited time). We've been tracking it for the last day and a half but we should start seeing some results soon :)

Another exciting event... Fox News came by and interviewed my boss! I wasn't included mainly bc I was wearing shorts for my bandaged knee and was on crutches, but it was super cool to see an interview taking place!

See you next week for more updates :) 

Week 7

It's been a fun week at CodaKid! We got our full sized banners in, which we will be able to hang at a couple BASIS locations ( Peoria, Awhatukee, and Oro Valley), so that parents and students can gain awareness about our summer camps this upcoming june! Here's a picture I took of the banner: 

We also focused on something new this week: Guest Blogging. What this consists of is writing a relevant article on someone else's blog. It gives you some nice back links which are highly important in terms of popularity: the more back links you have, the greater presence you have throughout the internet! Guest blogging allows for you to write an article about a trending topic that has to do with your company/work, and maybe reference a couple products of yours. Our aim was to gather a list of bloggers and sites with a large follower base and send emails that included a pitch for a story we could write for them. While we do have some big names like Huffington post on our list, we decided to start out a little smaller. We emailed Fractus Learning about possibly guest posting and they agreed! We have a deadline set up, and we'll be writing an original piece by April 14th! While we can't blatantly advertise our company, we'll mention it towards the end of the article :)

I also finally published a blog post, and this time, we set it up in a way to show that I wrote the post. You can check it out here if you want. The reason we've taken so long is because we have a rather lengthy editing process. We often change the content around so that we get the tone we want. The tone is, as many of you know, a huge part of the piece, and we want to make sure that our content appeals to the right audience-- most often parents. 

We're working on publishing a couple more blog posts next week-- a lot of our ideas were being finalized this last week as well. But I also finished the week with something I'd been working on for a while now: a press page!! Now, if you don't remember what that is, it's basically a page on your website with links to all the online/ print articles you've ever been featured in. It serves, in a way,  to show how much publicity you've had not only to customers, but also to other news sources, mainly because when we are sending out pitches for news stories, we include a link to our press page so they have an idea of the direction to go in. Feel free to check it out here. 

Thanks so much for reading guys and I'll see you next week :)

Eve

Week 6

After a nice, week long break ( filled with naps and food adventures) from CodaKid, I was eager to return to the office and see what had gone on while I was out.

My last day before break, my boss David had received a couple of design ideas for a new company logo. We had a slight problem with the original: the little character next to CodaKid in our previous logo looked a little bit too much like our dear friend, the poop emoji. And once you see that, you really can't unsee it. So after weeks of office discussions( getting the whole staff involved in this process was really fun), we finally picked a new logo. It'll be up in a week or so, but we're also redesigning our landing page so until then the old logo is still up.

We decided to do this because we wanted to look more professional and organized. A lot of our competitors have landing pages that are more appealing to the visitors than ours. So we stepped up our game! A big part about rising up in the ranks and in the eyes of buyers is about appearance. Having a sub-par website can be detrimental, especially if it's where most of our traffic comes from.  We also hired a PR firm last week. Why?

Because we decided we were going to take our online courses to the next level- not only are we advertising on Google ( which, by the way, we are almost ready to launch.. I finalized some details for the template on Wednesday), and Perfect Audience ( a site we are using to create our own PPC ads based on the hits off of our website), but also on other stores like Amazon, and eBay, amongst many others. 

A problem we encountered was the fact that we might need to sell an actual, physicsl product to send to those who had purchased our course. But since we aren't going to use CDs ( RIP CDs), we designed a  box to send that includes a promo code to use on our website! We'll be launching those in the coming months. 

And finally, another important aspect of my week has been writing blog posts. We haven't published a post since early March, but, that doesn't mean I have been writing them. There's 3 currently waiting on a final edit by my boss before they are sent out! So, as far as our traffic goes for the blog on our site this month, I'm expecting a decrease in views, unfortunately. But that's nothing we can't work on in the coming weeks and the month of April!!

