Shanghai Cuisine Tours

This new venture that my boss has got me working on has been a good experience so far. I've been working with web-designers and programmers to try to improve the web presence of 3 Dumplings (and to improve the actual content on the site itself, it still needs some help), but it's too soon to tell if anything that I've done has made a difference. Hopefully site traffic will pick up here in the next couple weeks as search engines crawl it and include it in people's searches for things related to the services we offer. I really enjoy working with web-based companies. My internship with Athletes' Performance last summer in Boston was what originally sparked my interest in getting involved online. My boss, Ace Bhattacharjya was a great mentor and taught me a lot about online initiatives. CorePerformance.com was a fun project to work on for a few months. After my experience there, I created PMMCornholes.com and RodtrimInteriors.com for my father and I (the latter needs a lot of work, still). This past spring, at school, I had a chance to help a close friend improve his web presence for his landscaping company - WasmerBros.com, and that was my first real time spent with Google Adwords. So now, I'm taking everything that I've learned from these 4 experiences and combining it to hopefully provide beneficial results for 3Dumplings.com. So far, I think I've been pretty successful.

As of now, I have created 5 Adwords campaigns for 3 Dumplings; one for Shanghai Cuisine Tours, one for Shanghai Market (Shopping) Excursions, one for Chinese Cooking Classes, one for Shanghai Nightlife Tours, and the last one is an image ad campaign which will be advertised on websites outside of Google, what is called the 'Google Display Network,' (sites such as about.com, food.com. nytimes.com, businessweek.com, youtube.com, gmail, fandango.com, cheapflights.com, entrepreneur.com, and many more) and will come up on these sites when things like 'Travel, Nightlife, Shopping, or Cooking Classes' are part of the content on the site. Here's the image ad I created, we may use this, or go with something else that a more experienced graphic designer can come up with :-) I wish I knew a thing or two about Photoshop...

None of the campaigns have been launched yet, but they're ready to go. We're waiting to see what kind of traffic comes to the site on a regular basis without the help of advertising, so that we have some base-data to compare our future advertising efforts to. Essentially, the main goal is to drive traffic to the site and, in doing so, hopefully getting customers to purchase some of our tour offerings. One tool that we're using to gauge our traffic and our visitors is Google Analytics. It's a marvelous tool that Google offers (one of many) and it's entirely free. If you have a website or blog or something and you're not running Google Analytics, you really ought to consider it. It's easy to install and it allows you to see how many people are visiting your site, what they're looking at on your site, where they're coming from, and more. You can set goals that you want to achieve, and for someone running adwords campaigns, like myself, you can see what keywords people are typing in to find you. This allows us to narrow our keyword selections for future campaigns. Google Analytics has graphs, charts, all kinds of cool gadgets, I'm on it every day.

On a different topic...

I have yet to get my hair cut. The plan is to go tomorrow around dinner time. Today, my Mandarin tutor taught me some words and phrases that should allow me to successfully communicate what I want done to my hair, so I guess we'll see how that pans out for me!

I want to send out a special thanks to the new viewers of my blog :-) Hopefully you've had a chance to catch up and you've learned all about what I have been up to over here in Shanghai! It's been quite the adventure (many adventures), and I'm having a blast. Stay tuned for more posts soon!

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PMM