Earlier this year, I explained why Instagram should be your primary marketing channel and how to use photography and hashtags to build a following. If you're struggling with Facebook marketing for your business, then you should really go back and look at that previous post of mine.
Although I explained Instagram photography, I did intentionally exclude details about Instagram Storie... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Way back on April 10, 2017, Facebook announced that they'd be cleaning up the News Feed to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.
Their goal was to cut back on the amount of spammy content that is published by Pages that deliberately try to game the Facebook algorithm. Their algorithm measures the popularity of a post by the number of likes, comments, and shares it gets an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Your online reputation is now part of your marketing. The results that people see in search help formulate the first impression that someone has of your business and whether or not they will purchase from you.
Managing your online reputation through reviews that appear on Facebook, Google Reviews, and Yelp is vital for your future business health. Savvy consumers are referring to what other people say in these online reviews and other consumer generated co... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What started as email spam years ago has turned into an ever-evolving monster of internet spam that permeates our emails, Google search results, automated telephone sales calls, and nonsense in our social media feeds. No matter how hard we try, marketing companies find new ways to put their message in front of us whenever we don't want it. This type of marketing is called interruption marketing, and it really has become an annoying interruption in everyday life as well.
At the JA NY show on Monday July 24, 2017, it was my honor to sit on the panel discussion about social media etiquette. The panel was moderated by Ashley Davis, Associate Editor, National Jeweler. The other three panelists I sat with, were Levi Higgs, Archives and Social Media Manager with David Webb, Joy Butler, Transactional busine... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I recently came across a seminar titled "How to Promote Your Online Store In A Cost-Effective Manner" and thought it was an extremely misleading headline. Whenever business owners ask me about cost effective online advertising, they usually mean "least expensive" rather than asking me how to achieve the best ROI with their online ads.
I've also found that many business owners believe that online marketing is simple, and that anyone can do it. Preying upon this belief, there are ad a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I have met and helped many different entrepreneurs during my time as a volunteer business coach for my local chapter of SCORE, a division of the U.S. Gov. S.B.A. While I've helped them make their businesses better, I've also learned that most entrepreneurs of all ages share several similar personality characteristics and daily practices.
Life of an entrepreneur
Most entrepreneurs start out small and quickly learn all the jobs needed to make their business run. If you're a small business owner, then you are probably the best s... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For several years and through a lot of tough competition, Facebook has managed to maintain its status as the most popular social media network, although there seems to be an evolutionary shift of people away from Facebook and on to other networks like Instagram and Snapchat. Some organizations, groups, and communities are using Facebook's Group feature to create a community messaging board, while other organizations have migrated to networks like Telegram. For the moment, Facebook is still the network to use, but Instagram is growing quick... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Your website is the cornerstone of all your online marketing; it's what people find when they search for a local business type or a specific product by name or by model number. People go to Google with an instigated need for an immediate purchase, when they need a specific service, or when they need to start research on a longer term decision making process. Those with immediate needs will take action based on what they see on your website or your social accounts. Those looking for an immediate purchase will look for an onlin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Because the online paid advertising playing field changes monthly, my clients constantly ask for my current recommendation for where to spend their limited marketing budget. Although there are many online advertising possibilities, I prefer that businesses use Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising because the ads can be changed frequently to highlight current offers.
MySpace used to be a fun social network. You had complete freedom to change your profile any way you wanted by adding music, changing colors, and customizing your background. Anyone with a working knowledge of HTML could customize the look of their page and turn it into their online bastion of delight. I remember when being on social media was nothing more than a fun competition of making your profile page look better than your friend's profile, then tease each other about it. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Online referrals are starting to make an impact on local businesses, but not in the way we all expected them to. A few years ago, the buzz within the online marketing community was that social networks would become a referral engine for people to ask advice through. Facebook even attempted to create a new type of social search engine to capture that referral service. Google also struggled with the idea that the internet would become a big referral engine, and they tried to capture a piece of it through Google+.
In honor of the jewelry shows in Tucson, Arizona this week, I decided to search for a website review candidate in that area. I began my search with the phrase "jewelry stores tucson az" and saw these results on Google:
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review. The goal of this review is to learn from someone else's mistake by randomly choosing and dissecting a website that has problems, and explain potential fixes. Hopefully there is something we can all learn from.
Websites with mistakes usually don't rank very high in Google, so when I search for review candidates I usually look lower in the SERPs, and even deep within the forbidden-nowhere-zone on Google... Page 2.
For this week's website review, I'm revisiting a jeweler in Orlando that I reviewed in July 2014. Back then, I was searching for jewelers near the town of Christmas, in Orange County, Florida. According to my previous review here I had to use Google Maps to locate a nearby jeweler when searching for the phrase "jewelers in Christmas, Orange, Florida." Google certainly has made some advancement in their Google Local systems since then, ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
Welcome to a somewhat unusual Friday review. Every Friday, I usually look for a website that's a bit of a fixer-upper and I suggest how to make it better. This week, as usual, I opened my Google Chrome browser in incognito mode and ran a search for "jewelry stores in Cairo GA."
There are certain search phrases that trigger specific search results formats, and normally when you search for a "jewelers in _____" or "jewelry stores in ____" Google activates the local results version of the SERP, but today it didn't.
Welcome to my weekly website review. Every Friday, I randomly look for a jewelry store website that has a few problems, that I call flops, and then I suggest ways to fix them. These short website reviews are not meant for the store itself but rather you, the reader. My hope is that you will discover something here that you also need to fix on your own site.
This week I used the phrase "jewelers Newport, RI" to search for my review candidate. Instead of choosing a jewelry store from the first page of the Google res... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Reading the latest website optimization and marketing methods online, and putting them into practice on your own website is a daunting task for most business owners. Many question their own actions and simply don't know where to start. For this reason, every Friday I present these mini case study website reviews. My goal is to find a website that has a few obvious (to me) problems, or flops, and then I suggest first steps fixes to get them on the right track again.
In this week's website review, I'm heading over to Laramie, WY in search of a good jewelry store. My hope, like most savvy internet users today, is that I'll find a good jeweler based on the information they have on their website. If the website I find happens to be a total flop, well, then I'll give some suggestions to fix it.
I write these website reviews every Friday to demonstrate how to apply new SEO techniques, online usability, and content building to pre-existing websites that need help. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is my weekly website review where I search for a retail jeweler at random through Google and pick apart what they are doing online. I try to uncover the flops that are being made so I can suggest the fixes needed to improve what they are doing.
This week, I started my Google search with the phrase "jewelers Brookline, MA" and quickly found myself heading down a rabbit hole after viewing these results:
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
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
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
When it comes to social media photographs, it's easy to forget that every person has a legal right to prevent you from posting a photo of their face online. Paid photographers and media companies are very aware of your legal rights, and they require people to sign a model release form.
Those release forms grant ownership and permission to use the photos for any purpose, even to sell the photos or use in promotions to sell a product. A quick Google search for "sample mode... 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.
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
Social media marketing is quite frustrating. The rules seem to change every time you think you understand the right methods of how and when to share to social media. Most internet marketers will lead you to believe that business success will come if you can get 10,000 or more fans following you on every network, when in reality it takes a bit more than just growing your social fan base.
Somehow those social media fans have to be converted into sales as shown in this diagram:
Social media is required for business--all businesses. It ties all your other advertising together: every ad you place in your local community, whether it's on TV, radio, on billboards, in all of your direct mail, for newspaper ads, or everything else you do on other social networks. Social media ties all your marketing together in such a way to support your customer life cycle.
Customer Life Cycle
There are specific steps that every customer must travel throug... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The last seven days have been quite interesting, and fulfilling for me. In addition to the photography demo booth at MJSA Expo in New York City, I also presented three seminars/training classes, one of which was at MJSA this past Monday.
