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:
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.
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.
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
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
This is the Friday website review where I dissect a random retail jeweler's website to find the good and bad that we can all learn from. Although I write about website design, search engine optimization, and online marketing every day, sometimes all that stuff doesn't make any sense unless you see exactly how it applies to a real website.
That's why I dedicate one day every week to these reviews of randomly selected jewelry stores.
Normally I ask someone on my team to give me a random city name, but this week's review 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
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
Small business owners always seem to struggle trying to balance the time they spend working in their store, managing back office paperwork, and growing the business. It's very difficult to achieve the perfect balance of spending time with each of these tasks if no one showed you how to do it correctly in the first place.
Occasionally, you will find a small business success story in the news, and perhaps you wonder how they achieved their success. From my own personal experience,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's almost impossible to see the short term effects of content marketing. Most business owners are more interested in seeing immediate results from advertising efforts. With traditional advertising, you can usually measure a change in sales that's directly related to a current or immediately preceding ad campaign.
In the age of the internet, that traditional advertising/measuring method breaks. Those of you who started your business prior to 1999 might still believe that you can throw more money into yo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Nugget I explained the "creation aspect" of the online content marketing method. Today's Daily Golden Nugget will explain how you can organize the information that other people created and use it for your own content marketing.
Within the internet marketing industry the words "curating" and "curation" represent the organization of online information into a single loca... 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
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.
It's almost impossible to see the short term effects of content marketing. Most business owners are more interested in seeing immediate results from advertising efforts. With traditional advertising, you can usually measure a change in sales that's directly related to a current or immediately preceding ad campaign.
In yesterday's Daily Nugget I explained the "
