Between your website, local newspaper, direct mail, radio ads, billboard, social media, and word of mouth, it's difficult to calculate exactly how your customers are finding you and what ultimately convinced them to make a purchase. What was once an easy task of calculating the ROI for an individual ad is now impossible because of so many different ways a customer can engage with you online.
"Attribution modeling" is the modern process of analyzing and assig... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
Twenty-five years ago, no one understood how the internet would trigger an evolutionary change in how almost every business in the world operates. Today, most businesses have some type of website to represent themselves online, and even the companies without websites have some type of online presence in business directories like Yelp and Google Maps.
It seems like every business industry has figured out how to use the internet to improve the efficiency of their business and their c... 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
The digital screen on my bathroom scale has been on the fritz more and more every day, and I finally decided to do something about it today. I've owned different wearable devices over the past 7 years to monitor my health and daily activity, but I didn't yet have a smart bathroom scale to monitor my BMI or other health factors. Today was the day I would finally get one.
I contemplated buying one off Amazon.com but decided that I'd rather compare models ... 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 recently had a few meetings with a French tourism company that needed help figuring out how to build traffic to their website. Their website wasn't anything special; honestly, it was just another directory website. Directory websites are a very common business model that range from large sites like CitySearch.com to local Chamber of Commerce websites. Niche focused directory websites can usually better serve their community than the larger sites.
No one ever wants to write a business plan for their new business or new business venture. Most people feel that a business plan is especially needed when you want to raise startup capital, which while true, a business plan helps you create focus.
Many business owners have great ideas that they feel they can accomplish without writing the ideas down on paper. I started my first business in 1994 with just vague ideas and didn't write my first plan until 2 years later after suffering several slow starts.
It's the hope of every business that they will build a website that helps make them a lot of money, but few websites ever achieve that goal. Turning a website into a money making machine won't happen overnight, and it won't magically happen without a lot of help from employees and the business owner.
Most small businesses don't know how to update their websites once they are launched; indeed, many will continually pay for website updates even though they can edit the website on ... 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
Retail is being redefined every day. Everyone still looks at their bottom line sales, but it doesn't matter anymore if the sales are from foot traffic through the front door or via shipping boxes out the back. While most retail businesses are still struggling to figure out how to bring foot traffic back in the front door, I submit that it's probably easier to learn what it takes to build your ecommerce business and increase the flow of shipped product instead.
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
We each have our own set of specializations and talents. Someone in your family is probably better at cooking than all the others, while someone else is a better writer, carpenter, or a musician. The world would be a very boring place if we all had the same level of skill and proficiency in everything.
The Entrepreneurial Journey
At some point, you probably got the idea that you could make your favorite baubles or provide a service better than others you'd seen, and so you launched a business o... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last 6 years, I've subscribed to more jewelry email lists than I can remember. Whenever I do a website review, I look for the newsletter signup and add myself to their list. Most of the time, I never hear from those retail jewelers because they don't follow through with their email list.
Amidon Jewelers, in New Hampshire, is one of the few independent retail jewelers that I know that has consistently sent me emails since I signed up to their list way back in 2012. Years ago, they were sendi... 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
Can you learn from someone else's mistakes? That's exactly what I hope you'll get out of this Friday Flop Fix. This week, I'm venturing over to Tupelo, MS in search of a retail jeweler that might be making a mistake with their online presence.
This is the result I saw when searching for "jewelers tupelo ms" in Google:
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
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
Back when jWAG was formed in 2010, the common mantra touted by many online marketers was that "the money is in the list." The list, at the time, was a reference to the number of people on your email list. Since then, we now have the ability to reach customers through many other list methods, including Facebook retargeting lists, Google AdWords remarketing lists, and even push notifications through custom apps that people download. So many online marketing opportunities exist now tha... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The axiom of search engine optimization is that your website will only rank for words that search engines can find on your website. If you learn nothing else about search engine optimization you must learn that one point. If you have learned that already; good, you don't have to read today, but before you go consider that many people aware of that axiom are still not applying.
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
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I find a random retail jewelry stores and review their website in hopes that we'll be able to learn something from the process. I call this a "Flop Fix" because I specifically look for websites that are making mistakes, i.e. flops, so I can suggest fixes.
Here's the search results I saw this week when I searched Google for "jewelry stores Elko, NV":
There was a lot of marketing buzz around QR codes when they appeared in the USA in 2009 and 2010. Marketers thought they would be a hot sensation for smartphone users and started slapping them on all their ads. Even though QR codes began to appear everywhere, their usefulness and marketing success rates were small. What marketers didn't realize was that QR codes must be utilitarian, but most were gimmicky. I wrote this Nugget about... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
Within the jewelry industry, I often hear about jewelry designers who take a break and put their business on hold while they reconsider their artistic direction or go back to school for additional training. Although it might seem like a simple idea to put a business on hold, how you present yourself online during your hiatus could have positive or negative ramifications on your future livelihood.
I've spoken to many jewelry designers who had a rough start with their busines... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
Entrepreneurs face many challenges when they first open their business. Frequently, business owners don't even know how to get started with registering their business on a local, county, state, or federal level. During my time as a business mentor with SCORE, I've been surprised by the number of aspiring entrepreneurs who come in asking for legal and accounting advice to help them get through their initial start-up peri... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I have this love/hate relationship with the words "branding" and "brand." When I became an entrepreneur and started studying different marketing approaches, I still remember my initial confusion of seeing those words used in connection with advertising. Up until then, I only knew of branding as a method of marking livestock, such as cows. The origin of the word brand, in fact, has Germanic origins relating to burning an identification mark into ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Bloggers have an unyielding passion to write and share their expertise with the world. Unlike a freelance writer for hire that is paid to create an editorial, most passionate bloggers write because they care greatly about the topic, and many do it for free. Those of us who write for free are often disappointed by posts that don't get the attention we wish they did; after all our blog posts are our children and we want our children to grow up and be successful and not unacknowledged misfits.