An interesting topic about marketing budgets and social media organically emerged during my training sessions last week, which I then added to my MJSA seminar at the last minute, and I want to share with y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It seems like only yesterday when it was thought that email addresses would become more important than telephone numbers, and now a website address is more important than both a telephone number and a physical address. A website is the most important representation of your business, yet most jewelers don't treat it that way, and many still view it as an online brochure that needs to be made once, and then forgotten about.
The local retail jeweler is losing a lot of business to the internet. The younger gen... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In preparation for this weekend's MJSA and JA Expo at the Jacob Javits center in NYC, I'm jumping way, way back to my fifth Daily Golden Nugget from July 30, 2010 about photography. I've written about photography many times since then, written product reviews about the VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Once upon a time, Facebook was the social network for college friends only. Then it was opened up to anyone to join. It was a free-for-all of friends keeping in touch without any special filtering getting in the way of seeing your friend's status updates.
When they let businesses join, there was a sudden surge of unwanted solicitations and plenty of users complaining that they were seeing too many business posts in their news feed. As is all things internet related, businesses viewed Facebook as t... 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
Welcome to the #ThrowbackThursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today, I'm jumping back to one of my early posts about location based services and checking-in on Facebook.
It was all the rage during the summer of 2010 to have a check-in app on your smartphone check-in everywhere. Gowalla, Foursquare, Whrrl, and Loopt were competing heavily when Facebook tried getting into the game. Facebook's initial eff... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Coincidently, this is the final Daily Golden Nugget for 2015 and it falls on a #ThrowbackThursday, giving me the perfect opportunity to check back in on my 2015 predictions from last year this time. Was I right, or very wrong? Let's find out...
Content Marketing Will Become More Important
My specific prediction was that the word "blogging" would be replaced with the phrase "content marketing" by the end of 2016... 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
Social media is bringing to light something that retail jewelers have known since they started selling jewelry: Christmas is when "everyone" gets engaged. According to the Chillisauce Marriage Proposal Survey, the most popular day to pop the question is Christmas Eve. Here's the bar graph with their findings:
I've previously estimated and explained that the customer cost of acquisition for a retail jeweler is somewhere around $75. You can calculate this number by summing up your advertising expense for a campaign and dividing that by the number of new customers you've acquired during that period.
We're all visual people. Smartphones and social media give us the freedom to snap and share photos all day long. Google has gotten much better as locating socially shared images and surfacing them in their image search.
When analyzing websites, I often find that there's more organic traffic arriving from Google image search than from web search. You can see this in your own Google Search Console data by looking at the Search Analytics report an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I've dissected a lot of websites that were not performing well, or produced completely unexpected results. One problem that seems to be appearing more and more is the inconsistent way that social networks are reading a web page and pulling information that you want to share. You see, you try sharing a link on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and they will quickly spider the URL you are sharing and make suggestions for the images,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Do you have a specific question about your website or want more details about something I've previously written about? Don't be afraid to write in and ask; you might just see your question in an upcoming Daily Golden 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
Do you have a specific question about your website or business that you'd like to see answered in a future Daily Golden Nugget? Please send it in through the contact form on the jWAG website http://www.jwag.biz/contact-us.html.
Here's an interesting question I received recently:
"For the best bang for my buck, so to speak, is it better to re-share an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here's a question that came in recently that I'll answer in this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget:
When I get a new follower on social media, should I thank them for the follow, or the Like - and if so, how do I do that without looking desperate, and move them closer to an in-store conversion or visit. Should I be sending them to my website? It feels like that is sending them away, not towards us. Thanks! -- Twisted on Twitter
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
Welcome to this week's edition of the Friday Website review. I'm journeying to Bayside, NY this week in search of my website review candidate. Using Google Chrome, I searched for the phrase "jewelers near bayside ny" and saw these results:
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.
It's Friday. Every Friday, I start out by saying "This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget." I'm sure you guys are tired of reading that. Anyone want to suggest a hashtag that alliterates with Friday? Send your suggestions to me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or just email them to me.
So it is Friday, and it's review day. The goal is learn something from a random website of a random retail jeweler chosen from a random city somewhere in the U.S. This week that random somewhere is Raynham,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is probably the Daily Golden Nugget you've been waiting for! Over the last few weeks I've been working through several topics related to marketing for the upcoming holiday season. This is part 10 in that special Holiday Run-Up series, and it's also a #ThrowbackThursday edition.
I'm not throwing back too far in this one, only to August 2014, when I explained how to use Facebook's VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 9 of my annual special Daily Golden Nugget "Holiday Run-Up" series packed with tactics to help you during November and December this year. I started this series with an overview of the marketing strategies that have worked over the last 12 months and have been expanding on each idea every day since.
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
This is Part 5 of a multi-day Daily Golden Nugget series packed with tactics to help you in your 2015 holiday marketing. The series started with the overview of 2015 holiday marketing strategies.
In this edition, I'll show you how to use the Facebook Audience Insights tool to build and save a target audience fo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 4 of a multi-day Daily Golden Nugget series packed with tactics to help you in your 2015 holiday marketing. The series started with the overview of 2015 holiday marketing strategies. Today I'm specifically covering the topic of...
Another summer has come to a close and the holiday season is almost here. No matter what the financial forecasts say, I want to give you some current ideas to improve your marketing methods, and hopefully your sales, through the end of this year.
Create a Uniform Branding With Your Ads
I'd like to start with a suggestion for you to review the ads you are already planning for this season. Instead of running standalone ads this year, you can use all the potential advertising methods... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The holiday season is quickly approaching and you need to consider how you will be spending your advertising dollars. Will you hold an event promoted with post cards and phone calls? Will you have a Black Friday sale promoted in the local newspaper? What medium will you use for your weekly ads for the holiday season?
There are a lot more choices now than just newspapers, post cards, billboards, TV, and radio. VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Daily Golden Nugget comes from a question I received last week to explain the difference between ad targeting on Facebook and Google AdWords. In simple terms, the AdWords targeting can use a really sophisticated way to target what people are searching for. On the other hand, Facebook uses a really sophisticated way to target the demographics of the people themselves.
September has a strange place on my yearly calendar. I view it as a month that tries to maintain a death grip on the hot days of summer while also revealing the temperatures and colors of the fall. I remember how it was to dread the beginning of the school year, and now, even though I'm not a parent myself, I can appreciate how parents feel now to have their children occupied all day again.
This is final part of my 3-part series on Time Management. I realize it's a bit ironic that I've written Daily Golden Nuggets on Time Management and it's taking forever to read through them.
In the first two installments, I explained my methods of how I prioritize time, how I figured out the best time of day for me to work, how I deal with time consuming tasks, the time suck of social media, and how delegating tasks saves me time.
I recently had someone tell me that they felt it was better to post anything to their business Facebook account than nothing at all. This particular jeweler didn't have anyone in the store willing to manage their Facebook account, yet they felt it was important to be active.
Their solution was to hire a social media management company that didn't know anything about jewelry, and was posting non sequitur information to their account. Although their fan base was slowly increas... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'm sitting on a regional jet right now as I write this. I'm heading back to New Jersey after three days with the RJO in St. Louis, Missouri. For me, it was a weekend of discussions about e-commerce, online local marketing, and social networking.
I was very impressed with all the jewelers I spoke to this weekend and I'm starting to think that the need for social media is starting to be understood as a necessity for marketing, even though the results can't be tracked. Many jewelers told me... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When you consider the time it takes to be involved with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and so many social networks, it's no wonder so many people live their lives carrying their smartphone in their hand all day. So many people have traded everyday verbal conversations for terse text conversations and deluges of selfies.
