The internet of things (IoT) now connects so much of daily life it's hard to remember what things were like 23 years ago when it was just in its infancy. New internet connected devices are announced every day that will undoubtedly shape our futures of personal life and how we reach customers and conduct business. Although there are plenty of new tech toys announced every week, it's the smartphone which has changed how we manage our daily lives.
With all these changes happening in the world around us, it's hard to im... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What's good and what's bad? What works and what doesn't work? This is what I try to reveal every Friday as I work through my Flop Fix website reviews. I always start them with a Google search in a random town around the U.S. in search of an independent retail jeweler that could use a little help while also allowing me to publically explain what can be learned from their mistakes.
This week, I began my search for "jewelers Honesdale, PA" and saw these results:
This is my weekly #FlopFix website review. Each week, I find a random retail jeweler's website and suggest fixes that could make it better. I never know what I'll find when I start these reviews and I do my best to document my first impressions as I look at the site.
This week I'm venturing to Olympia, WA where I'll search Google for "jewelry stores in olympia wa." Here's a screen grab of the returned SERP:
Every week, usually on Friday, I write a website review. This week, I'm publishing my review a couple days early because I have something special planned for Friday. The goal of my website reviews is to dissect the online efforts for a random local retail jeweler. I don't bother reviewing the websites for chain stores because I want to illustrate how a local jeweler can improve a similar site like their own.
I find my website candidates by searching Google using the Chrome browser set to incognito mode. Incognito mode is good to use whe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A reader recently wrote in and asked if they should archive their sales notices on their website, or just delete them. There's no easy answer to this question because it all depends on how you made the announcement. Let's explore some of the reasons when and why to archive those notices.
Types of Notices
The question at hand is very general and does not specify if they wanted to archive a web page, a social media post, an email newsletter, or a sales email so I'll cover all three fo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I look for candidate websites that are not ranking very well in Google search results and dissect them to figure out why they are ranking poorly.
This week, I searched for "jewelry stores Florence, SC" to find that poorly ranked site. I found an interesting situation with the store Fisher Jewelers & Silversmiths that I'll investigate today. I first noticed the AGS listing for the store shown here:
For this week's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to a Daily Golden Nugget that's in desperate need of updating, specifically what I wrote about the Jewelry Information Center, otherwise known as the JIC. JIC was created by Jewelers of America as a consumer education service. The jic.org website commonly posted current jewelry trends and was a great inspiration resource ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Within the jewelry industry, I often hear about jewelry designers who take a break and put their business on hold while they reconsider their artistic direction or go back to school for additional training. Although it might seem like a simple idea to put a business on hold, how you present yourself online during your hiatus could have positive or negative ramifications on your future livelihood.
I've spoken to many jewelry designers who had a rough start with their busines... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to a very special #FridayFlopFix website evaluation. I call these weekly posts the "Flop Fix" because I specifically look for website problems, i.e. flops, for which I can offer improvement ideas, i.e. fixes, that everyone can learn from.
Well, this week is a doozy. I have been TRYING to publish this review every week since I ORIGINALLY wrote it back on December 16, 2015! Today is March 3, 2016; that's 11 weeks ago. There's a story behind this that should make you all cringe. Forewarning, I'm about to reveal some... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last month, I spent a lot of time analyzing the keyword data I collected during the 2015 holiday season. The information that surfaced was just the tip of the iceberg that I had, but it would take months to go through and write about it all, so I limited my analysis to the list this list:
Bloggers have an unyielding passion to write and share their expertise with the world. Unlike a freelance writer for hire that is paid to create an editorial, most passionate bloggers write because they care greatly about the topic, and many do it for free. Those of us who write for free are often disappointed by posts that don't get the attention we wish they did; after all our blog posts are our children and we want our children to grow up and be successful and not unacknowledged misfits.
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review here!
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week I've randomly chosen Santa Clarita, CA as the city to search for my review candidate. When I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers Santa Clarita, CA," I saw these three Google business listings:
In this #ThrowbackThursday nugget edition, I'm jumping back to a simple one from October 2010 about finding blogging topics.
Blogging has become the primary way of generating content for your website that search engines then use to better understand what your website is all about so they can correctly match you with the people searching for... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There's a trending website design idea that has its place, but that place is certainly not on your home page. Today, I'll explain what this website design trend is, what's good and bad about it, and how to use it.
Infinity Scrolling
Social media websites have changed the way we interact with website. Before Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, everyone thought that the internet was made up of individual web pages. But social networks g... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Tracking the most active social media content might seem silly, but there's real value to this activity. When you first start blogging or otherwise buildi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping way back to September 2010 to the topic of landing page planning, although I didn't specifically call it landing page planning back then.
