Over the last 6 months I've been writing a lot about the importance of associating all of your marketing channels together. Your website is the cornerstone of your marketing because that's where you can fully control the user experience, but social networks, offline ads, and online ads should now tie together to create a road of intriguing discovery for your customers.
While I've been following the ins and outs of exactly how to build that path of discovery, and explained it to you, I've not been following that path myself. Since July 27, 2010 I'v... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I have a love/hate relationship with the placement of social network icons on a website. Some websites have them in their header and some put them in the footer. In this Golden Nugget, I'll give you my point of view of where and why you should place your social icons.
Are They Important Enough?
Back when MySpace and Friendster were the latest craze, it seemed like everyone was adding large icons for those networks to their website header. Websites without those icons were made to feel like... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
How can you accurately decide when to post to social media when there are many reports, infographics, and varying online advice on what time of day and how often to post to social networks? So many contradictory reports make it difficult to know what advice is the best advice.
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I find a random retail jewelry stores and review their website in hopes that we'll be able to learn something from the process. I call this a "Flop Fix" because I specifically look for websites that are making mistakes, i.e. flops, so I can suggest fixes.
Here's the search results I saw this week when I searched Google for "jewelry stores Elko, NV":
Your success on social media is related to the amount of time you spend engaging with your customers. I like to think of social media as the online version of a business networking event. Plenty of people attend business networking events with grand notions of meeting new business partners only to get there and stand on the sidelines, or quietly sit at a table without working the room.
At some local networking events, you might have the opportunity to hand out ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The year 2015 is about to come to a close, but before it does, I'm venturing out on a limb to give you my forecast insights for 2016. This year, I'm referring to these as "insights" and not necessarily as "predictions" because these things are what I already see happening in a small way, and steadily growing. They are in no particular order...
Social Media Change with the Young Generation
The current teenage generation is struggling to hide from their parents online. Many of them want nothing to do with Facebook because the grown-... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For today's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping to the topic of buying your friends, or more specifically, not buying them.
Buying Website Links
There are plenty of online services offering to increase the traffic to your website, increase the number of links pointing to you website, increasing the number of Twitter followers you have, and increasing the number of people who like your Facebook page. More often than not, these services ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
One month ago today, I introduced the 2015 Holiday Run-Up with the premise that this year you could create several specialized marketing campaigns, or micro-campaigns, focused on singles products or groupings of products. Implementing the micro campaigns would require lots of product photography, correctly targeting your customers, writing lots of product content, sharing that product content to social media, coordinating... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The time needed to manage social media can easily eat up most of your day. Over the last few weeks, I've detailed a lot of social media tactics in this 2015 Holiday Run-Up series. If you've missed out on the discussion so far, then go back to the beginning here and catch up.
I've covered topics of Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram so far in this Run-Up to the 2015 Holiday season. This is my 14th installment in this special Daily Golden Nugget series to help you boost your 2015 holiday sales.
If you're just joining in for the first time, then you should review the outline of this series I explained here. I'... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The purpose of this website review is to look over a random retail jeweler's website to evaluate if they are correctly applying what we know about the internet, online marketing, and business. We'll see if improvements can be made, or if we can learn something from them.
Each week I start by searching Google in a random town for a typical phrase that a consumer would search for. This week the search phrase is "jewelers logan ut," and he... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Jennifer Shaheen, President of Technology Therapy Group was among those speakers chosen to present at the 2015 JCK Las Vegas show. Jennifer and I are industry colleagues and we share 99% of the same point of view about the internet and how retail jewelers should be using it for their marketing.
This is the Friday website review where I search for a jeweler in a random town around the United States then review their website. By reviewing a live site, I'm usually able to highlight good and bad points that we can all learn from.
For this week, I wanted to find a retail jewelry store in Laguna Beach, California. Here's the SERP when I googled "jewelers in Laguna Beach, California":
Jewelers are in the business of helping couples get to the moment when they profess their love and vow "til death do us part."