Those who have chosen a smartphone-tethered life, now find it second nature to use social network as a way to keep their friends and family in... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
Facebook is becoming well known for their ability to provide to the surface, very detailed demographic and the personal interest data about your customers. They've been able to give more details than the data Google has provided for several years. In light of Facebook's advancements, Google has improved their own demographic and interest data and made it available through Google Analytics and AdWords.
Before you can access to the demographic data from Google, you need t... 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
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.
I was at a social media marketing meeting in New York City last month when someone asked if they should be posting the same photos and status update to every social network.
That was a good question, and there's no real straightforward answer. In reality, it depends if you have the same audience following you on all the social networks. If the same audience follows you on all networks, then they will get very bored very ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's Throwback Thursday, I'm bringing back a group of old Nuggets that are near and dear to my hart: Location Based Services.
One of our more ambitious events here at jWAG was back in August 2010 when we held live video broadcasts several days in a row, we called it "jWAG Live 2". Every day we covered different topics, one of which was ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
After last week's Nuggets about marketing funnels and determining a funnel cost, I received an email from a reader wanting to know my current recommendations for a marketing funnel.
Here are my recommendations for monthly online marketing, in this o... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I explained how to analyze the cost of your marketing funnel. Today, I'll follow up with some specific funnel ideas to help you formulate your own plan.
Understanding Previous Marketing
Here's a tricky question to think about... Do you measure ad success by the number of people it brought... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The truth of the matter is that your business will never survive without some type of marketing. Word of mouth marketing is not enough anymore to support your business. Simple posts to social media and meager ads in community newspapers won't support your overhead, or even put food on your table.
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, you should 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.
I've been online since 1988 and I began programming websites professionally in 1994. With 36 years experience online, you certainly can say I'm one of the internet "old timers." In the mid 1990s, we had no idea how the internet would transform the world. Indeed, just watch any sci-fi movie from the early 90s and you'll see how their portrayals of the future completely lack the everyday technology we take for granted today.
A jeweler wrote to me the other day asking for help with their Mother's Day contest promotion. The promotion is being advertised through the local papers but the contest takes place through their website. To enter the contest you need to fill out the online form and agree to sign up for their newsletter.
Because the contest is centered around creating a custom design, this jeweler wants to send out a series of additional custom design em... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Many retail jewelers still struggle managing the time it takes to promote themselves on social media. Unfortunately, even though you can hire an agency to manage your social accounts, the best way to engage your customers is to establish your brand's own online identity.
It's difficult to allocate the time needed to engage on social media amidst the daily routine needed to run a jewelry store. Instead of doing it all yourself, you could allow your employees to engage soc... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Facebook can be very annoying when it doesn't let you select the right preview image for the blog you are trying to share. All of your blog posts should have associated images. They grab attention and help to convey your message, but sometimes Facebook simply ignores the images you use.
Facebook has become a very visual social network and they try to offer all users the best possible shared images from every web... 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
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
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today, I'm going to perform an incognito Google search for a random jewelry store candidate in Blackstone, Virginia, then review their website.
The goal of this weekly website review is to learn something new, or at least to see an implementation of something good or bad that you never knew.
When I used the search query "jewelry stores in blackstone va" I was given these results:
As the final hours of 2014 tick on by, I would like to share some of my predictions for 2015.
1. Content Marketing Will Become More Important for Jewelers
In order to understand why this will be important, you first need to understand what Content Marketing is. "Content" is anything that you publish online with the intention of influencing a customer's buying decisions. Written content is usually absorbed into Google and Bing and returned in search results, while all other content (photos, graphics, videos) are shared socially.
'Twas the night before Christmas, and time to close doors after a long four weeks, the time still soars. Did you break record sales with engagement rings sold? Hope she says yes tomorrow; the future's untold!
While it's usually children dreaming the morning's delight; the guys that you helped are filled with horrible fright. You're the town's best jeweler; the men come to you; your jewelry's the best at getting an "I do."
The times, they have changed, and there's much online chatter, you've to to keep up, or else you won't matter. You made mistakes then, when your website used Flash, but you took steps; improvement when sales came to a crash.
Your jewelry designs always win Best in Show, but your website's sad ranking had fallen too slow. With new learning, you hoped an answer'd appear... 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
Managing the online identity for your business is time consuming. Although you might have found the best agency to build your website and help your marketing online, the relationship you have with them probably won't last forever.
Eventually, you will have to divorce your marketing agency.
This is the conclusion of the Daily Golden Nugget I began yesterday detailing how your agency should be setting up your business accounts and what you need to do to guarantee you always have login acce... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
Let's imagine that there's a special gift giving day coming up soon and I need to buy a gift. Assuming that I live in Englewood, Colorado I might do a Google search for "buy jewelry gifts in Englewood Colorado."
Today is the weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of this review is to randomly search Google for a retail jewelry store and learn something from scrutinizing how they manage their website and online identity. There's always something to learn from these reviews, whether it's learning from someth... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As the internet and online shopping have become more popular over the last few years, today, the first Monday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday, has earned the designation as Cyber Monday. This is the day when many e-commerce websites have 24 hour sales to lure shoppers to spend their money online instead of shopping in local stores.
Every year comScore.com reports the sales figures for different shopping days through the holiday season. Although the calendar date of Cyber Monday changes ever... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the Thanksgiving Holiday in the United States. For many years, this day marked the official point on the calendar as the start of the holiday season in the US. Not too long ago, you wouldn't see a single Christmas Tree or holiday decorations in a store until the Friday morning after Thanksgiving. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade would march down the streets of New York and not a word about Christmas was mentioned until Santa Claus went by on that last float, giving us the go-ahea... 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
Have you ever even really thought about that question?
If your business is 100% e-commerce, then it would be easy to run a few reports in Google Analytics and figure out which Acquisition/Channel brings the most visitors. You could also use the Conversions/Attribution to see when people first discovered you and what eventually turned them into buyers.
We're now in the last two weeks of October and a lot of holiday promotions are about to launch. You've probably already completed your own marketing and all the publication dates have been set. In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll go over some last minute online marketing referral sources that you still have time to set up this week.
Your customers will find you through many online sources. Some of those sources will be your own paid marketing, while other people arrive through organic tra... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
One of the common errors in the English language is the confusion between the words Champagne and Champaign.
Champagne is a region in France where the sparkling wine, champagne, comes from. Those French "regions" are similar to states in the US. Although there are vineyards all over the world that produce sparkling wine, it's not "champagne" unless the grapes were grown, and the wine was produced in that region of France. The capital city of Champagne is Epernay, which I visited a few years ago. I've include... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throughout all of last week, I've been laying the groundwork for a complete holiday 2014 marketing plan that you can use to promote a chosen suite of items.
This is the third part of my Daily Golden Nugget series outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. The first part explained how to select the items to promote during the holidays. The second part detailed how to set up your newspa... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the second part of my Daily Golden Nugget series outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. The first part I began yesterday explained how you should select a specific set of jewelry items and then write blogs, take photography, and make videos for those items.
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
Seventy-seven week days ago, when I reached the 1000th Nugget milestone, I got the idea that I should write a recap of all the technology that I wrote about that came and went since 2010 when I started this daily newsletter.
Although I really want to be nostalgic, I don't even have the time to look through 1000 posts to create a full list. But I'm going to give it a try and see where this goes, so let's have a little fun... Instead of learning something new today, I'll look at some old topics that I'v... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Although I'd like nothing more than for every jeweler to manage their own social media accounts, the truth is that many business owners don't, or can't do it. I'm told many reasons why they can't, like not having enough time, or not knowing where to start, or how to do it, or even which social network they should be using.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm reviewing another section of the seminar I presented on July 27, 2014 at the JA NY show. This segment is about paying for traffic on Facebook; should you be doing that?