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review here!
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week I've randomly chosen Santa Clarita, CA as the city to search for my review candidate. When I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers Santa Clarita, CA," I saw these three Google business listings:
Tracking the most active social media content might seem silly, but there's real value to this activity. When you first start blogging or otherwise buildi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping way back to September 2010 to the topic of landing page planning, although I didn't specifically call it landing page planning back then.
Planning your landing page long before you need to use it is an important part of a successful online marketing strategy, but before I get in too deep of how to help with the success, let me just briefly explain what a landing page is.
Throughout the past month, I analyzed different sets of keywords that I collected during the 2015 holiday season. Most of that research focused on overall analysis of the keyword data without breaking it down into the desktop, mobile, or tablet categories of devices. I chose that approach to save time, and quite frankly, so as not to bore everyone with too much similar information.
That said, in this edition, I am splitting apart the results to show you how the u... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
If technology and website design are not your cup of tea, you might want to skip this one. On the other hand, if you're a business owner who wants to understand the future of how to make your mobile customers happy, and want to learn some advanced concepts that will help with the future of customer detection and personalization, read on.
Mobile Personalization
There are a lot of mobile devices out there. The data I analyzed while writing my latest VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It all started six years ago; that's right, we're celebrating the jWAG's 6th anniversary today with the ambitious and philanthropic mission to surface our research about the internet and how the jewelry industry could best use technology to improve their business.
When my business partner and I launched the Jeweler Website Advisory Group (jWAG), we never expected it to blossom into the resource that is now referenced by so many people, even outside the jewe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
With the 2015 Holiday Season at an end, let's take a look at some website tracking results from the Thanksgiving week through Christmas.
I have a lot of data to from various retail jeweler websites. The set of data I'm referencing below was recorded across retail jewelry websites that have been active with updating their website regularly over the last 12 months. These same websites are also mobile friendly. This includes a combination of retail jewelers and ecommerce sites. Remember, the results show... 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
I enjoy all the feedback and questions I receive from my readers. Last week, I received a question about RSS feeds which I'll address today. This is a higher level topic that I last mentioned in my Nugget from December 16, 2010, but have never explained in full detail. The detail I'll cover today might be of some interest to those of you who blog on a regular basis, and... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is a special Christmas edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each and every Friday, I write some type of website critique or review as an educational case study. For Christmas today, I'm changing it up and reviewing a Christmas-related search engine results page.
As I started my search today by typing out "christmas jewelry ideas," Google offered me the suggestions you see here:
I recently did a comparison of the total user sessions between November 2014 and 2015 including a breakdown of usage on mobile, desktops, and tablets.
I'm continuing my analysis of the same data as measured across retail jeweler websites; this time I'm comparing the increase or decrease of new users between November 2014 and 2015.<... 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.
In this edition of #ThrowbackTursday, I'm jumping back to October 2011 to the topic of website holiday themes.
In that Nugget, I explained how you could add a few small, cheerful holiday design changes to your website as well as some quick links to help holiday shoppers.
Most retail websites maintain the same design throughout the entire year even though those same businesses will dec... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Reports from the first weekend of the big holiday season in the U.S. are in, and they are quite mixed.
Businesses both large and small tried to get a jump on the Black Friday specials this year by advertising "Black Friday" discounts throughout the four weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Early in November, a blog post on C|Net speculated that VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Internet technology and search engine optimization changes continue to affect small businesses and the marketing methods they use. Google forced everyone to think seriously about their mobile website in April 2015 with #mobilegeddon, creating a surge in businesses that finally took mobile websites seriously.
Welcome to the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, and it's also Black Friday in the U.S., the largest retail shopping day of the year for U.S. retailers.
The goal of these weekly flop fixes is to identify something on a retail jeweler's website that should be fixed. My suggestions are based on my previous experience and research. In honor of the upcoming Cyber Monday, I decided to specifically look for a retail jeweler with an e-commerce website to find some flops that need fixing. I made my search f... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., the only national holiday that transcends all races and religions. The holiday is typically celebrated by gathering together with friends and family and enjoying an elaborate meal. The next few weeks will see huge spikes in retail store sales, and today is probably the last day off most retail store owners in the U.S. will have until Christmas Day.
I'm mentioning this because a recent review of my own Google Analytics revealed that 47% of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is the eve of the official start of the "holiday season" in the U.S. Retail businesses have been preparing their inventory, ads, and employees for the last few months in hopes to really boost sales this year.
In a perfect world, most holiday season ads are already finalized and scheduled, but there's always the opportunity for retailers to gain a little extra publicity every day through different types of engagements with their customers.
Every business experiences some type of growing pains; these usually have something to do with lack of time, hiring the right employees, and supply and demand of products, but there's also a website growing pain that's very real.
There are a lot of easy ways for business owners to build their first website. WordPress is a good option for businesses that just want to put information online, and Shopify is a good option for those hoping to sell online quickly. Both of these systems offer out-of-the-box jewelry website templates and setups to get your website live in just a few days. GoDaddy also runs a marketing campaign... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For today's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping to the topic of buying your friends, or more specifically, not buying them.