Few relationships are intended to last forever, or even a lifetime, but when you get into bed with a business partner, you are rarely thinking about the day when you will break up. When you're in business for yourself, you should be making forward steps to improve your business, but also prepare yourself to different possible future outcomes.
Social networking is supposed to allow you to be more social. When you typically think of social networking, you are probably thinking about ways to connect with your customers, and how to engage them in order to influence their future buying habits.
In all the talk about social networking to marketing your business, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you can use social networking for your own enjoyment and education.
It's an annoying system that doesn't seem to make any sense, but yet hundreds of thousands of businesses use it in their marketing every day.
It's almost a year since last we gave you an in-depth discussion of Twitter. If you have yet to join Twitter then you should review the archived Daily Golden Nuggets from a year ago. The links are at the bottom of this Nugget.
What we'd like to review today is more data provided by Dan Zarrella with HubSpot.com which is referenced on this infographic: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/science-of-social-timing-1/
According to @danzarrella you can increase traffic to your website if you tweet and share a link at least 1 time (no more than 4 times) per hour. In fact, Dan shows that when you consistently Tweet 1 shared link per hour you can create a 350% incre... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every year your mail boxes are filled with holiday cards from friends, family, and sometimes even business relations who want to simply say how important you are to them. The typical "Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year" are among the common phrases inside holiday greeting cards.
Your Facebook Likes, email subscribers, Twitter followers, and Google+ Circles are supporting your business, and are very important to you as well. A message of holiday cheer and heartfelt warmth can make their holiday a little happier.
Sending messages to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are easy and you shouldn't feel worried about message overload during the last days of the season. On the other hand your email subscribers might be getting tired of hearing from you by the time December 20th comes around.
It's the season of giving. Combine that with the social web and you could come up with some creative ideas to weave through your website, email, Facebook, and Twitter marketing. If all your holiday marketing is simply attempting to sell, you will quickly lose your audience, so how can we spice up your website and email messages?
A good place to start is to think about what people do during the holidays other than buy gifts. They get together with family, catch up with friends, decorate their homes inside and out, watch seasonal movies and TV shows, bake, sing carols, and anything else you can think of. What are your traditions during the Holiday Season?
Actually that's a good question to ask on your Facebook Page: What are your Holiday Traditions? You could even make it a contest and have every shared story entered int... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As mentioned a few days ago, American Express is trying to popularize Saturday, November 26, 2011 as the day when people should go out and buy local, not online, and not from big brand stores. This is the 2nd year in a row they are promoting it and they call it "Small Business Saturday."
Those looking to support their local community will visit the stores they already know about. Other shoppers might make an extra effort to read their local newspaper or direct mail circulars and ValPak, Money Mailer, or similar ad mailers.
Smartphones are everywhere and we are already inside the mobile age. Mobile websites are a thing of "today" not "tomorrow." However, if you don't have one yet there are still many things you can do to beef up the chances of being found on Small Business Saturday.
Black Friday emails continue to surge every year. According to Responsys.com there was a 67% increase in Black Friday emails in 2010 from previous years.
Black Friday shopping starts very early in the day, so if you're planning on sending an email that day you need to send it out at 3AM or 4AM local time so shoppers are reminded of your deals and include you in their shopping schedule.
Here are some suggested subject lines for Black Friday, a few of which come from Responsys.com.
"Wake Up! Don't Miss BLACK FRIDAY DEALS" "Black Friday Deal Buster Specials on Jewelry" "Black Friday Only - Free Necklace with every Pendant"
Naturally that last suggestion of a free necklace would be a loss leader. Take a look at yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget for some recommendations on low cost suppliers.
Today we're going to give you some ideas for email and website content that you should launch on the Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving. That's 2 weeks from today, so if you jump on this right now, you can still get it done.
To begin, we'd like you to take a moment and think about all the emails your vendors have sent you in the past week or so. This year it seems like many vendors are promoting their low-cost jewelry lines. These low-cost lines include silver charms, woven jewelry, alternative metals, and we've seen a few specials on traditional jewelry including pearls.