Thanks for reading guys, and I'll see you next week!!

Eve

Week 5

Time flies by when you like what you're doing, and I can't believe we're already at the end of week 5!! 

What we started off with this week was a conference call with Google's advertising department. This was a follow up from Mr.Dodge's meeting with them when he flew out to California a couple weeks ago. While we used what we had discussed with Viktor the week before, about the design and the size of banners, what we got from the call was mainly a confirmation, a little bit of information, and the okay to go to the next steps. 

The jist of the meeting was about what each side had to do in order to get the PPC ads running, how long would it take in order to run them, if we should do the writing and design or if they had someone there that was going to do that. So, we will be designing our banner ads, they will be writing the actual PPC ads, and the entire process can be done in no shorter than 3 days. Which, in my opinion, is very fast! We told them we wanted to focus mainly on our online courses division due to the fact that we believe it has the biggest potential for success.

Something else that was hidden in the call was a kind of test, to see if we were actually going to bring in any money for them. We mentioned that one of our biggest ( if not the biggest) competitor ( who also used Google Ads) had reached out to us and wanted to meet so they could talk to us about how great of a job we were doing, and how interested in our company they were-- our contact at Google got a little flustered, meaning that he probably got the confirmation he needed that we would bring in success. We're not quite sure if the company was simply spying on us or if they are genuinely interest in what CodaKid does, but only time will tell I guess.  

I spent the rest of the time this week working on a long term marketing plan, detailing exactly how much time to spend on what and what were the biggest priorities, as well as how to measure the success rate of each one. While this plan might take the next couple months to set into action, I'm eager to start working on it now. Today was also spent talking about our blog. David and I had some differences in regards to the tone of our blog-- something very important in terms of our readers. Do we want to write as a formal 3rd person objective or take on  a more casual tone? We talked about our competitors blogs, and the image we wanted to create for ourselves. We ultimately decided on keep a more 3rd person, detached tone, but still try and appeal to parents and have a slight conversational edge. 

That's it for this week, but thanks guys for reading!

Week 4 part 2

The second part of my week was spent discussing our website reports for the month of February. This means we actually got to see the number of users going on our site, what specific pages, for how long.. and what I'm most excited about.. what blog post did people go on most.
( side note: here's that picture of my initiation at CodaKid)

Our dear friend Viktor (from my last post), sent us this report as well.

The statistics actually made me very happy:

• 38.99% increase in website traffic
• 31.7% increase in Organic Search Traffic ( aka no ads were used to attract users)
• 46.01% increase in new users
• 27.95% increase in returning users

and my favorite stat ( this is what I've been working on since I started)

• 972.73% increase in social media traffic

Which means, more people are seeing the blog,  Facebook, and Twitter posts we're posting!!

By far our most successful blog post has been our Parent's Guide to Minecraft post, with over 200 views!

We also got to track our top refferal websites and funnily enough... my blogspot was on the second page due to all the links I have on here LOL! 

I can't wait to create more content so we can get our stats up for March!

I also spent today sending out Pitch ideas to local news reporters so we can get some press coverage for our summer camp this year. We were mentioned in a couple articles last year from AZ Central, Fox 10, and 3TV )

Tune in next week for more!

Week 4

Hi everyone!

This week really proved to be successful and entertaining!! My friend Alex and I also decided we would have an eating tour of Old Town Scottsdale during my lunch breaks! We started off with Chop Shop on Thursday. But any who, let's get to the details..

On Tuesday, Mr.Dodge and I had a call business call with Viktor, someone that works closely with us on the design for our website. The main topic of our call was PPC ads ( also known as pay-per-click ads). Since my boss visited Google headquarters while in California last week, he got to meet a team that had selected him and the CodaKid company to work with them for their advertising department ( which they had recently switched from hiring a third party to make all the ads found on Google to doing it themselves).