Buying Website Links
There are plenty of online services offering to increase the traffic to your website, increase the number of links pointing to you website, increasing the number of Twitter followers you have, and increasing the number of people who like your Facebook page. More often than not, these services ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For this week's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to my August 2011 topic of Landing Pages that I explained here and here.
Website redesign and ad specific landing pages are more important than ever. I use video and heatmap tracking on several of my customer websites to... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to a year ago to the last time I updated my report on the most popular smartphone resolutions used by visitors to retail jewelry websites.
The last time I reviewed smartphone screen resolutions was only a week after the iPhone 6 had been released. For several years, the iPhone has been the most... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
One month ago today, I introduced the 2015 Holiday Run-Up with the premise that this year you could create several specialized marketing campaigns, or micro-campaigns, focused on singles products or groupings of products. Implementing the micro campaigns would require lots of product photography, correctly targeting your customers, writing lots of product content, sharing that product content to social media, coordinating... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's #ThrowbackThursday, and it's also the 19th installment of my special 2015 Holiday Run-Up series. Over the last 30 days, I've written out holiday marketing steps for Pinterest, Google+, VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As I write this, I'm indulging in a very large pumpkin muffin. It will quite possibly be my lunch for today even though I know it's just a quick fix of food and not the type that could sustain me for more than a few hours.
Our lives are filled with quick fixes of one type or another. Many advertising tactics feed into the need to satisfy the human nature for a quick fix. In the website and e-commerce realm, we of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The time needed to manage social media can easily eat up most of your day. Over the last few weeks, I've detailed a lot of social media tactics in this 2015 Holiday Run-Up series. If you've missed out on the discussion so far, then go back to the beginning here and catch up.
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
In today's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to January 2014 to my directions on how to post to Google+. This is also a continuation of my special 2015 Holiday Run-Up series giving you the tactics you need to help boost your sales this upcoming season.
I've covered topics of Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram so far in this Run-Up to the 2015 Holiday season. This is my 14th installment in this special Daily Golden Nugget series to help you boost your 2015 holiday sales.
If you're just joining in for the first time, then you should review the outline of this series I explained here. I'... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the continuation of my annual Daily Golden Nugget "Holiday Run-Up" series loaded up with step-by-step explanations of how to make the most of your holiday season advertising. The focus of this Run-Up is how to make the most of your product advertising to attract customers through multiple media methods. This is the 13th installment of the Run-Up, and this series still has a few more days before I finish all the topics that should make a positive impact on ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 11 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 3 weeks ago with directions for all the initial steps needed to prepare for the information you'll find in these last few run-up days. The initial marketing strategies overview is here.... 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 Part 8 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 Part 7 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 and has continued since.
In this edition, I'll explain ways you can plan your product content to correspond to the holiday ads you have ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For today's edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I want to jump back to a Nugget from November 2013. In it, I gave ideas on how to use gift certificates as a reputation management tool. That idea, which is still very viable today, is to donate a gift certificate to your local charity in exchange for asking them to write an online review.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...
This is Part 3 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...
This is the #ThrowbackThursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, but it also has a special tie-in to my ongoing Run-up series of 2015 Holiday Season Marketing Preparedness. The throwback doesn't go back too far, in fact it's a year ago today when I originally wrote about using different domain names to track your offline marketing. I've since... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is Part 2 of a multi-day Daily Golden Nugget series packed with tactics to help you in your 2015 holiday marketing. The series started yesterday with the overview of 2015 holiday marketing strategies. I'm breaking down each section of that overview into a more detailed Daily Nugget.
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
Last week I explained what I've been seeing with regard to mobile trends and your business future. Because of those trends, I strongly urge all businesses to start migrating their approach of reaching customers using the internet from a desktop computer point of view to a smartphone point of view. Doing so will be a complete shift in how you think, and what you... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When it comes time to consider a new jewelry designer for your store, you have an extra tool at your fingertips to help decide if you should buy into the line or not. However you evaluate a new line, you can also use Google Trends to help you decide. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
While there's a lot of chatter about TV cord-cutting, I'm starting to see the another type of cable being cut: the ethernet cable.
Although the majority of my reporting is based on measured data, I also feel it's important to report on the unscientifically tracked trends that I observe in my daily life, trends I notice when interacting with my own customers, and how I obser... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back 4 years to August 9, 2011 to my topic of conversion rate optimization.
What's A Conversion?
A "conversion" refers to some type of customer interaction that results in the capture of the customer's identity, usually their email address. E-commerce sites also measure conversions according to the number of online sales they have. VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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 was recently asked if I could help evaluate an SEO agency based on their email solicitation. SEO, or search engine optimization, changes so quickly it's difficult to know if an agency will be providing the most up to date services.
Here's the email I was asked to evaluate:
Reminder-SEO starts from just @99 USD per month Hi, First of all thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to read and consider this, We are of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
That's what I always say when a jeweler wants to ask me a question but starts off saying "I have a stupid question," which happened several times over this past weekend while I was at the RJO show in St. Louis. When it comes to asking me questions though, you have to be aware that I always use the good questions as future Daily Golden Nuggets, like this one.
After my Local Marketing seminar at the RJO show, a jeweler was explaining that they often ask for their customers to write ... 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
In this edition of Throwback Thursday, I'm jumping back to September 2011 and the topic of Article Spinning.
To understand what Article Spinning is you must first understand the importance of having a blog on your website. My avid followers will already know that I'm all about the blogging. High value blogging content... High value blog content that you post on your main website!