Black Friday shoppers will probably be more interested in finding gift items for people on their list than directly interested in spending time looking at your expensive ring showcase; so stay focused on the holiday buyers on Black Frida... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'd like to tell you a little story today, and with it perhaps a little education lesson. To begin, I ask you to sit on the floor around this old black and white television...
Saturday August 6, 2011 was Lucille Ball's 100th birthday. Google commemorated the day by changing their logo to look like a 1960s black and white TV with movable channel knobs and a volume switch. On the TV screen the name Google appeared just like the opening credits from the "I Love Lucy" show. The Google doodle was actually a playable TV displaying 6 different "I Love Lucy" clips on each of the channels selected from the movable knob.
Over the last 12 months Google has created some amazing logo doodles. (In case you don't know, each of those unique Google logos are called "doodles.") Some of my favorites are from Earth Day 2011, the Bunse... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We'd like to tell you about a little research project we started on March 13, 2011 and concluded July 1, 2011. We'll explain what we did, give you our results, and then explain why this is important for jewelry stores.
Our goal was to determine how many small businesses are actually using online reviews, social media, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, etc. as part of their online strategy.
Our target market was Houston, Texas, where we chose the unofficial diamond district on Richmond Ave. as our test epicenter.
We don't actually have anyone physically in Houston. This test was purely via the internet by searching in Google Places where we randomly selected independent restaurants, hardware stores, toy stores, various boutiques, and many other types of retail businesses. We tried to get a completely random sampling of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Many changes in Google took place over the last seven days.
Google+ was announced Google changed their user interface Google and Twitter got a divorce... but we don't know who ended up with the engagement ring and wedding band.
Since October 2009, Google and Twitter had an agreement to supply a direct real time feed from Twitter to Google. This feed was an important part of the Google SERP when breaking news was searched, or for times when someone happens to search for a hot Twitter topic.
Any time a TV show suggested to join them on Twitter for a live conversation, you could be assured that the Twitter feed would appear in the SERP when someone searched for the TV show's name while it was broadcasting.
On July 3, 2011 Google's agreement with Twitter expired. Google has turned off all real-time search r... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We follow news and blogs from a few jewelry industry websites, groups on LinkedIn, Twitter conversations and articles from Instore Magazine and MJSA. When we see something interesting, or perhaps a developing trend, we try to pay attention to it and report back on it here.
We're hoping that you value the SEO education and real world evaluations of websites, mobile websites, and how you can use them.
In other words, we're hoping you value us as experts in our field, and that the jWAG.biz website is an excellent resource for you.
Other jewelry industry sources have yet to take on the challenge of explaining how Google ranking has changed since February 2011; instead, they stay with familiar topics of Facebook, Twitter, Google Places, and marketing ideas. Maybe it's because the changes are too new and no one wants to a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Christmas is just about 6 months away from this week and for the last 2 days we've been explaining how people are starting to search online for holiday gifts. We have some more holiday preparation action items for you today relating to Facebook and Twitter.
As previously explained, we're grabbing some of the important information from www.google.com/think/insights and giving it to you with key takeaways. Unless otherwise noted, all the data presented here comes directly from Google's reports for retail stores.
We left off yesterday explaining that you should use phrases like Sales, Coupons and Customer Loyalty to create a few strategic landing pages that also include the primary jewelry website phrases of engagement rings stores, vintage inspired rings, jewelry store, etc.... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've recently written a few Daily Golden Nuggets about social sharing, "Like" buttons and generally how to increase the traffic to your website through social sharing. But now we realize that some of the directions we gave you might be misunderstood, so let's clear them up.
Sharing a link to your website on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn or any other social network will increase the number of visitors on your site. Not because the search engines found the shared link and use it for ranking, but simply because other random people saw and clicked on the link.
That's easy. Share a link = increase traffic from people clicking that shared link.
On the other hand, if you only want to spend time sharing links that help your search engine ranking then you have to be very specific with your sharing.
Today we're giving you a specific example of how you should use Twitter Share and Facebook Like buttons on your website newsletter pages.