Paying for online advertising always has a right way and a wrong way. Typically the wrong way is seriously wrong and it's a complete waste of money. Most businesses, not just retail jewelers, are advertising on Facebook wrong.
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
Jewelers should be worried about their personal security and how much information they share on social media. There's always that possibility that someone is watching you and planning something really bad.
It seems like everyone has a Facebook account now, and Facebook does not allow you to hide your personal profile anymore either. You can unfriend people and lock all your posts, but there's no way to hide yourself from the public Facebook search.
A few years ago, Google AdWords created a feature called Remarketing that allows you to secretly tag a website visitor so you can target them with a specific ad in the future. The premise behind the marketing method is that a customer will likely return to your website if they see an ad that reminds them to.
When designed correctly, those ads would understand what you looked at on the website then show you a corresponding ad on Google search or other content websites. When using this type of marketing, you'll find that... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Something's been happening over at Facebook since December 2013 that affects how the overall methods of how customers see your social posts...
If you carefully examine your own Facebook Insights, you should see what many of my own customers are seeing. Generally speaking, there's a massive decline in the number of your Fans that see the social posts your business is publishing.
Although Facebook doesn't provide statistics on personal accounts, you might have also noticed that while your business s... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The Second Annual MJSA ConFab Conference was held at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City on November 3, 2013. The conference was attended by jewelry design students, aspiring jewelry designers, and seasoned jewelers who already design their own jewelry. There were 5 sessions on topics that would help attendees increase their profits. I was... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As the Holiday Season quickly approaches, I wanted to use today's online jeweler review to demonstrate how a customer could discover a local jeweler when you search for a designer's name, even when that jeweler has the worst website.
For this week's review I used the Chrome browser in incognito mode and searched for "pandora jewelry glens falls ny."
The search results mostly included a mixture of listings from ForLocations.com, StoreLocator.com, JewelryStoresInfo.com, and even Craigslist.org which hinted that there was a store in t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
From what I've seen since 2009, the methods of running contests on Facebook have been so difficult and misunderstood that many business gotten themselves into real trouble without even knowing what hit them. People have been locked out of their accounts and pages were deleted all due to guideline violations. Meanwhile other people and pages attracted thousands of fans through the same violated guidelines without so much as a whisper of a scandal.
As a continuation to yesterday's Nugget where I gave you 5 templates for creating Facebook Cover Page images, today I have a few specific suggestions for how to use your Facebook Business Page cover photo.
Page Cover Photos usually draw a lot of attention in the News Feed which means you can capture some extra attention if you change them on a regular basis.
Do you have an upcoming store event? Special sale? Big announcement? You can use your cover photo to announce any one of these, but just make sure to keep that announcement within the 100% Safe Zone I'm showing you.
Back in February, I reported that Facebook changed their Advertising Guidelines to limit how much space in your cover photo could be used for text. This guideline quickly became known as the 20% Rule my many Facebook marketers and it seriously limited how you could use Facebook to quickly attract attention of your page fans.
To the delight of many Facebook marketers, this 20% Rule was removed on July 1, 2013. This is great news that allows us to use our cover photos for ads, notifications, and calls to action... Facebook gave us back the permission they took away from us when they launched the 2012 major layout redesign, back when we only had tall Profile Pictures in the left margin.
I'd like to share a dirty little secret with you today... It doesn't matter how many people follow your Facebook Business Page; what matters is how many of your followers will convert to customers.
Over this past weekend I attended the MJSA Expo show in New York City and met with several vendors, jewelers, and speakers. I especially enjoyed my conversation with Eugene Brill of Rio Grande about their e-commerce use on mobile devices.
One of the topics Eugene brought up during his seminar was the use of VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I remember reading Facebook studies from 2011 showing that the most popular types of updates to Facebook were images. When comparing text updates, video updates, and photos updates, the photos had the highest ratings in the studies.
It certainly was true for a while; any photo posted to Facebook would be seen by a larger number of your fans and friends. The results were clearly measurable.
Within a short time many brands started to flood their posts with images. This exploitation eventually lead to a change... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Facebook recently announced that they will try to revolutionize online search by letting you find recommendations from your friends. The entire concept is still in the early phases and the usefulness is not quite clear. They call it the "Social Graph Search."
In the past they've tried to work their way into other technologies, like location based services and photo sharing, with mixed results. In some cases they had to force their new features on users when they were not adopted quickly.
Getting started with any new advertising method always carries a little bit of trepidations. Your advertising budget could be exhausted easily if you made the wrong choice. Common questions that might cross your mind might be: Will it work? Will it not work? Will I reach my target audience? Will the audience I reach spend any money?
With offline advertising you have to rely on demographics and circulation statistics for each medium. With online advertising you can't rely on previously know statistics because it's all up to you to figu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the second part of a Nugget explaining how you can take tracking results from Google analytics and calculate more than just the return on investment for your retail jewelry store. (Part one here)
Let me do a quick rundown of all the example numbers from yesterday...
The following visitor referrals have come to our website over the last 30 days Visits from Facebook: 15 Visits... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
One of the most common problems for a retail store, not just retail jewelers, is being able to accurately track the point of origin of online visitors and follow them through to the point when they walk into your retail store. Although for small retailers there is a simple method... you simply ask your customers.
That might seem intuitive, but in all seriousness, the retail jewelers I talk to tell me it's not easy for the sales person to remember to ask a lead source question when you're in the mid... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Online marketing is a struggle for almost everyone. No one is sure what will work and what will not. Different experts have conflicting ideas on how you should spend your online advertising money, yet no one seems willing to provide meaningful reports that are easy to understand.
Email platforms like Constant Contact, iContact, and MailChimp have their own methods for measuring open rates, bounce rates, and click rates. But is that information really he... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Regardless of whether your sales were up or down for the 2012 holiday season, you should still evaluate what part of your marketing plan worked and what failed.
To help you with your evaluation, I'm going to review how you can measure the reality of your social marketing efforts from Facebook.
I'm going to explain a few Google searches below. For your own best test results with these searches you should use the Google Chrome web browser in "incognito" mode. If ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Since we're at the beginning of a new year, I'd like to share a new designer line marketing strategy that ties together your website and your Facebook Page.
A few months ago, I noticed that Google is including Facebook Photo Albums in search results. After a few months of testing I've come up with a method whose primary purpose is to help you grow your website visitor traffic but this will also grow engagements between you and your Facebook Likes.
It's still happening on Facebook. I need to revisit a topic that has long been a point of contention and confusion for many business owners: Personal Profiles vs. Business Pages
We as everyday average users of Facebook have a personal profile through which we all can keep in touch with family, friends, or even customers. Through the last few years we've seen several privacy disputes with how Facebook manages who sees the information that we share. Thanks to the competition crea... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'd like to turn my attention today to a quite common mistake that many jewelers make when they use Constant Contact as their email marketing platform.
Like all email marketing systems, Constant Contact allows you to post your email message directly to your Facebook Page. To do this, Constant Contact will convert your email into a standalone page that they host for you at the http://myemail.constantcontact.com website. They then share that website to your Facebook Page.
Facebook has a way for businesses to provide some type of offer to those who visit a Page. The offer is not at all based on a check-in, anyone can see it until you turn it off. "Facebook Offers" can be a discount, a redemption, a free prong inspection, free cleaning, or anything you can think of.
Facebook Offers are available only in beta testing for a few Business Pages. Normally I don't write about new, untested features, but if you're one of the lucky few to have this beta feature right now you should use it... it's currently free.
First, go to you’re the timeline for your business page and look at the share box. Above the share box you usually see the words...