Did you know that it's possible to track the effectiveness of your offline marketing, as in, print ads, TV commercials, and even billboards? Yep, it's true, and it's simple too... Just use a different domain name on each ad.
Once a week, usually on Friday, I write a website review for a randomly chosen retail jewelry store. This week the review is being moved to Wednesday.
For this week's review, I'm searching for "jewelers in Sedona, AZ" using Google Chrome in incognito mode. The results I saw during last week's review were formatted for a smartphone. This week the results are formatted for a desktop browser again. Oddities like that are usual... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The 2015 Las Vegas jewelry shows came to a close one month ago today. On the morning of June 1, 2015, I was on the search for designers who would be willing to work with retail jewelers the way I explained in this pre-Vegas post here..
A quick recap from that Nugget:
Don't rely on your inventory management software to tell you what to buy.
Over the last few days, we've all seen our share of rainbows exploding from our computer screens and smartphones. The Supreme Court of The United States (SCOTUS) ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment requires States to allow same-sex marriage in their State and recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
While the legal fight for legal same-sex marriage rights is now over, the personal conflict and religious views will continue for quite a long time to come. Regardl... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The term Big Data is one of the internet's latest buzz words that everyone is talking about but no one seems to know what it is, why they should care about it, how to collect it, or how to use it.
Put simply, Big Data is the collection of massive amounts of demographic and tracking information you gather about your customers. Once gathered, you then churn that information into reports that help you better plan future marketing and provide interesting insights ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It must be summer. That's the only time I ever go to IHOP. In fact, this is the second time this month I've visited this family favorite. I was preoccupied with JCK work during my first visit earlier this month, but this time around I'm able to relax and leisurely enjoy a Saturday morning breakfast.
I always know what to expect when visiting IHOP. The menus always show crystal clear, large photos of mouthwatering stacks... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This Daily Golden Nugget is my 1,276th in a row. When I started this blogging journey nearly 5 years ago, I never expected where it would take me. Truthfully, every blogger begins their writing journey for personal reasons and we never know where we will end up.
Blogging is huge. The word blog has become the general term to represent all types of content creation that involves written words. When I started writing these Nuggets, I envisioned them only as email newsletters that would be archived online. I... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Throwback Thursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today I'm jumping back to Nugget number 55 and the topic of money sites.
The topic of marketing funnels came up during the 2015 JCK Talk on multi-channel marketing. The original idea of a marketing funnel was that you would reach a lot of people with a broad scope... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
The internet is a very visual place. Photos, videos, memes, animated graphics, and company logos flood every social network. When used incorrectly, they also create clutter on websites.
One of the methods I use to gauge how often a website is updated is to look at the 3rd party logos used throughout the website. I'm especially critical of search engine optimization companies that tout their modern SEO services next to search engine logos that are more than 10 years old.
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
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Usually I choose a random city around the U.S. to find a retail jeweler, and this week, in honor of the Las Vegas jewelry shows, I'll search around Las Vegas, Nevada.
The following is a screen grab when I searched for "jewelers in las vegas." The top listed store is The Jewelers of Las Vegas. They have updated their website since I last re... 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
Diamonds are supposed to be forever and a girl's best friend, but lately they are a tough sell. While many of my retail jewelry store customers are still looking for ways to increase their wedding and engagement ring sales, there are plenty of other opportunities for with designer lines of jewelry that could attract a new audience to your store.
You can read that article yourself, but in brief, the 6 theories posed were:
People are disappointed... Which I guess means all of us in the jewelry industry are wondering when our industry will rebound from the recession like... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'm one of those people. I admit it... I don't turn my cell phone off in a movie theater.
It's not that I want to be rude; I do put it on silent; but I have to keep the vibrate setting on. The nature of my job is such that I'm always on call to monitor a few very important websites for a few of my clients. So I can't be out of touch from those computers and servers. In fact, the only times I'm unplugged is when I'm at 38,000 over the Atlantic. WiFi isn't available on the transatlantic f... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I remember back in the late 1990s when I was helping people set up their first email addresses and told them that email would eventually be more important than their telephone number. Since then, the internet evolved in ways we never imagined and, although email didn't cause telephone obsolescence, some say that both methods of communication are going away.
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.
This is the Friday jewelry website review where I find a random retail jeweler and review their website for design, usability, and SEO. In each one of these reviews, my goal is to show how the information from my other Daily Golden Nuggets can be directly applied to a website.
This week, I'm using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode to search for "jewelers st joseph mo." Here's a snapshot of the results:
I'm in favor of the entrepreneur that tries to build a business around a perceived need. What make entrepreneurship in the U.S. so exciting is that you potentially make a healthy living off an idea you dream up yourself.
The internet makes those dreams possible.
A few weeks ago, one of my clients brought my attention to the following message that was posted on their Facebook wall.
When I first opened my business in 1994 as a computer consultant, the drivers of new technology were a lot different. In the mid 90s, it was typical to first buy a computer before figuring out what software you could use on it. Many of my customers wanted their own programs written, too. Those were the days of DOS and Windows 3.1, and the options for software were limited to what you could find in your local Egghead Software store, or you ha... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this week's edition of the Friday Website Jewelry Website Review, I'm beginning my search in "jewelers morgan city, la" to find a website review candidate. I go through these website reviews every Friday as a way to monitor and show you what's happening in the world of jewelry websites. I never know how the review will turn out, but the hope is that something is learned.
Last week, I was doing a little research into the US census data on this website. The U.S. business census data is captured every 5 years, but there's a delay before the information is published. The 2012 was only recently published.