We assume you send your newsletters via email. From within the newsletter, you should allow your readers to share it to their favorite social network. You might only have 300 people on your email newsletter list, but allowing sharing gives you the chance to reach thousands of new customers.
Many email newsletter companies (like Constant Contact, iContact and Aweber) allow short term archival of your newsletters on their website. Mostly, this allows user to read the newsletter through a website instead of their email program.
However, for several years we've tracked the impact of jewelry store email newsletters and how to archive those newsletters directly on your website instead ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We'd like to revisit social signals for your website.
A "social signal" is an internet service or feature that allows you to share your web pages to other members within your online circle of friends.
Wikipedia currently maintains a list of 198 popular social networking websites. Each of them has their own method of sharing links and information amongst friends.
Search engines are slowly tapping into the popular social networking sites and beginning to measure and include intra-member communications (i.e. sharing and liking) in organic search results.
According to Wikipedia the top social websites listed by member totals are: 1. Facebook 2. Qzone (China) 3. Habbo (teen website) 4. Twitter 5. Windows Live 6. Bebo 7. Vkonatakte (Russia) 8. Tagged 9. Orkut 10. LinkedIn
"Sometimes it's easier to find exactly what you're looking for when someone you know already found it. Get recommendations for the things that interest you, right when you want them, in your search results."
The "Plus One" feature was in beta testing for a while, and we've been peeking under the hood of that beta for several months to get an idea on how it will work.
On June 1, 2011 as many of you were probably packing for the JCK show, Google officially moved the +1 service from beta to general use and once again changed the way we have to deal with search engine optimization.
From now on, you should see a [+1] button on the Google SERP next to the title of each result. Specifically, y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google measures fresh content by the time stamp of the physical file found on a server. If you upload your website on November 15, 2010 then many of your pages will have that November 15 time stamp.
Time stamping on files is also how Google determines original ownership of intellectual property. If your time stamp is oldest then your images and articles will be considered the original source of that particular information.
There is a growing problem with this time stamp concept when using content management systems. In a Google training video in 2010, someone asked what Google was doing about management systems that create a static page, but populate it with new information daily.
When Google checks the time stamp on a web page, it ignores the page if the time stamp is still the same as its last visit. In other wo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's best to have a pre-existing Google account before you create a YouTube account for yourself. The two accounts will link nicely together. While logged into your google.com account, navigate over to youtube.com and follow the directions to create an account using your existing Google account.
Be careful with your YouTube user name.
Your chosen YouTube username becomes your "Channel" name. Do your best to select a name that matches your store's name. If your store's name is "Venus Creations" then try for "venuscreations" as your channel name. If that's not available, then try "venuscreationsjewelry" or "venuscreationsjewelers." Whatever you select, you want to make sure there's a clear association to your store's name and brand.
Once your username is selected, your video channel will be available through a si... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Link building is a difficult part of search engine optimization. It's better to have a real person creating links on other websites than to buy a software program to spin links for you, but it takes a lot of time.
A well-placed link will bring a lot of valuable Google PageRank, and increase your SERP ranking.
But what if your goal is to increase visitor traffic in addition to PageRank?
A good answer to that is simply to get social. Share links on social networks like Digg, Stumble Upon, Reddit, Twitter and of course Facebook. Is your favorite not listed here? No problem, go ahead and use it anyway.
The goal to social sharing on these websites is to attract new people to your website. In this process, it's a numbers game; more shared links means more people see those links and potentially click. People who... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've covered this topic before in our trainings, but with the recent changes to Google we need to revisit this again.
Your organic ranking is determined by the information you have on your website and how your website has been shared with the world. Search Engine Optimization now includes a mix of different social networking signals in addition to how many times people link to your website.
In 2010, Bing developed a strong association with Facebook to help measure the popularity of shared websites. The shared websites were given some new weighted value in Bing's search results.
Google was much slower to adopt social networks into their organic ranking, but in late 2010 it was announced that Twitter would help determine ranking. In early 2011, Google further introduced methods to measure Facebook sharing on Busines... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
No one likes to read a boring sales letter, and surly no one stays on a website that is boring looking or has boring information.
