Week 2 Recap: I Took the Long Route
This weekly recap is a part of the “Experiencing the Digital Marketplace” experiment involving creating and advertising for a drop shipping website for the duration of December 2020. If something you see piques your interest or if you want to learn more about what I accomplished, feel free to look around!
Please visit the following links to my Weekly Recaps!
The best place to start this recap is by providing my set goals for this week at the beginning of the project.
Week 2 Goals:
Create a landing page.
Link webpage to Google Analytics.
Publish website.
Create one advertisement (most likely Facebook or Instagram Ads).
Start incorporating Zapier to automate my workload.
Day 3 or 4 review traffic/analytical data.
Create and send out email questionnaires.
Write a blog post focusing on the products offered.
Write a blog recapping the week.
Record a Loom video to show what I did and how I did it.
I created a landing page for my project. You can see it here. I did not link Google Analytics to my Shopify website because Shopify supplies an analytics tool itself. I did publish my website with zero snags! I created one advertisement for Facebook, but Facebook would not allow it. I had to manually go through each product and change the Country of Origin to the USA. After doing this, the issue was resolved!
I did create a Zap (automation sequence using Zapier) connecting Google Docs to a Medium account. This makes it so that when I finish a blog post I do not have to copy and paste it into Medium, but move it to a folder in Google Docs and it will create an unpublished draft in Medium! This saves me time having to copy, paste, and restructure my writing. However, the one issue I find with this is the Google Doc can’t have a list (bullet nor number), or else the list becomes scrambled.
Though I’m not certain, I think this is due to Medium’s limited editing functions.
I have reviewed my analytical data, but with the delay in publishing my Facebook Advertisement, this needs moved to Week 3. This includes the email portion of my goals, considering I saw zero traffic to my subscription pop-up or website. Again, this will be moved to Week 3.
I created two blog posts:
What I accomplished but didn’t include in my goals
Facebook and Instagram
I created both a Facebook and Instagram account for my website. I forgot to add these to my goals for the week but managed to include making Ads for these platforms. Here’s my advice to those who want to create Facebook or Instagram Ads: make sure to create your business page first because you cannot make ads without one!
Mailchimp
I created a pop-up subscription function for my website using Mailchimp. Shopify allows you to create a landing page but it requires coding and can take time. I have previous experience with Mailchimp and saw they offer a pop-up subscription sign-up and decided to give it a shot. The whole process took less than 10 minutes to complete. I then connected Mailchimp to Shopify by using the app integration ‘ShopSync’.
The only snag I experience was having it pop-up every time someone visited the website. After reviewing the connection and settings in Mailchimp, I found out they made a recent product update and you needed to accept the changes for the integration to work.
I also created a ‘thank you’ email for new subscribers that includes a 5% discount code! I figured this will increase sales and offer some insight into the analytics of my pop-up subscription form.
Conclusion:
This week brought many speed bumps. I wish things went smoothly, but hey, the best lessons are the ones from experience!
Make sure to stop by and read my Week 3 Recap next week!