Shrinking Number of Retail Jewelry Stores
The data shows that there were only 16,847 corporations that classified themselves as "jewelry stores" in 2012, and there were 2... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
This is the #ThrowbackThursday edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week, I'm jumping back to Nugget Number 93 from December 1, 2010. The topic is Trading Links with Local Businesses.
Linking to Avoid
Google has placed heavy penalties on websites that use link building to affect their ranking. The VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I received an interesting question the other day from Suzie, a jewelry designer. Well, her name wasn't actually Suzie, but let's just say that it was so it makes this story easier to tell.
For several years, Suzie had an Etsy account where she sold a line of baby toe ring jewelry. This was her fist line of jewelry before she started making gemstone jewelry necklaces. Realizing how different these two lines of jewelry are, instead of using Etsy to sell the necklaces, she opened an e-com... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday Jewelry Website Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every week, I randomly choose and dissect a retail jeweler's website to see what makes it tick. I never know what I'm going to find each week; sometimes it's something new to learn or a refresher on topics I've previously written about.
To find this week's review candidate, I searched Google for "jewelry stores in Bridgeton, New Jersey" and was given this SERP:
Popular pages on your website are often called "Landing Pages." That popularity can be measured as the number of people who click on a page while browsing around your site, or the number of people that Google and Bing send to your site.
When you place an ad in the newspaper or send out a direct mail piece, you usually include a website address on that ad. Most of the time, that website address will just be your domain name, like exampledomain.com, in which case the... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last week I wrote my weekly jewelry website review while I was waiting for my flight to France in Newark Liberty Airport, in Newark, NJ. Because I was sitting in the airport, I had the opportunity to present that review from the point of view of an actual mobile user.
QR Codes have been a hot topic for several years. In this #ThrowbackThursday Daily Golden Nugget, I'd like to jump all the way back to my second Nugget ever, which was on QR Codes. That was July 27, 2010!
That Nugget was the number one most popular post I had ever made, until I started writing about screen resolution and setup directions for Google M Business. It has since d... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last two weeks, I've been detailing why it's important to have a correctmobile setup for your website. Google's decision to use mobile friendliness as a ranking factor has a lot of people worried that... 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
Search engine optimization was once a game of pure guesswork. SEO specialists would simply watch their own efforts of what worked and what didn't work, then simply follow the same steps over and over again.
Companies like MOZ.com and SearchEngineLand.com have communities of users always trying to figure out which supposed SEO techniques work, and which don't. Search Engine Land even published their of VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll cover one of the nagging mobile website issues that Google doesn't like any more. Well, I don't know if they ever liked it, but in this video they've clearly pointed it out.
It all started a few years ago when people first started dabbling in mobile websites. It's difficult to retrofit a desktop site to include a mobile version, unless you are willing to redesign the entire site again. Setting up a parallel mob... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A number of years ago, and I was hired to create a website to promote a national marketing campaign for retail jewelers. The website served as the cornerstone for hundreds of jewelers who were using the same set of ads to promote a select number of products that were sold exclusively through those retail jewelry stores.
The goal of the marketing campaign was to establish a nationwide brand identity for the hundreds of participating retail jewelers. Participation in that brand identity woul... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
If you believe the (mostly North American) superstitions, Friday the 13th (today) is supposed to be an unlucky day. Perhaps it will be unlucky for some couples that breakup before tomorrow, Valentine's Day, arrives. I prefer the optimistic point of view and would rather believe that love is in the air today.
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, and to honor Valentine's Day I decided to search for a jewelry store in or near a town with "love" in the name. This was not as easy a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throwback Thursday is the name of a weekly internet trend where participants repost photos from the past. This is especially popular on Instagram where users tag their photos with the #TBT hashtag.
Truthfully, you can "throwback" anything that happened in the past. It could be a social media post, a photo, a blog post, or yes, even a Daily Golden Nugget!
Honestly, this is my first participation in a TBT, but what the heck; let's do it with a slightly different spin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What's your favorite type of content? Given that content includes written articles, videos, podcasts, photography, and every other type of creative digital experience. There's a labor cost associated with creating a digital experience for your customers, a cost that's not easily understood by small business owners.
There's also a competing value of the content that swings between the long term value to attract quality customers and the short term value of getting a lot of attention. S... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday retail jewelry website review. In this week's review, I'll be searching for a random website candidate to critique in the hopes that we can all learn something useful to implement on our own websites.
To start this week's review I started searching for jewelers in Hudson, NY. Specifically, I used the Google search query "jewelers in Hudson ny."
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
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll provide some research based information about mobile keyword search data collected during the 2014 Holiday Season.
Cross reference your own sales figures and website analytics against this data, and use it to improve your future marketing. The findings here should be useful to you all year long, but especially as you start planning your website content and marketing for the 2015 Holiday Season.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm exploring keyword data collected between November 1 and December 31, 2014 from many retail jeweler websites.
I collected a large amount of keyword data from people using Google's desktop search, mobile search, and image search. The mobile search data is very interesting. Last week, I presented th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When using Google Webmaster Tools, you can view which search queries will trigger your website to appear in search results. In the past when we SEO guys would spew the phrase "search queries" it was just a fancy name for saying "keywords." In fact, you can say "search queries," and "keywords," and "search phrases" and mean the same thing.
Regardless what you called it, all you wanted to do was put the right words on your website that correspond to what people search for in the dif... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throughout 2014, Google made several advancements in their search engine and gave us some new reports in Google Webmaster Tools to see the results of those advancements.
