During the jWAG Live 1 event, I was approached by John S. Cryan IV who stated, "Matt, you seem to be a Google Lover," to which I replied, "my data tells me more than 95% of jewelry store traffic comes from Google, so why shouldn't I be?"
As of today, the statistic is down to 89.7% with Yahoo holding on at 4.2% and Bing up to 3.8%.
89.7% of traffic is a lot, and that's why the Google+ Project is going to be so valuable for jewelry stores. It's going to be very easy to attract customers from some other area of Google right into your Plus account.
It seems like the invitation feature for Google+ is still working, so just reply to this post if you'd like me to send an invite. When you get the invite, DO NOT create a business account. Business accounts are not available yet. You need to do this as yourself.
Getting in at this early stage gives you the advantage of learning the system and establishing yourself with some details about your store, yourself, and sharing content to Circles you create.
Facebook gives you the ability to organize your friends in Lists, but they make this feature hard to find and almost useless. Instead of giving you the ease to filter your own News Feed, they created a mathematical way to figure out how important someone is to you and whether or not you want to see their posts in your News Feed.
Everything you share on Facebook is shared to all your friends. This makes things difficult at times because at a fun backyard barbeque, you need to maintain a mental filter of any photos you are tempted to upload. You don't want anything incriminating to be shared with your customers, do you?
Google is taking a completely different approach. They are forcing you classify your friends into Circles when you add them. At first, I thought this feature was horrible waste of time. Since I deal with marketing every day, I simply want to build lists of name quickly, but I also need to have my lists organized. Reorganizing after a list is created always takes longer than if I would simply take the extra 10 seconds to classify users as they come in.
Google+ Circles will force us all to become better online marketers.
The Circles concept also forces segregated sharing of information. If you choose to publicly argue with a family member, that will stay contained within your family circle. If you choose to post photos from your barbeque, they can be visible only to your friends. If you insist on debating politics, you can share that with friends and family and not alienate half of your customers who disagree with you. And finally, when you have something special to offer from your business, you would share it with just your "Customer Circle."
I noticed this morning that any website links shared publicly are ranking very well in SEO. It looks like, at least for right now, Google+ is not using the nofollow attribute on links. This is good news for link building, so get on there and share a few pages of your website in the Public Circle.
When Google+ opens publicly, your customers will wonder what it's all about and will go searching for people they know. If you set up your profile now, share things, and interact, you will surely attract your customers when they join at the early stages.
Thanks for reading,
Matthew Perosi
Founder
Jeweler Website Advisory Group
