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