Specifically, from within Webmaster Tools you can easily see when your website appeared in web search results, images search results, and mobile search results. During the first quarter of 2014, I started noticing retail jewelry websites appearing in image results more than ever before, and the Webmaster Tools ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
With the 2014 Holiday Season at an end, let's take a look at some website tracking results from the Thanksgiving week through Christmas.
The following data was recorded through more than 100 jewelry related websites. This includes a combination of retail jewelers and e-commerce sites. Results shown here only apply to the jewelry industry.
Holiday 2014 Sessions
Here's a screen shot of my Google Analytics tracking across the retail jewelry websites I'm tracking:
The 2014 Holiday Season has come to a close and it's time to review your marketing strategies and record the results for next year's season.
I've compiled some email details that you can use as a benchmark for your own strategies.
I've subscribed to hundreds of email newsletters from retail jewelry stores, large and small e-commerce jewelry sites, and a few chain stores. This is a graph showing the quantity of emails I received from all those senders from November 1, 2014 through December 26, 2014: ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
According to this marriage proposal survey 45% of marriage proposals for the year will take place on Christmas Eve (last night) and Christmas Day (today), but as a jeweler you probably already know that.
Can you count how many engagement rings did sell over the last 3 months? How many nervous boyfriends did you help through the process of learning about the 4C's of diamonds and the difference between an SI1 whose inclusion is di... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
'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
You probably already know that Christmas is the most popular day of the year for a marriage proposal. No doubt you've been helping with the selection process for the past few months leading up to tomorrow's inevitable day of celebration for many couples.
Here are the website tracking statistics from mid-November through mid-December 2014. As usual, these results are pulled from the group of 100+ retail jewelry websites that I monitor and the results might not apply to any other industry.
4-Weeks of Holiday Data
Here's the graphical representation of the sessions I've been tracking:
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
The internet has seen many changes over the last 4 years since I started writing these Daily Golden Nuggets. Undoubtedly, a lot of that change was informed by Google, but really there are a lot of other factors involved.
Through the Great Recession, a lot of easier and less expensive technology emerged that now allows us to access information from anywhere at any time. You could argue that the technology companies forced fancy new mobile devices on us; or you could say that the technology devel... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here are the website tracking statistics from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday in 2014. As usual, these results are pulled from the group of 100+ retail jewelry websites that I monitor and the results might not apply to any other industry.
November 2014 Sessions
Let's first take a look at this chart from Google Analytics:
It's time to kick off my yearly report of email subject lines throughout the holiday season. This is my breakdown of "Black Friday" emails throughout November 2014.
As part of my email tracking, I'm subscribed to hundreds of different email lists. Every month, I monitor trends and techniques to see how email marketing is evolving. During the month of November, I received almost 1000 emails building towards the launch of the holiday season.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
If you ever get into a conversation with a search engine optimization professional (aka SEO), they usually bring up the topic of how Google ranks your website and that there are "more than 200 different signals" that Google uses for their ranking algorithm. It's Google's standard message that they are using more than 200 signals, but they've been saying the same thing for more than 10 years now.
Surly they must be using more than 200 signals now, but they'll never admit it.
From time to time, I'm able to measure the effects of certain t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Around this time every year, my local fire department hangs out their "Change your clocks, change your smoke detector batteries" sign. It doesn't rhyme at all, but they want to make sure you get into the habit of associating a required action with a life saving action that we all would otherwise forget about.
Since daylight savings time is on everyone's mind, this is also a good opportunity to tie in some type of watch promotion. Selling watches isn't as glamorous as selling diamond covered jewelry, but it's still a sale that shouldn't be overlooked... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Have you ever wondered how your jewelry store's marketing compares to other jewelers? Well, wonder no more because there's a way you can view that comparison in Google Analytics.
It's called the Benchmarking report, and it's available under the Audience -> Benchmarking -> Channels menu as shown here:
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
We know from yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget that people who browse jewelry websites prefer the iPhone over the Android. In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm investigating exactly what mobile visitors are searching for.
During the month of September 2014, I collected and analyzed all the landing pages for mobile visitors across m... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What role will smartphones play in the lives of the everyday average consumer during the 2014 holidays? The mobile audience is becoming more important in marketing as mobile devices become more ubiquitous in everyone's daily lives.
Everyone has a different opinion of which smartphones are better. Many software developers prefer the Android devices because they provide more flexibility, whereas the Apple devices are designed to be more user friendly for the non-technically oriented.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll bring to a close a multi-part series of holiday marketing for the 2014 season. This is the 11th part of the series all based around the unified topic of marketing for the 2014 season.
In this series, I started with explaining how to organize your marketing, then showed you how to set up tracking of that marketing, and concluded with a few posts showing you how to read the tracking results.
I've including the previous 10 related posts at the bottom, but you don't... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show and explain the Exit Page report in Google Analytics.
Although this edition can stand alone as a single Nugget, it's actually part of a larger series on holiday marketing and how to analyze that marketing. This is the 8th part to that series. I've included the first 7 in a link list at the bottom of this Nugget.
Google Analytics Exit Page Report
Let's take a look at the Exit Pages report in GA. This is similar to the VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'd like to show you how to find the keywords that people are using to find particular pages of your website.
Although this Nugget does stand on its own, it's actually part of a series of post I've written for the 2014 holiday season. This is part-7 in that complete series. I've included links to the first 6 parts at the bottom of this post.
Today we'll be looking at Google Webmaster Tools, so if you don't already have your account set up and ve... 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.