Over the last 2 years Facebook has been dabbling on and off with the ability to check-in to a store using a smartphone. The check-in feature was introduced in August 2010 with the major user interface revamp that also took place that month.
The summer of 2010 was also the beginning of the widespread public awareness of many location based services like Foursquare, GoWalla, SCVNGR, Whrrl, Brightkite, and many others. Each of these location based services provided a way to "check-in" through a smartphone and share where you were and what you were doing with friends.
In August 2010 Facebook was reporting 500 million users, and it was thought that their check-in service would crush all the others. But that didn't happen.
Fast forward to today, two years later, and many of the location based services don't exist anymo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Facebook has built-in analytics called Insights. If you are an Admin, from the top of your Page you can see the basic Insights chart showing purple dots for each of your posts, a green line for the number of people talking about your Page, and a blue line that shows the reach of the post.
Typically it's the reach that people look at to measure the effectiveness of their posts. "Reach" represents the number of times your Page has somehow appeared to other people on Facebook. In the simplest terms, those appearances could have been in the Ticker on the top right of your feed page and in the list of Stories shown on your feed page.
In a more abstract measurement, the number of people you actually reach is also measured by the people who Liked and Shared your post through friends of friends and fans; then the number of frien... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
If you want to dazzle, impress, and eventually make a sale, you will need really good jewelry product photography on your website. Some jewelers get the photographs from vendors, but most jewelers who truly understand the web will take their own photos.
Posting photos on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ is a surefire way to increase interactions with your customers, and even increase sales. My strongest recommendation for photo sharing on Facebook is to share one of your product detail pages that has a really large, good looking jewelry photo. The more eye-popping the photo is, the more likely customers will click it from your FB Timeline. Post the page, not just the picture.
My second recommendation for photo sharing on Facebook is to post photos you took throughout the day in the store. As an example, you could take a ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
At the beginning of this week we told you about our ongoing Facebook study. We started actively collecting data on February 2012 and the process is still ongoing. Our goal is to identify the types of social post and interactions that will not only build your interactions on Facebook, but also bring people to your website.
It's important to get people to your website because that's the only place you can truly control the user experience and the marketing they are exposed to. The ultimate goal, of course, is to get people into your store, which you could do successfully through Facebook itself, especially with Events. Discovering the success of our suggestions here relies entirely on whether or not you have a face-to-face customer lead source tracking system. In other words, you have to ask the people who walk into your store.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is a continuation of our Daily Golden Nugget series on Facebook. We're still covering basic Facebook information so you can understand why Facebook has worked well for so few jewelers while most gave up after trying different things for a few months.
We're on a quest to explain how Facebook measures the importance of every status post and how they are organized in your personal News Feed. As we explained earlier, Facebook's EdgeRank is calculated with 3 apparent variables known as Affinity, Edge Weight, and Recency. We prefer to use more sensible names that are easier to understand like "Friendliness Factor," "Post Type," and "Post Age."
No matter how popular your posts are, they will eventually fade away through age. Age is not simply measured by the minute or seconds hand on the clock, it could be based on how fre... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is a continuation of our Daily Golden Nugget series on Facebook. We're still covering basic Facebook information so you can understand why Facebook has worked well for so few jewelers while most couldn't see a return on investment.
And that's the key, ROI. The only way to successfully market to a Facebook audience is to understand how EdgeRank works and how to influence it. If you influence someone's EdgeRank you also increase the chance they will visit your store or website. Facebook sets their own rules and user experience. You cannot fully control the user experience or hope to generate foot traffic and sales unless you get people to your website. You and you alone control the rules of engagement on your website.
As we began explaining yesterday, Facebook's EdgeRank is calculated with 3 apparent variables known... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
To say that our heads are swimming in Facebook data, research, other people's opinions, and total nonsense would be an understatement!
As we announced yesterday we've been conducting our own private research study into Facebook. Our goal is to discover what would get people off Facebook and onto your website or into your jewelry store.
This has not been easy. Why? Simply because no one is talking about this topic at all, yet all of you seem to be asking us for this information.
To be honest, typically you guys in the jewelry industry are a little more grounded, and slower to adopt new technology. While many other industries and brand ran headlong into the wide open green fields of Facebook marketing, most jewelers held back wondering what was on the other side of that wide field. Many of those early adopters foun... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Let's set the wayback machine to 1993 when we used to track the number of "hits" to a website. At that time a website was simply an HTML file with text and a bunch of links between pages. A hit was counted every time one of the HTML pages was displayed in the Mosaic web browser. (Mosaic was the first web browser.)
The early internet engineers wanted to know how many times their pages were read, and they assumed each "hit" represented 1 person taking the time to actually read it. Those old counting system didn't consider that other file types, like images, would eventually get caught up in the hit counting.
Before anyone knew it, a page with 2 images was counting as 3 hits, and a page with 9 images was counting as 10 hits. This meant that two people visiting a page with 9 images would suddenly be 20 hits, rather than jus... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here's a regular routine for the online marketing process of your jewelry website, or brick and mortar jewelry store...
You share status updates on Facebook and hope to gain new fans. Maybe one day those fans will click over to your website to see the jewelry you sell.
You share on Google+ knowing that it will help influence the Google SERP. Maybe one day someone will actually search a phrase you posted on Google+ and click over to your website to see the jewelry you sell.
You create quippy remarks for a 140 character Tweet and flood your Twitter account. You hope that eventually someone will see your #jewelry or #engagement #ring hash tags and click over to your website to see the jewelry you sell.
You set up a WordPress blog and post regular entertainment news or monthly updates about birthstones. This pr... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday we explained that you should first create a dedicated and permanent page on your website for each event you hold. You should include a link to that dedicated page in all email invitations and in the Facebook Event that you create.
We left off with the question of why would you want to create a dedicated, permanent page on your website for each event. Here are our 2 really good reasons why:
1. Regular Social Activity
It's good to show people you have activities year round. Remember that in the February 29, 2012 Daily Nugget (bit.ly/xQ9BPj) we told you that the Store Events page was the 2nd most popular viewed via mobile browsers. Even if you don't have a current event, you still need to give them something to find.
Events. Not every jewelry stores runs them, but we have to wonder why not. Ladies Nights, Super Bowl parties, Red Carpet parties, Facebook Fan parties... or just your everyday average, run of the mill trunk show.
You don't own an average retail store; you own a jewelry store, and sometimes people need to be invited in. And if you do it right, those invitations will keep bringing new customers into your store for years to come.
Inviting customers to an event is easy with today's technology. We remember in 2005 when some jewelers were spending more than $3500 to snail mail a box of very slick post cards. With today's marketing, you're more inclined to save that money and take advantage of the invite power provided by Facebook and regular email.
Facebook has an entire Event Application to invite your fans, and give ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Black Friday is gone and Cyber Monday is over; now it's time to tune your online abilities to less automated methods. You might have used automated email sending and automatic website content changing over the last few days, but for the next month you will need to put a little TLC spin on attracting new customers.
Radio, TV, direct mail, and newspapers are all traditional methods to attract customers; you either love or hate these methods. Social networking is time consuming and seems to have a hit or miss success rate.
So what's the suggested strategy? Actually it's one that should work throughout the year...
Back in June 2011, KISSmetrics (www.kissmetrics.com) published an interesting infographic called "The Science of Social Timing." Actually we can't give KISSmetrics all the credit because they got their data ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here's a strategy to help increase the visibility of your Facebook page throughout the holiday season. Actually, this works not only for the holiday season but all year long.
Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ each have the ability to connect a post to someone else, and get their attention doing it. Today we're going to explain how the Facebook feature works; it's called "tagging."
When creating a status update from your Facebook wall you can easily mention someone's name, or a business name, in the update box. By the way, did you know that the official name for the Facebook update box is called the "Publisher Box?"