Pizazz, humor, personal interest stories... these things will make your website interesting, and if you are lucky (or skilled) you will keep them coming back; better yet, they will share your link to their friends through Facebook and Twitter.
Use your own creativity and personality to engage your readers throughout your website and on your blog. But don't fall into a trap of using the same format over and over to post new entries to your blog. Change it up every once in a while.
For example, we've previously suggested that you post photos of new merchandise when it arrives in your jewelry store. Photos of the latest shipment of engagement rings would be interesting for anyone shopping f... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet gets larger every day. No one knows exactly how much larger every day. In July 2008, Google estimated the web grows by several billion pages per day. Of course that was before the Twitter and Facebook craze. Every Facebook post and every Tweet is its own page on the internet.
Daunting, isn't it?
When it comes to adding pages to the internet Google has one request above all others: "Add new value to the internet."
Of course, with billions of pages added every day how can YOU add value that someone else hasn't already done?
This is a good question, and we don't really have an iron clad answer. After all, how many different ways can you write about the 4C's of Diamonds? How many different ways can you explain what pearl restringing is?
The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page of your website is a great place to post all the typical questions you get from customers that visit your store.
Can you quickly recite the popular questions the people have asked you through the years? All of those popular questions belong on your FAQ page of your website.
But what about the not-so-popular questions?
People love to see you care about your customers and are willing to take the extra time to provide customer service. Answering specific questions on your website is a great way to prove you care. Here's how you can do it.
1. Put an "Ask the Jeweler" form on your website. 2. Post the questions and the answers to your website. 3. Email the "asker" the URL of the answer.
With any luck, the asker will be very happy you personally answered thei... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google will only spider and index as much of your website as it believes it will use.
If your website is doesn't seem worth while then Google will not spend computing resources to analyze your site.
If you have 100 page you certainly want all 100 pages saved in Google. So what would make your website valuable enough?
Here are some ideas:
1. Deep Linking: Getting links to your site is great and most links will point to your home page. But it would be so much better to have inbound links to sub-pages and even sub-sub-pages within your site. Google usually follows all the links it finds, and when those links point to a variety of pages on your site it causes Google to index more.
2. Change the internal linking structure of your website: Google won't dig too far into your website from the home page. If ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is a simple idea: the more often you update your website, the better it will look in the search engines.
Google claims they attempt to re-read the entire internet every few days. The Google spider searches for new information all the time, and when it finds something new, it rushes to read every last page. This rush to read new content is visible in your Google Webmaster Tools when you publish several new pages on your site on the same day, or when you first launch a new product catalog.
Fresh content on Facebook and Twitter is also monitored constantly. In fact, Twitter is especially scrutinized and any tweets related to breaking news are shown in a special window on a SERP. This is part of Google's Buzz feature.
Most of the time the search engines will return the oldest websites that have demonstrated popularit... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Recently, we explained to you the duplicate content problem caused by having a search form on your own website. The search engine will enter information on that form and cause a serious duplicate content issue.
This Daily Golden Nugget will explain a more common duplicate content issue that plagues many websites.
Unless your web programmer or web host specifically implement prevention techniques, all of you will have the following issues. We're not going to bore you with how to fix it; we will leave that up to your own website people.
When you type in your domain name, you need to make sure no matter what the format, it always brings you to the same page.
By far the .com domain name extension is the most popular. It was the first one way back in the early 90s and everyone fought over them.
Today (that's in 2011, for those reading this in the distant future) it seems like there are new dot extensions every few weeks. The .co extension is newly available and now you can even register a .asia extension, if you really wanted.
Many of our jewelry stores have difficulty acquiring the domain name that perfectly matches their store. But some stores find that another store with the same name already has the .com. In these cases, we always recommend selecting the .net or the .biz options.
Just the other day there was a discussion in our office about the validity of the .co domain extension. However, the point was brought up that human muscle (typing) memory would probably k... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Some time in the summer of 2010, Google changed their policy regarding how they treat Twitter.