Planning your landing page long before you need to use it is an important part of a successful online marketing strategy, but before I get in too deep of how to help with the success, let me just briefly explain what a landing page is.
Throughout the past month, I analyzed different sets of keywords that I collected during the 2015 holiday season. Most of that research focused on overall analysis of the keyword data without breaking it down into the desktop, mobile, or tablet categories of devices. I chose that approach to save time, and quite frankly, so as not to bore everyone with too much similar information.
That said, in this edition, I am splitting apart the results to show you how the u... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the last Daily Golden Nugget where I'll dive deeply into specific keyword phrases I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season. I've presented a lot of information over the last 30 days and I could spend another month sifting through it, but this stuff does get boring after a while when there's no specific goal in mind. That's an important thing to remember; it's best to perform your keyword research when you have a specific goal in mind. Every time I grind through keyword data, I seem to lose an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week I seek out a website that needs some help, and I make improvement suggestions. Most of the time, I simply do a random Google search for a jewelry store, sometimes I come across a store randomly during work, and sometimes one of my friends sends me a website that perplexes them.
What I'm presenting today is a continuation of the 2015 Holiday Season keyword data I presented yesterday. Today, I'm reviewing my findings about search queries that contained the phrase "engagement rings."
What I have here today is similar, yet very different to the "engagement ring" information I presented yesterday. Notice the difference in the query phrase between today's plural version an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For this week's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to April 2012 to the topic of jewelry designer line microsites. Specifically, I need to update my information about <iframes> and how their usage has changed over the 3.5 years since I wrote that original Nugget.
What is an <iframes>?
Iframes are standard HTML tags which allow you to take a website and make them appear within one ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, where I intentionally look for a jewelry website that has problems, and I make suggestions to correct them. This week I'm searching for "jewelers in Durham, NC" for my flop fix candidate. These are the Google results I had to choose from:
In this edition of the weekly website review, I'm venturing to Freeport, NY to look for a jeweler. My search begins in Google with the phrase "jewelers freeport new york." Here's a snapshot of the search results I saw:
This is the weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I work through these website reviews to give you real examples to learn from. It doesn't matter if the website is good or bad, there's always something to learn from.
I'm changing it up a little this week. Normally I search for the phrase "jewelry store" and a random town name, but not this week. In honor of this weekend's official kickoff of the Jewelers Equality Alliance<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of Throwback Thursday, I'm jumping back to September 2011 and the topic of Article Spinning.
To understand what Article Spinning is you must first understand the importance of having a blog on your website. My avid followers will already know that I'm all about the blogging. High value blogging content... High value blog content that you post on your main website!
I'm not sure if it's just me or general public awareness, but I feel that the subject of blogging has been a hot topic for the last two months. I think it started as a snowball effect because of this post where Robinson Meyer expla... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This Daily Golden Nugget is my 1,276th in a row. When I started this blogging journey nearly 5 years ago, I never expected where it would take me. Truthfully, every blogger begins their writing journey for personal reasons and we never know where we will end up.
Blogging is huge. The word blog has become the general term to represent all types of content creation that involves written words. When I started writing these Nuggets, I envisioned them only as email newsletters that would be archived online. I... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Throwback Thursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today I'm jumping back to Nugget number 55 and the topic of money sites.
The topic of marketing funnels came up during the 2015 JCK Talk on multi-channel marketing. The original idea of a marketing funnel was that you would reach a lot of people with a broad scope... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet is a very visual place. Photos, videos, memes, animated graphics, and company logos flood every social network. When used incorrectly, they also create clutter on websites.
One of the methods I use to gauge how often a website is updated is to look at the 3rd party logos used throughout the website. I'm especially critical of search engine optimization companies that tout their modern SEO services next to search engine logos that are more than 10 years old.
This is another edition of the Friday Website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to search out a random retail jeweler from around the U.S., and then I review their website.
I never know what I'm going to find when I start these reviews. My hope is that I can illustrate one of my previous Daily Nuggets with a live example.
My search began this week with the phrase "jewelers in Evergreen, CO" and saw this as my search results:
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back, almost to the beginning. My 8th Nugget was a really good idea for writing good online jewelry sales copy that I want to revisit today.
Blogging has passed through various evolutions in the years since its original inception in 1994. The first blogs were created to help people keep their friends up to date with what they were doing. Services like Open Diary, Slashdot, and LiveJournal we... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Using a contest to promote your company and build awareness is a viable method of marketing for any business.