 The way PPC ads work is that they use the caches found and show ads based on what the user is interested in. We have to different ways of going about this. The first one is through Google, where we would simply need to know the measurements of the ad so we can best design and fit our wording ( that is, if we have to do this ourselves.. we still aren't sure but we have a meeting next Wednesday to discuss it-- we just wanted to run it by Viktor first). Our different ads would show up based on what the user is searching. For example, if a user searches ' kids coding summer camp', Google would track this and show that user ( who has now cached this phrase), an ad for a CodaKid summer Tech camp.

Our second way would be through a site called Perfect Audience. It tracks users on our websites and shows them ads based on what 'landing page' they went to. If user A goes and looks at the page for our online course... they're going to get an ad for our online course, not just a random CodaKid ad about our summer camp. The more specific we make our ad to landing page correlation, the more specified ads the user will get!

On my next post, I will discuss the website traffic for the month of February!

Week 3

This week at Codakid proved to be very productive! The staff and my boss are always very friendly and this week I was even asked to take a picture with a fake mustache on so I could be " officially" initiated!

 While I work 3 5 hour days a week, I still manage to get a lot accomplished. One of our big highlights this week was the national press we received via Twitter. A company called Tech Co wrote an article about 13 start ups to watch out for in the Phoenix area. This was amazing due to being the first piece of press we were mentioned in that was national ( all of our previous mentions were from magazines based here in the Valley). We made sure to retweet it, and mention it on Google +. Now, I know you must be thinking, oh Google Plus is dead, no one ever checks it! Well, you're not wrong. But a little trick not everyone knows, is that when we post something to Google Plus, the Google search engine will pick it up a couple days before it would pick up an article posted on Facebook or Twitter. That way, when we write about it on Google +, only a couple hours later will we see it on the results page-- which can tremendously help when you're trying to get the word out about your company.

A problem we encountered was that we were getting caught up in the little, day to day problems we faced. Meaning, whatever that day threw at us, we would handle. Now, that's not all bad but when you want to look at the big picture, it might be easy to get distracted. So, we decided to add onto our  marketing plan: I now have a table of over 10 blog posts I plan to publish by the mid April. Now, that might sound a little useless, but planning is everything. The deadlines and topics are set, and I now feel like I won't run out of ideas -- it was starting to feel like that because it's hard to come up with different articles about Minecraft and Coding all day.. but I made it work :D

While we didn't post any blogs last week, my last day of week 3 I spent working on 3 different blog posts for CodaKid. After some proof reading we should be able to publish them all within this upcoming week. I believe we will also be working on Pay-per-click ads.. so tune in next week for more!!

Eve

Week 2

Hi everybody,

After my second week at CodaKid, I feel a lot more comfortable working in the office. While a setback was still occurring with the online courses I mentioned last week, we still made a lot of progress. We worked on another blog post and a press kit- both of which I will discuss in greater detail later in this post.

What Mr.Dodge wanted me to focus on a little each day was an ongoing article called the 100,000 dollar challenge. This series of posts created by Neil Patel details the process of creating a start up and getting it to 100,000 in revenue within its first year of existence. Each monthly update discusses exactly what steps were made to achieve their monthly goal. Interestingly enough, more than half the year given for the project was spent on marketing and getting content out to the public without even
releasing a product to buy. This really shows the importance of consistent blogging and gaining a follower base- as well as organic search results. Organic search means users were going through a search engine and finding content from the blog with no references or links.

This really pushed us to think about how much content we should be getting out their in order for Google and other search engines to be finding our blogs and SEO ( search engine optimization) words in order to get our blog content up from page 7 to page 1 of the Google Search! So this week, we released a blog post that had to do with parent's understanding Minecraft, to get content out about Java Coding ( yes, there is a section on that within the article-- we want to include content that is relevant to what we do).

On top of this, I also started creating content for a press kit. What's a press kit? It's basically a page on your website where you list some information about your company, your product, your staff, and mention all the articles you have been featured in. This allows for further reporters that want to write a segment about you to get a concise image in their mind about your company-- and give them some inspiration for their article or news segment.