Twitter is a very fast-paced micro-blogging website. A quick search on Google for the number of tweets posted every day returns some amazing numbers: around 1.9 Million! That's a lot of 140 character messages and we'd guess that's 44.3 Million words posted per day.
Another quick Google search for the average number of words in a book and we find different experts saying between 70,731 and 75,000, so let's take 72,865. Using that number, we estimate approximately and equivalent to 608 books (novels) worth of information is posted to Twitter every day.
Interwoven in all those "books" are millions of links to other websites. Some of the links are pure spam, and some are really good links to worthwhile information. That's a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In previous Daily Gold Nuggets, we've mentioned methods to get links from other businesses in your town or in neighboring towns. Building links to your site is very important and there is a huge variety of ways you can do so.
The important part to link building is making sure that the link to your website is not what we call a "nofollowed" link. A few years ago, the search engines came up with this "rel=nofollow" feature in order to prevent the huge comment spam that was building up on blog posts.
Many people were intentionally commenting on blog posts and including the link back to their website as a method of link building. The result was a huge amount of link spam and improper search results pages. The nofollow feature nullified and disqualified this type of spam and all those links, which quickly returned all search... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The final item to talk about is Status updates. Yes, LinkedIn has status updates just like on Facebook, and just like updates to Twitter.
Your first thought is probably one of, "Oh great; another things I have to waste time on," but you shouldn't look at it like that.
Status updates on LinkedIn do not have to be once an hour, once a day or even once a week. They only need to be when you have something relevant and exciting to share with your connections.
An easy example would be "I've been hired to create a custom championship ring for a sports team." It doesn't have to be that exciting, either; you could simply say, "I've been hired to create a custom pendant for a 25th wedding anniversary."
This is the fourth email in our LinkedIn setup strategies presented this week. So far, we've explained good methods to fill in your Summary, Specialties, Experience and Education sections.
Today, we want you to look at the Twitter settings in your profile. From your Edit Profile screen, click the tiny "Edit" link next to the Twitter setting. From the Twitter Settings screen, you can put in your Twitter account name and select it to be visible to anyone.
As we discussed last week, Twitter should be used at least once per hour. That's a lot of noise to be making on Twitter and you don't want to overwhelm your professional users on LinkedIn. So make sure you select the setting to "Share only tweet that contain #in." This is a good practice even if you only tweet a few times a week. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
You have to be everywhere online in order to achieve local dominance within your market. Actually, that's a general statement for any industry, not just jewelry. What it means is that there is no single, all-powerful website or social network for everyone. Every one of us has unique taste and needs and therefore no single website works for everyone, although Facebook certainly thinks they do.
Twitter is for noise-making. Facebook can be used for friends, family or business. MySpace has even more noise than Twitter. CafeMom is for moms-to-be. Classmates is the place to connect with school friends. There are hundreds of others and you can find a great list on Wikipedia by searching for "List of social networking websites" if you are really interested.
Your customers will come from everywhere, and that's why you need to ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday we gave you a very brief introduction to Twitter. And that was truly very brief considering there are hundreds of printed books, eBooks and online courses that teach you amazing twitter secrets.
Our point of view is different. We know you don't have a lot of time and we want you to get the best ideas from these Daily Gold Nuggets.
Yesterday we told you to create a Twitter account and send a tweet that said "We have a great selection of #wedding #rings that just arrived."
The words "#wedding" and "#rings" are called hashtags within Twitter. This hashtag feature allows various tracking for you, and ease of search for general users. If someone wants to find all local tweets with the word "wedding" in it they could search for "wedding," or they could search for "#wedding."
Even though we've mentioned Twitter many times in other training, we've never specifically given you strategies to use it as a business tool.
We will admit the concept of Twitter is strange. Why would someone want to post a 140 character note to the internet for eternity? The answer is simply that the system was created for friends to share their instant messaging status updates with other friends. In fact, AOL Instant Messenger was the inspiration for the Twitter system.
High school and college students loved it practically overnight and people with way too much time on their hands and way too many friends all flocked to get accounts.