To connect one of your status posts to someone or to another business you simply need to type the @ symbol followed by their name. Facebook will activate a drop down list as soon as you type the first lett... 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
There's a tactic we commonly use when creating AdWords campaigns that allows us to target online ads to appear to people who have already visited your website. The idea is that if someone took the time to browse through your website, they were probably interested in your jewelry, but weren't interested enough to purchase at that moment; so we keep showing them ads to make them remember the jewelry store.
This is a very successful strategy that Google AdWords has enhanced greatly in the last 12 months or so. Google explains the effectiveness in the fact that people are targeted with specific offers. These offers were not, and will never be, visible on the regular website, making the person feel like they found a special deal or even say to themselves "wow, thankfully I didn't buy that a day ago."
Review websites are popping up everywhere. Not too long ago, the only review sites we worried about were Google Places, CitySearch, Yelp, InsiderPages, MerchantCircle, and a few others. In the Spring of 2010, Google was so hungry for reviews they created new HTML tags to tell Google when a review was showing on a page.
Since then, reviews online have exploded because digital marketing agencies realized the power behind the tool. Does your marketing agency get it yet?
The review services mentioned above are typically out of your control, or you may have to jump through a few hoops to manage the reviews. Other online reviews can appear on your Facebook Business Page or on your website, and these are easier to control.
Your first ACTION ITEM for today is to contact your web programmer and tell them you want a review... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There's an idea among first time website owners that it's best to slap up a website with perfect jewelry photos, prices, and a Buy Now button and they can sell online. At the other end of the scale there's another camp of first time website owners that feel it's best to slap up a website with basic information about the jewelry store and they will attract new customers into the store.
Both of these ideas are completely erroneous. There is no way to slap a website together and become a success. What's worse is that we know, and our staff has attended, many seminars at jewelry trade shows where both of these myths are perpetuated.
You might be familiar with the phrases "Business card Websites" and "E-commerce sites from vendors." The business card site is a basic 1, 2, or 3 page website that puts your name online. The e-c... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Geesh, this extended series on emailing strategies and statistics is getting pretty tiring! After 7 previous Nuggets covering topics like what day to email, who to email, who's name to use when emailing, and even the time of day to email, thankfully today is the last day.
We've explained some reasons why it's good to use quality paid email services (they keep you honest) and a few of the features from each. They all have short term trial periods so just try them out.
Last week we voiced our opinion that we don't believe it's worth the trouble to send fancy HTML and image emails to your customers any more since most email programs automatically block HTML images.
Today we'd like to tell you about a controversial strategy for sending emails that is so far out of the box that you'll have a hard time letting go enough t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
EDIT: This Nugget is Defunct because Facebook took away this feature.
In the previous few Daily Golden Nuggets we've analyzed emails and given you some times of the day, days of the week, and months of the year to send your emails. We've also explained the differences between HTML emails that have photos and plain text emails, and when to use each.
There are a variety of companies that you can purchase your email service through like iContact, Constant Contact, and AWeber. But what about Facebook?
Have you ever given a though to using Facebook for email marketing? Let's explore some ideas for doing just that.
First, forget about your personal Facebook account. We've been saying it for more than a year, and many other internet marketing professionals will say the exact same thing: Do not use your per... 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
I really didn't expect my review of Google+ to take all five days this week. This will be my last interstitial Daily Golden Nugget (for at least a few days).
Yesterday I started a list of features I foresee being integrated into Google Plus. Google's public company status prevents them from publicly announcing what they are working. The GOOG stock is actually doing very well since the launch of Google+.
Yesterday they reported their quarterly earnings were up and they've officially reached 10 million Google Plus users. I read a report on SearchEngineLand.com explaining how many people have not accepted invitations sent to them. Those of us that have are starting to realize the more compelling nature of Google Plus over Facebook.
When using Facebook, I usually keep a browser tab open. I occasionally look at that ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Hello, I'm interrupting this regularly scheduled Daily Gold Nugget to bring you some direct reporting from the construction site.
Normally our Daily Nuggets are written from a compilation of data we've either measured or had direct experience with. Personally, I don't like to feed into the noise of so many SEO professionals that say one thing or another about SEO and you never know who's right. Thankfully, my team specializes in jewelry SEO and all our research data is specific to that sector.
Today, and maybe for a few days this week, I'd like to talk to you directly about Google+. First, let's get you up to speed on the nomenclature since I might refer to it as "Google Plus," "G+" and even "GP."
I finally got an invite to Google+ on Friday, July 8, 2011 and dove right in. I sent out emails to all of my customers... 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
Many jewelers criticize us that almost everything we teach refers to Google in one way or another. This is simply because in our tracking we see the highest percentage of organic traffic coming from Google.com.
Today we took a random sampling of the sites we work on and looked at an average percentage of all the current traffic in the last 30 days. Here are the results:
Organic Traffic for May 2011 to Jewelry Websites: Google: 85.39% Yahoo!: 6.41% Bing: 5.94% Search: 0.83% AOL: 0.95% Ask: 0.48%
It's amazing that Ask is still holding on as a search engine. It's also pretty surprising to see Search.com and AOL showing up as organic sources for organic jewelry website traffic.
Obviously you see how much traffic comes from Google. More than 85% of organic traffic for jewelry websites comes fro... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"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
Continuing the conversation from yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, let's present another simple idea you should consider while building your mobile website.
You're going to have to make a choice between allowing your mobile visitors to see your PC website initially, or automatically redirecting them to the mobile version of your website.
Our opinion is to allow the users to visit whatever website they typed into their browser, and not automatically redirect. So, if they type in http://m.jewelrystore.com you should show them your mobile website, but if they type in http://www.jewelrystore.com then you should show them your normal website.
When visiting the normal website, you need to give them an easy-to-locate link that allows them to jump to the mobile... 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
The Internet is not not just limited to websites any more. In fact, the everyday normal website is slowly being replaced by social sites and various online services.
A few years ago, if you wanted to put all your jewelry store information online you would have to figure out how to do it all, or hire a company that could do it all.
Do you have videos on your website? Previously, you needed to manage video content on your own and have a hosting account capable of handling that huge video bandwidth. Now that process is much easier with YouTube.
Do you have testimonials on your website? Previously, you needed to ask people to write testimonials and mail them to you. Now you can ask people to write online reviews on Google Places or Yep. You can even capture tweets about your site and post them on your website.
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
Online marketing is not always about finding the right ads, or expensive photography, or search engine optimization, or even the right online marketing company.
Another important part of online marketing is simply you; your personality and your time--oh, and your communication skills.
It's time to brush up on your typing and online communication skills, because that's what today's Daily Golden Nugget is all about.
There are hundreds of various local online forums that you can get involved with. Here are some forums that we know of that you could get involved with today:
1. Local Chamber of Commerce community forum websites 2. Your bank's website may have local forums 3. American Express has online forums
Although Facebook is technically not an online forum, you can use it as one to interact with y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The answer might actually surprise you and you can't really answer it unless you understand how your website functions.
You see, you don't just count the number of pages on your site, as in your About Us and Services pages. You need to take a really close look at how many dynamic pages are being created automatically.
As an example, let's talk about a typical online jewelry product catalog webpage. When you visit that type of page, you would first see a bunch of smaller photos of all the jewelry. Clicking on any image will then bring you to another page of full details for that single item.
For every product you add to your website, you also add another dynamic page to your site.
The same is true for the blog or newsletter archive on your website. Every blog entry creates ... 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
One of the effective ways Facebook was used during the holiday 2010 season was by offering deals to your Facebook Business page fans.