Over the last three days, I've given you some specific marketing tactics that, as a whole, would equate to a large marketing campaign for the holiday season. I began with a discussion on choosing the right products for the campaign, then explained how to VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. My example will focus on specific items which we will build content around and share socially.
What I've written out in this guide will be good for anyone looking for a different approach to marketing for this upcoming holiday season. There's a lot of detail for the setup, implementation, and then the post-analysis of the entire campaign. You'll do the setup... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The other day, I was helping a business colleague of mine review a website design his customer gave him. For storytelling simplicity, I'll refer to my colleague as Joe and his customer as Sue. Although Joe doesn't work in the jewelry industry, the early steps in designing a website are very similar across all industries, and I bet all website programming companies have the same experience working with their customers.
Sue wants to open a brand new e-commerce store by December 1st. She already owns an old e-commerce store w... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Content creation is a continual task for every website owner. It can also be a very challenging task to come up with new content all the time without suffering from mental burnout or writer's block. That burnout will have a bad effect on your long term SEO, so it needs to be prevented.
One way to prevent content creation burnout is to spread the task around between several employees on your sales staff. Remember that website content isn't just blog posts. Content... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the next 4 months, you'll have several opportunities for social media and email marketing campaigns that can be associated with special calendar events.
A quick look at my own wall calendar and I see these jumping out at me as important US dates that can tie into your marketing campaigns:
September 7, 2014: Grandparents Day October 13, 2014: Columbus Day October 31, 2014: Halloween November 2, 2014: Daylight Savings Time Ends November 11, 2014: Veterans' D... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A few times of the year, a simple turning of the page on the calendar reveals not simply tomorrow's date, but triggers a complete shift of thinking.
Early September heralds the beginning of the fall season in the northern hemisphere. Summer vacations are over and school starts again. It's an overnight shift in thinking from leisurely days into a regimented structure for the next 8 to 9 months.
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 going to explain an often overlooked way to advertise your website locally. It comes at a lower cost, and with a higher return, than most other online advertising methods.
It's very easy to get swept away by the hype of online advertising methods like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, and to buy into the claims of large online advertising agencies. While you can get a lot of good results from agencies, Facebook, ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google AdWords Remarketing is an online marketing method that allows you to show ads to people who have already visited your website. You and Google control who sees the ads by secretly tagging every visitor to your website, then choosing what ad to show to them around the internet.
I always like to refer to AdWord Remarketing as a separate type of online marketing, but... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
How deep is your website? The depth of a website is measured by the number of times you would have to click on a navigation link in order to reach the most nested areas of your website.
I've read website design recommendations stating that every page of your website should be reachable within 3 clicks. Anything more than that supposedly won't be of interest by website users.
But when it comes to a product catalog, it's very easy to dive down into 4 levels very quickly. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting a seminar at the JA show in NYC. The seminar was "Should You Pay For Website Traffic? Understanding How and Why."
During the seminar, I detailed what I know about Yelp, Pandora Radio, Google AdWords, and a few others methods of online advertising that can work for or against you.
One of the online marketing methods that generally works against you is Yellow Pages. Once upon a time, it was common for everyone to "let their fingers do the walki... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday Review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Every week I analyze the online properties of a jewelry store found during a random search in a random city.
For this week's review, I searched for "jewelers near elma ny" to find this search result:
The number of mobile users is still rising, but the rate at which jewelers are intentionally deploying mobile websites is slowing. In the month of June 2014, I tracked 43.12% of visitors to jewelry websites using either a smartphone or a tablet. This is up from the 39.88% I reported in April 2014.
This mobile usage level during the recent slow summer months is now higher than ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I've been sharing a lot of my secret tips recently and today I'd like to share another. This one's about understanding your customer's intent.
One of the biggest mistakes I've noticed many retail store owners, not just jewelers, make is that they set up their store, create advertisements, and design their website based on what they believe their customers will like, without truly trying to understand what their customer's intent is.
Five months from today, you will be launching your last minute Christmas advertising campaigns and counting down the last 7 days before the big holiday. Have you started to prepare your website and holiday ads yet?
The other day, I was walking through one of those stores that sells Christmas items all year long and I couldn't help but remember that now is the time for those "Christmas in July" sales events. However, considering that today is Friday, I immediately started to wonder how many towns were n... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Small business owners always seem to struggle trying to balance the time they spend working in their store, managing back office paperwork, and growing the business. It's very difficult to achieve the perfect balance of spending time with each of these tasks if no one showed you how to do it correctly in the first place.
Occasionally, you will find a small business success story in the news, and perhaps you wonder how they achieved their success. From my own personal experience,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Do a Google search for the phrase "there are no original ideas anymore" and you will find 57 million results explaining how the world has run out of ideas.
Can it be true? Has the world truly run dry of new concepts and ideas?
Although I've heard a few people make such statements, I never gave it much real thought until the summer of 2013. There were a lot of big changes that inspired me to write a Nugget detailing how SEO... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's Daily Golden Nugget, I'm reviewing website traffic and email headlines leading up to Father's Day in the USA, which was June 15 this year.
Organic traffic doesn't usually increase much during the weeks leading up to Father's Day, although this year there was an overall 10.52% increase during the 5 weeks right before the holiday.
During the week of May 19th, I only saw 2 emails mentioning Father's Day with these subject lines:
In today's Daily Golden Nugget, I'm reviewing website traffic and email headlines leading up to Mother's Day in the USA, which was May 11 this year.