Next week I plan on publishing even more content for the blog, and hopefully write about the online class as soon as the technical issues have been resolved, so that we can create more awareness. We also have some website changes planned, so that when customers want to buy our online course, they are not distracted with our current main page, because it focuses more on the local aspect of the company. We want to change this so that the company can branch out into more national than local news.

Thanks again for reading and see you next week!

Eve

Week 1

Hello, again!

This concluded my first week of interning at CodaKid, alongside Mr.Dodge ( with the both of us making up the entirety of the marketing department).  After showing me around the office and explaining what we would spend the majority of my internship doing, we made sure we were on the right track for our goals( which I will discuss in a little bit), and also by answering this question:

What's the best way to market efficiently?

Having an active plan of action and carrying through.

My mentor and I created a short term plan for the next week in order to promote the two most important products both short term and long term for the company, a summer camp and a set of online classes, respectively.  We decided to write a blog post once every two weeks, with our first one coming out last Thursday-- which you can find here. This blog post allowed us to introduce our lineup of Summer Tech Camp lessons-- which had almost completely sold out last summer.

We are also planning to write a Facebook post and an email blast to all our subscribed members. The program we use for the e-blasts is called MailChimp, which allows us to sort out lists of members in any way we like ( for example, I had to send out an apology email to around 150 customers who replied too late to an email and could not sign up for a beta class this last saturday ( 2/13)), in a very efficient manner and send out emails to large numbers of people without doing too much manual work.

The plan for this oncoming week is to start promoting the online classes. Why online? Because in order for this particular start up to grow, simply having classes locally is not going to attract as many customers as we would want because we are limiting ourselves to one location- the Phoenix Metropolitan. Many of our competitors- including IdTech and Youth Digital- made their way to success through their online lessons.

Branching out of the Valley and finding success in other parts of the valley would mean a successfully growing business-- something that relies heavily on the marketing department and making sure we can reach audiences far and wide. I will also be working on re-targeting ads this week-- ads that bases their content off of a user's recently looked up history.

I will make sure to keep you all updated!!

Eve

January 21st: Introductory Post

Hello, everyone!

My name is Eve Fabre, and I am a senior at BASIS Scottsdale High School. This blog is dedicated to my Senior Research Project, an internship and research opportunity available for the third trimester of my senior year. I will be working on this project from February through May, and keeping this blog active as a way of sharing with you what I will be doing. At the end of my ten weeks here, I will be presenting this project in order to graduate with High Honors. My project will revolve around marketing through social media, and how to effectively gain a customer base for a start up company.

I have always wanted to study business, and the interpersonal relations required to work alongside others to keep a company thriving. With the age of technology thriving all around us, marketing as we know it has been shifting. The way advertising used to work is through “ Bullhorn Advertising”, which simply means advertising far and wide to the mass public and hoping to attract customers.

However, many teenagers and adults can filter out many unwanted ads on social media, as easily as ad-block or just following people and companies that interest them. This is how inbound marketing was created. Companies using the process use specific keywords in their advertising, videos, or product naming in order to appeal to a certain audience that the company and product are targeting. Since not all companies want to target the same audience, I will be focusing on researching which media platforms are best used in order to attain a specific customer base.

I chose to work as a marketing intern for a start-up business that teaches kids how to code using popular video games such as Minecraft to build a stable base for children and teens to develop a passion for coding. I will be working side by side with Mr. Dodge, the owner of Codakid. My day to day schedule will revolve around sending media blasts to different on different networks, including email, Twitter, and Facebook and seeing the different levels of response, while also building marketing plans to keep those several social network accounts active and thriving. I will also be analyzing data, and studying competitor's techniques to see how we can improve our marketing.

I hope you find this as interesting as I do and cannot wait to keep sharing my journey with you all!