According to a comScore survey, social media accounted for 33% of the buying influence in December. Within that one-third percentage surveyed, 9% said they were watching Facebook Business pages for deals, and another 9% said they were watching their friend's status updates for deals.
To tap into this small, but growing, market you need to understand the different strategies you could use. The easiest to implement is creating an Event on Facebook.
Throughout December, we saw dozens of jewelry stores creating events that were simply called "10% off for all Facebook Fans!" Actually the percentage varied, but that was the general idea.
We're not going to talk about anything new today. Instead, we wanted to share industry statistics and our own findings for this 2010 holiday season. Everything reported is for online sales or statistics.
These statistics were reported from comScore.com Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 25) $407M, up 28% Black Friday (Nov. 26) $648M, up 9% Cyber Monday (Nov. 29) $1,028M (that's a Billion!) 16% Green Monday (Dec. 13) $954, up 12% Free Shipping Day (Dec. 17) $942M, up 61%
The week of December 17 (Free Shipping Day) saw 52.7% of online transactions with free shipping. comScore also reported that there was a greater trend for online buyers to wait until Free Shipping Day before making the final sale. This is a clear indication that free shipping is a deal winner when selling online.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
Ever wonder why your marketing strategy fails, or doesn't return any real investment? You spend thousands on a billboard just to have friends say "I saw your billboard." You spend thousands on a radio ad just to have the FedEx guy say "I heard your ad on the radio today."
Each and every time you spend money on an ad, it should return enough sales to at least cover the cost of the ad. If not, well, then you did it wrong.
Wrong demographic target, or wrong placement, or wrong words, or maybe simply no one cares about what you are trying to sell. Of course, there's always the possibility that your ad slogan has some other urban slang definition and everyone's laughing at you.
Now in the second week of online marketing attempts, we are seeing random and sloppy ads from many jewelry stores.
It's Black Friday in the USA and that means millions of people are out spending money and hopefully many of you retail store owners are bringing in some good sales. Which, by the way, we hope you are reading this from your cell phone or tablet while out on the sales floor.
Speaking of cell phones and tablets, here are a few good ideas you should think about over the next week.
#1. This one's for iPad users. Get yourself a nice photo frame stand that the iPad can sit in. A clear plastic frame will work, too. Load the iPad with some photos of items you have in stock. On Windows, you can easily load photos as if the iPad is a camera by using the standard iConnect-to-everything-iRelated-cable. On a Mac, you can use the iPhoto program to load and organize your photos.
Competition is good; well, at least that's what some businessmen will say. Competition keeps companies honest because it prevents monopolies, and it also spurs innovation.
In June 2009, Microsoft re-branded its MSN search engine into the Bing search engine. This engine has some very nice features, but according to our tracking of jewelry websites, only 7.63% of search traffic comes from Bing, so we don't pay attention to it much.
Although, Facebook is inching closer to becoming a full-fledged search engine using Bing, so that minuscule 7.63 might increase. Again, we'll let you know if it does.
Bing has one really good SEO feature for reverse engineering your competition's website, and that's the IP Address lookup. You can put the IP address of any website into the Bing engine and find out all the other websites ho... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
So far, in this week's Daily Gold Nuggets, we've been explaining that storytelling through your emails, blog or Facebook posts will build a better relationship with your customers than simply trying to shove ads in their face.
The storytelling continues again, but the next story needs to be a few days after the last. In this next story, you want to tell your readers that you are finished decorating your store, and show the photos from the process. A good solution is to take photos from your smart phone and upload them to Flickr or DailyBooth or Picasa. Then, as you write this next part of your story, you can link to those photos that are already online.
Don't make the mistake of taking photos and uploading them to Facebook through your phone. Photos uploaded to Facebook will automatically post to your Wall. You don't w... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday's Daily Gold Nugget concluded with the statement that the better targeted your emails are, the more frequently you can send them out. Today we will expand on this idea.
According to Ted Nicholas (a very well known sales and copy writer) every ad or email you create should have enough ROI to at least pay for the cost to create it. If not, then throw it out and start over.
Ted also explains that you should test your message on small groups before sending it to your entire list of customers. Here are some strategies so you can put this into direct practice using the Facebook Update feature we explained yesterday.
We have a few assumptions here. 1. We assume you have more than a few hundred Facebook Fans that like your Business Page. 2. We assume that a good percentage of your fans are actually ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A little more than a week ago, we reported through these Nuggets how Facebook could zap you if you didn't follow their rules. One of those things is sending too many emails to your Facebook friends from your personal account.
There is however, a way to send out an "update" to all the fans of your Business Page. You can even target the specific people to send to. Here's how...
Go to your Business Page. In the left margin, under your image, click "Edit Page." This will take you to the Management Page, where your Basic Information will be showing. Now click on the "Marketing" link in the left margin to get to the screen that says "There are many ways to Promote Your Page." Click on "Send an Update" The next screen will look like an email compose screen, but it has a subtle difference. You will see the "Audi... 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
Do not shoot the messenger on this one. We're about to give you very specific instructions on using your Facebook Business Page. You might not believe us. If you choose to ignore this Gold Nugget, we will simply laugh and point a finger at you when you get zapped.
Was that blunt enough for you? Please give us some attention for this one.
First, understand that Facebook needs to make money. They have a mostly free system, but somehow they have to pay their bills. From our point of view, their rules are put in place to prevent you from making money with their free system unless they get a cut of the profits.
In November 2009, they announced a set of new rules that totally distorted the ability for businesses to use contests to gain new fans and to protect their branding.
This Nugget might be more of a Soap Box statement than an educational piece, but it's important.
Facebook services an alleged 600 million users accounts now, but they only have around 1,000 employees. They have no customer service department, and when you have trouble, you are forced to use the online help system to get answers from other users.
Their system is very big, and even with the help system, it is impossible to figure out how to post a question. The only way you can talk to a live person is to have a paid advertising account with them.
Facebook has a very strict set of rules. They are almost absurd, actually. The most absurd is that each person is allowed only 1 account. We've expressed our dislike of this policy during our Live 2 Event in August 2010.
Are you aware of all the little nuances of Internet Marketing that could improve the conversion rates from your blog site to the main area of your site where you make money?
Internet Marketing is a learned skill. Even with many years of experience in traditional media marketing, you couldn't possibly know the how's and why's of Internet Marketing. We're giving you a few easy ones below.
By now, you should have an established blog set up. We hope you have it on your own website rather than a Blogger or WordPress account. Here are some tactics that you should be employing in each of your blog posts.
1. Your main headline needs to be the largest words on the page. 2. You should break up your blog entry into subsections with a sub-heading for each. 3. Headings and sub-headings should be in a Sans Serif font. Good ch... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday we gave you some ideas about using your personal Facebook account. Assuming you are using it for professional purposes, we wanted to give you some ideas how to set up your personal branding with it.
Do you have a personal brand statement?
What is it that you uniquely do for people? Many business owners will refer to themselves and their company together in terms of "we," but that's wrong in this case because you want to be you and alone. So, step back and figure out what it is that you do exactly for people.
Do you specifically provide expert watch repair? Do you specifically provide award winning jewelry design? Are you the fashion expert? Why is it that people come into your store and ask for you? Write that down because it's your personal Unique Selling Point, or USP. Your USP should be interestin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've been reviewing many Facebook accounts recently. The one thing we continue to see is an inconsistency between how jewelers are using their personal Facebook profiles for both business and personal things.
Our view continues to be that you need to pick one or the other. If for personal use, then lock your profile and only allow personal friends, family and other professionals within the jewelry industry to become Facebook friends. But don't allow customers or employees to friend you.
On the other hand, if you choose to keep your personal life off Facebook then go right ahead and allow your customers to friend your personal account.
If customers are connected to your personal account, then avoid political postings and comments, as well as overly posting about your personal life.
