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!