During the past month, in preparation for Mother's Day, many retail jewelers held jewelry design contests. Typically this type of contest required a sketch of a pendant to be submitted to the jeweler through some method. The winner would have their pendant turned into reality by Mother's Day.
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to the topic of "thin content" that I first explained back in September 2011.
Thin Content Explained
In simple terms, thin content refers to a web page that has very few words on it. Google likes to refer to this content as pages "with little or... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday jewelry website review where I find a random retail jeweler and review their website for design, usability, and SEO. In each one of these reviews, my goal is to show how the information from my other Daily Golden Nuggets can be directly applied to a website.
This week, I'm using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode to search for "jewelers st joseph mo." Here's a snapshot of the results:
In this edition of #ThrowBackThursday, I'm jumping back to an old topic, and still a very valid topic explained in Daily Golden Nugget number 175 back on March 25, 2011... Adding new value to the internet.
Content, content, content! That's what Google wants. Countless numbers of official Google webmaster blog posts, videos, and presentations by Google employees at internet expos talk about the continual need to create new content.
This is the Friday Jewelry Website Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every week, I randomly choose and dissect a retail jeweler's website to see what makes it tick. I never know what I'm going to find each week; sometimes it's something new to learn or a refresher on topics I've previously written about.
To find this week's review candidate, I searched Google for "jewelry stores in Bridgeton, New Jersey" and was given this SERP:
Throwback Thursday is the name of a weekly internet trend where participants repost photos from the past. This is especially popular on Instagram where users tag their photos with the #TBT hashtag.
Truthfully, you can "throwback" anything that happened in the past. It could be a social media post, a photo, a blog post, or yes, even a Daily Golden Nugget!
Honestly, this is my first participation in a TBT, but what the heck; let's do it with a slightly different spin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What's your favorite type of content? Given that content includes written articles, videos, podcasts, photography, and every other type of creative digital experience. There's a labor cost associated with creating a digital experience for your customers, a cost that's not easily understood by small business owners.
There's also a competing value of the content that swings between the long term value to attract quality customers and the short term value of getting a lot of attention. S... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What is the real value of the content you produce? Should you be creating your own content or hiring someone to do it for you? What about content curation?
This is part 2 of my in-depth answers to those questions. I've identified 6 levels of content and list them here in order of their most valuable to least valuable:
1. Business Owner Creates Content 2. Business Owner Curates Content 3. Business Owner Socially Engages 4. Hire Content Creator or... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I proposed a few scenarios on how you could create content needed to attract customers to, and convert customers on your website.
Content marketing is a large part of the modern day business strategy, but the creation process is so long and expensive, that many business owners are ready to give up after t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'll be the first to admit the website content creation difficultly level is pretty high. Content includes infographics, photos, podcasts, PDFs, videos, testimonials, and, of course, the written word. It takes hours to prepare each of those types of content but the return on that time investment come in the form of several years of attracting customers throu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The word "organic" is used to indicate something happening naturally in its environment, without outside influence that is deemed to be artificial or controlled. A quick look at the organic page on Wikipedia and you'll see that there are 28 different phrases for organic used in the English language.
All of the phrases refer to some type of natural growth or living thing that is grown according to certain standards. Orga... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There are a few standard pages needed on all websites, like the Home, About Us, and Contact Us pages. Other pages become important depending on the business; a Directions/Locations page is important for a business with a physical location but it's probably useless if your business is 100% e-commerce.
Other common pages for retail jewelers include: * List of Designers * Services * Staff
Once we get past the 7 pages I've already mentioned, the need... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday jewelry website review where I randomly select and review the website of a retail jeweler. The goal is to dissect their online accounts to see how they might be ranking highly, and what they might be doing right, or wrong, with their online identity.
I use Google's Chrome browser in incognito mode when searching; otherwise the search results will be skewed based on my personalized search results and the top ranked sto... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It astounds me that people still offer first place Google ranking service. Every day I still receive at least one spam email which offers me to get first place ranking on Google if I hire them to improve the SEO of any of the domain names I manage.
I started writing these Daily Golden Nuggets more than four years ago and even before then, Google posted warnings saying how first place ranking could not be achieved by simply hiring someone. Their warning is VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is the Friday Daily Golden Nugget website review. Normally I search a random town name in the United States in search of a website review candidate. But for today, I decided to add a little holiday cheer and look for a town with a holiday related name.