The attention span of the everyday average customer is thinning. Until you heavily test, then create your own sales funnel, it is very difficult to know the best place to advertise.
Your sales funnel is your method of directing users to follow your online activity from one place to another until they are lead right to the website that sells your product. Your selling site is called your money site.
Of course, that doesn't mean you are actually selling on your site; it just means it's the site that has your actual sales pitch on it. That sales pitch could be your product catalog, or a landing page with a conversion form on it.
Your money site is usually your website. Every other site should be part of your sales funnel and is used to attract new customers and gain their trust. Allegedly Facebook has managed to win... 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
Quick! Name items you sell from your jewelry store more during the holiday season than any other month of the year.
Your sales might reflect differently than our findings, but here's what we know for sure.
According to statistical data provided by Google since 2004, we have seen higher online interest in lockets, crosses and jewelry boxes every holiday season for 6 years in a row.
Did you know that there's a psychological dollar value barrier that consumers are not willing to spend above online? We've seen that number to be somewhere between $450 and $497. Purchases of higher value than that usually trigger the need for a consumer to physically touch the product before purchase.
Lockets, crosses and jewelry boxes are relatively low ticket items, and consumers are willing to spend money on them without botheri... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When it comes to SEO, time is very precious. It's ticking by very quickly and if you want your website to be functioning correctly for the holidays, you need to take action before September 30.
On Friday last week, we explained a strategy of writing a description of your holiday inventory and having your webmaster post it on your website. Today we are continuing with a different spin of this idea.
Video.
As soon as your holiday inventory arrives, you need to film a video presentation of each item you are serious about selling. Production studio camera and sound quality is not needed, but lighting is very important.
You have several choices to shoot your video: Digital camera, Flipcam, or Cell Phone.
Your audience will forgive poor audio quality as long as the video image is good, and the jewelry color... 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
Perhaps the title of this Gold Nugget is a bad pun. Today we're going to give a brief overview of the new Facebook Places system compared to Whrrl.
Whrrl has a straight forward system showing you immediate suggested things to do on the opening Home page. There's also a easy to use Check In button that, when tapped, will give you a fast, real time listing of places around you.
As people check in and make recommendations, those recommendations are pushed out to anyone else who is within the local area. We've already seen people act upon our recommendations immediately, and then reply back to us with a "did it." The same suggestions will show up on the Home page for people up to about 20 miles away.
Unlike the badges you earn from the other systems which you can use to mark your personal goals, Whrrl give you Influe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This week's set of Gold Nuggets will help cut through the chatter of "Location-Based Services."
Today, August 23, 2010 Facebook changed some of the functionality of their website. In preparation of today's changes they've slowly been announcing new services to the world. Last week they announced Facebook Places in hopes to enter the arena of Location-Based Services (LBS).
It seems the world suddenly woke up and is talking about LBS as if it's something new that started last week. In reality the location-based technology became commonplace back in 2005, except many of us weren't quite aware of it. If ever you read the fine print in your cell phone feature, you would have know that Big Brother was tracking you.
There are many players right now vying for the LBS crown. At this point, we don't even know who will win ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's a very common misconception that the home page is the only place a visitor will enter your site.
Ticketmaster sued Microsoft in April 1997 because Microsoft linked directly to a Ticketmaster purchase page instead of their home page. Since then there have been 4 other large visibility cases all resulting in dismissal.
"The whole point of putting information on the Web is to make it easier for people to access it, so companies should be thrilled that other sites want to link to them." - David Sorkin, dontlink.com
Facebook users deep link all the time, they just don't realize it. Pasting a URL into the FB Publisher box (aka making a "status update") is usually done to share something interesting with friends.
Deep linking is extremely valuable for SEO, which is something we've learned over time and testin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There's a lot of hype when it comes to Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. Many leading internet marketers will say Facebook is the far superior system.
The truth is we just don't know yet. The Facebook advertising system is still young. If you sign up for ads on there today you will see a lot of features that indicate "beta" and even a few disclaimers that say things like "this data may be inaccurate."
Google has years of experience with advertising and it's their primary income, so they have to get it right. Facebook approached the advertising concept completely differently than Google, and they made it much easier.
But with ease comes sacrifice. Facebook's ad system also only allows you to target people that are related or not related to your specific fan pages.
"...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
For several years and through a lot of tough competition, Facebook has managed to maintain its status as the most popular social media network, although there seems to be an evolutionary shift of people away from Facebook and on to other networks like Instagram and Snapchat. Some organizations, groups, and communities are using Facebook's Group feature to create a community messaging board, while other organizations have migrated to networks like Telegram. For the moment, Facebook is still the network to use, but Instagram is growing quick...
It seems like only yesterday when it was thought that email addresses would become more important than telephone numbers, and now a website address is more important than both a telephone number and a physical address. A website is the most important representation of your business, yet most jewelers don't treat it that way, and many still view it as an online brochure that needs to be made once, and then forgotten about.
In yesterday's Nugget, I explained 
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.
Jewelers should be worried about their personal security and how much information they share on social media. There's always that possibility that someone is watching you and planning something really bad.
A few years ago, Google AdWords created a feature called Remarketing that allows you to secretly tag a website visitor so you can target them with a specific ad in the future. The premise behind the marketing method is that a customer will likely return to your website if they see an ad that reminds them to.
Something's been happening over at Facebook since December 2013 that affects how the overall methods of how customers see your social posts...
The 
As the Holiday Season quickly approaches, I wanted to use today's online jeweler review to demonstrate how a customer could discover a local jeweler when you search for a designer's name, even when that jeweler has the worst website.
From what I've seen since 2009, the methods of running contests on Facebook have been so difficult and misunderstood that many business gotten themselves into real trouble without even knowing what hit them. People have been locked out of their accounts and pages were deleted all due to guideline violations. Meanwhile other people and pages attracted thousands of fans through the same violated guidelines without so much as a whisper of a scandal.
I'd like to share a dirty little secret with you today... It doesn't matter how many people follow your Facebook Business Page; what matters is how many of your followers will convert to customers.
Over this past weekend I attended the 
I remember reading Facebook studies from 2011 showing that the most popular types of updates to Facebook were images. When comparing text updates, video updates, and photos updates, the photos had the highest ratings in the studies.
Facebook recently announced that they will try to revolutionize online search by letting you find recommendations from your friends. The entire concept is still in the early phases and the usefulness is not quite clear. They call it the "Social Graph Search."
Getting started with any new advertising method always carries a little bit of trepidations. Your advertising budget could be exhausted easily if you made the wrong choice. Common questions that might cross your mind might be: Will it work? Will it not work? Will I reach my target audience? Will the audience I reach spend any money?
This is the second part of a Nugget explaining how you can take tracking results from Google analytics and calculate more than just the return on investment for your retail jewelry store.
One of the most common problems for a retail store, not just retail jewelers, is being able to accurately track the point of origin of online visitors and follow them through to the point when they walk into your retail store. Although for small retailers there is a simple method... you simply ask your customers.
Online marketing is a struggle for almost everyone. No one is sure what will work and what will not. Different experts have conflicting ideas on how you should spend your online advertising money, yet no one seems willing to provide meaningful reports that are easy to understand.
Regardless of whether your sales were up or down for the 2012 holiday season, you should still evaluate what part of your marketing plan worked and what failed.
Since we're at the beginning of a new year, I'd like to share a new designer line marketing strategy that ties together your website and your Facebook Page.
It's still happening on Facebook. I need to revisit a topic that has long been a point of contention and confusion for many business owners: Personal Profiles vs. Business Pages
I'd like to turn my attention today to a quite common mistake that many jewelers make when they use Constant Contact as their email marketing platform.