Of course, you can never simply have a useless technology stay useless, so business people and technology gurus also flocked to figure out how to make money using this new tool. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Can you come up with a list of 52 little tips for your customers? There are 52 weeks in a year and it would be great if you had a tip to share with your customs every week.
Here are some ideas:
* Announce the birthstone of the month each month. That's already 12 weeks.
* Give a tip each month on the colors of the season and the type of jewelry, whether a style or a specific charm, that will match the season and fashions. That's another 12 weeks.
Only 28 more ideas needed. Can you come up with those on your own?
Once you have them all written out take an evening or a weekend afternoon and type them all into your blog.
Then set up an account with Hootsuite.com and attach your Store's Twitter and Facebook Business Page.
Next grab the URL of each blog post and create a status update in Hootsuit... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Search engine optimization is a labor intensive job; before you realize it, the process could suck hours of time away from you and there is no immediate gratification from the work either. But, in the long run, if your strategy is sound, there are big payoffs through increased traffic.
Through our current body of educational material, we've given you many different types of keyword research tools to use. We specifically mention Keyword Eye and Google Keywords on a regular basis.
Ever wonder how long it takes *us* to do keyword research? Here's our normal process and the amount of time it normally takes us for each step.
1. Figure out what you would like to be optimized for. Take a look at your QuickBooks sales report and determine inventory or jewelry brands to target. (25 minutes)
Every once in a while, you should add something a little extra into your online marketing efforts. While everyone scrambles to figure out how to use Facebook and Twitter every day for immediate buzz, it's still very important to slowly establish your website as a local authority.
(Follow this link if you don't know what an authority website is: http://bit.ly/dmRMjY)
The next time you get a new line of exclusive jewelry in your store, or run an event, you should issue a press release. The press release has the event details as well as links back to your website. Once published, these press releases last forever, and so will the links.
A very popular paid press release house is PRWeb.com. If you have the money, use this professionally recognized a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The phrase "duplicate content" is mentioned a lot when it comes to website SEO. Your website ranking will be lower if you have duplicate content issues.
Duplicate content on your website is a result of sloppy programming or setup. In reality, your website will feed the search engines the same information multiple times. In response, the search engine will remove you from the SERPs until you fix the problem.
Google, Yahoo and Bing are all fighting for the best "user experience." That experience includes not including badly functioning websites. It would be frustrating for the all of us if we had to deal with that every day.
On the other hand, something that we all seem to be dealing with every day is duplicate status updates on Facebook.
Just because you have the ability to cross-post between social websi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Marketing is your responsibility; not your bookkeeper's, not your salesperson's, not your bench jeweler's.
Owning the store means not only making sure it runs every day, but also planning marketing far enough in the future to ensure continual profits (or at least break even in this economy).
It's time for an online marketing plan that you can get running quickly.
Here's a list of things that we have measured successfully for retail jewelers. This list alone can be used as the basis for your online marketing strategy: 1. Add new information to a blog on your *website* regularly. 2. Manage a Facebook Business Page and give your customers a reason to Like you there. 3. Link your Facebook status feed updates to Twitter. 4. Maintain a Flickr account and post new photos of jewelry daily, properly labeled. 5... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The last location-based service we are reviewing this week is Foursquare, "4sq" for short.
According to the buzz on the street, during the last 7 days both Foursquare and Gowalla have to worry about Facebook Places. We explained our position on the substandard Facebook Places yesterday, and Gowalla has a really cool interface that we explained 2 days ago.
Foursquare is not snazzy looking, but it's fast, has real time updates, interaction between users and 3 different types of social competitive scenarios.
They really have their act together.
Here are some of the features that wow'd us: * Check in at the same location enough times to become the "Mayor" of that location. Compete against your friends. * Check in at different locations, different times of the day, and at specific events to be awarded "Badge... 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
On Tuesday this week I 
Social networking is supposed to allow you to be more social. When you typically think of social networking, you are probably thinking about ways to connect with your customers, and how to engage them in order to influence their future buying habits.