I started with this list of holiday towns, but it turns out that most of those are "populated places" or ghost towns. It seems like many forefathers were willing to name towns after Christmas, but over the dec... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For the past several years, Google has been telling website owners to write quality content for their website in order to rank higher in search results and to satisfy customers. This directive of theirs has spawned an entire industry of freelance writers that produce content just to satisfy Google's directions.
The optimist in me wants to say that Google has spurred the creation of a new generation of writers, but the pessimist in me looks at the type of content that's generally created and sighs in discon... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I recently gave a seminar about website design and SEO to a local group of entrepreneurs in New Jersey. Although the presentation was mostly about what to watch out for when hiring a search engine optimization agency, there were a lot of questions about good website content versus bad website content.
One of the attendees started explaining her recent difficult experience with website design and a WordPress template. She's an established copy writer and content c... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, and it's a special one too! In honor of Halloween, I decided to search for a jeweler that would be in, or nearby any town with a Halloween themed name. Naturally the first part of this adventure was to locate some towns with Halloween related names. I found these...
The first one I found was Scary, West Virginia. No jewelers in that town but I did find a store called Elizabeth's Attic within about 5 miles. Honestly their website is downright scary, VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There have been a few special number nuggets so far, like the 100, 200, 404, the 505, the 970, 1000, and now the 1099. What's so special about 1099? Well in the United States, that isn't just a number; it's also the tax form you give to your freelancers and subcontractors at the end of every year instead of a W2.
Although the US employment rules say you should hire employees and put them on payroll, there are times when you might want to only hir... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday retail jewelry website review. Every week, I select a random location around the United States in search of a review candidate. The object of this review is to learn something that might be able to help you with your own website.
I always try to write the review with an unbiased point of view, and I especially hope that the jewelers reading this will use these reviews to better their online presence.
For this week, I'm using the search phrase "jewelry stores Waterlo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. My example will focus on specific items which we will build content around and share socially.
What I've written out in this guide will be good for anyone looking for a different approach to marketing for this upcoming holiday season. There's a lot of detail for the setup, implementation, and then the post-analysis of the entire campaign. You'll do the setup... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is the Friday Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of this review is to analyze a website for its good qualities, and bad, and to learn from it. Every week I choose a location in the United States from which to pluck a review candidate from.
This week I'm heading over to Albany, Georgia. What I remember most about my own visits to Georgia is the unstoppable kudzu. But today I'm less concerned with vines that grow 1 foot per day because I'm in need of a quality jewelry store.
The other day, I was helping a business colleague of mine review a website design his customer gave him. For storytelling simplicity, I'll refer to my colleague as Joe and his customer as Sue. Although Joe doesn't work in the jewelry industry, the early steps in designing a website are very similar across all industries, and I bet all website programming companies have the same experience working with their customers.
Sue wants to open a brand new e-commerce store by December 1st. She already owns an old e-commerce store w... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Content creation is a continual task for every website owner. It can also be a very challenging task to come up with new content all the time without suffering from mental burnout or writer's block. That burnout will have a bad effect on your long term SEO, so it needs to be prevented.
One way to prevent content creation burnout is to spread the task around between several employees on your sales staff. Remember that website content isn't just blog posts. Content... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Technical SEO is certainly something that computer scientists and programmers do best. Even though the technical SEO procedures are important, I don't often not... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In its simplest terms, search engine optimization is the process of doing something for your website that will help it to rank higher in search engines. Google maintains its dominance over the entire search engine industry because it keeps its users happy.
Users... Those are the everyday people of this world, like you and me, who keep returning to Google because it offers the best search results no matter which device you use. Google pays attention to what we all look for, how we use ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Website usability is always a point of contention between visual website designers, data analysts, and website owners. The website owner always wants their website to look good, the designer is always trying to satisfy the owner, and the data analysts seems to always be in a losing position of 2 against 1.
Of course, then there's the uncomfortable situation some months later when the website owner is upset that the website is not driving more business the way they had hoped. Usually this is when ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In my Nugget yesterday, I explained how you need to consider the longterm value of your SEO and SEM efforts to the overall process of building your brand.
That Nugget directly relates to today's topic of Keywords, specifically keyword density.
In yesterday's Nugget I explained how Google will penalize you if you try to game their search results. They are pretty strict about that now since working so hard to improve the w... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"...articles are easy to follow and seem to have information one can use right away." -Ann, Gallery 4, Hamden CT
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review 
Today is the Friday Daily Golden Nugget website review. Normally I search a random town name in the United States in search of a website review candidate. But for today, I decided to add a little holiday cheer and look for a town with a holiday related name.