Every year, during the three weeks leading up to Mother's Day, the organic customer acquisition patterns repeat themselves. This year that pattern started on Monday April 21, 2014 with a slight rise of traffic. The increase in traffic occured from Monday through Friday followed by the typical dip in traffic over the weekends.
Everything you add to the Internet will either help or hurt you tomorrow. Every piece of content has a long shelf life.
Your marketing strategy today could be a onetime use, or it could add to the cumulative benefit you create to build your brand awareness.
Typical search engine marketing includes paid ads or paid strategies that only have a value while you're paying for them. That value goes away as soon as you stop paying for it.
This can clearly be seen in any large marketing company service, like Y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Talk to any search engine marketing professional and they will say that you need good content on your website in order to rank well search engines, and engaging content on social networks if you want to interact with your existing audience, and gain new followers.
For competitive industries, like retail stores and retail jewelry stores, there's so much stuff being published on the internet daily that your website can fall behind in its search engine ranking for generic phrases unl... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It was a pretty exciting day yesterday at the MJSA Expo in New York City. It was my honor to be one of MJSA's Business Experts where I had the pleasure of answering direct questions from jewelry designers, retailer, and manufacturers.
It was a wonderful experience to freely share all the stuff I write about here on jWAG.biz in a face to face setting. One important question t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is a continuation of yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget. I'm explaining how you can tie together different combinations of marketing methods to use as a unified marketing approach.
Please refer to yesterday's Nugget to see the first 5 of this list. Here are the next 5...
Newspapers and email - Depending on who you talk to you will hear different reports on the successfulness of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In a previous Daily Golden Nugget, I explained that you need to avoid a single point of marketing failure and I listed a few ways you could pair up your marketing methods. As I wrote that Nugget, I realized I needed to prepare this follow-up post to better explain how those pared marketing methods actually work together.
I've pulled those bullet points from that previous post and listed the... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As a computer engineer, programmer, and networking engineer, I have seen my share of technical disasters since I first got involved with computer in, um, 1984. I got my first computer, a Timex Sinclair, in '84 and quickly learned the BASIC programming language.
Early computers were very fragile and their storage ability even more so. You never knew if your program would work the next time you tried to load it after saving it to a tape drive. Early floppy disks were also fragile and could easily be ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I reviewed a simple method for keyword research that would help you discover clusters of words for content creation.
Using that same technique, I did my own keyword research relating to "custom jewelry design" and came up with this group of phrases:
Back on September 10, 2013 I told you that your website needs to target specific topics rather than individual keywords. Eventually other SEO companies started saying the same thing.
The problem with ranking by "topics" rather than "keywords" is that most people still think in keyword... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday, I gave you my list of predictions for 2014. Those predictions were things that might happen whether you want them to or not. Today, as we start a New Year, I want to give you a list of things that would make good New Year's resolutions for jewelers. Any one of these alone would help improve your business if you stick with it all year long.
1. Resolve to Get Employees Involved With Content Creation
Train all your employees to help with the content creation process. Photos, reviews,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I briefly explained that you need to build various types of content in order to rank well in the new version of Google's search results. Higher ranking in Google Search means more customers will find you.
This is the new world of content marketing, which is much different than direct marketing. With traditional online and offline advertising you have various w... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
People search for random phrases during the holiday season. Here's one such random, and very specific search:
"18 karat gold double sided St Christopher medal with a car on one side"
Here's another:
"2 or 3 strand 14k gold bracelets with a center gemstone"
Google is trying to entice everyone to search using more natural questions rather than "search speak," and every month I'm tracking more than 1000 random search phrases just like those two above.
I typically do a website review every Friday but this week I'm changing that up and going to review some recent email marketing that's associated with today: Black Friday 2013.
This was a very busy week for email blasts. On Monday, I received 31 emails from retail jewelers, on Tuesday 37 email, 43 emails on Wednesday, and even 35 emails on Thanksgiving day by the time I posted this. I sign up for new emails all the time and most jewelry stores never send any emails until the holiday season.
In fact, I saw a few emails on Tuesday from retailers I signed up with more than 6 months ago and had never heard from before then.
There's really no way to point at any one type of online service as "online marketing." Google, Microsoft, and Apple have taken all the pieces of the internet and woven them together. Ultimately you should be involved with all social networks, mobile ads, search ads, e-commerce, and a fantastic website.
Achieving all of that is the hard part.
If you started from scratch, this is how it would work:
The 2013 Holiday Season is off to a running start with many large and small retailers starting their advertising already. I've heard many different news outlets say that the holiday season is shorter this year, but it's still the same number of days between today and Christmas.
Actually, it's really only the US market that is looking at this year as a "shorter" season because we have a self inflicted border on the calendar (Thanksgiving) that sends everyone into a shopping frenzy the next day.
I've been tracking email marketing campaigns for the last 3 years and every year I'm seeing "holiday" emails earlier and earlier. This year the "holiday super sales" and "doorbuster" emails were already hitting my inbox at 4:24 AM on November 1st.
WHEW, I'm pretty sure some people were just getting home from Halloween parties ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this installment of the Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to explain how to correctly set up your Google Analytics account structure to correctly track your marketing activity.
Almost as if they knew I was planning this topic for today, Morgan Stanley reported last week that that we would see the weakest Holiday Season since 2008. One of the reasons they cited in their report was that "increased promotional activity likely inhibits 2013 Holiday sales."
It seems like they are referring to the idea that too many promotions will cause people to buy less. Of course that almost seems like a paradox unless you are aware of all the consumer studies that measure choices vs. sales. This topic is widely e... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today I'd like to tell an interesting story about websites and customers service that you might be able to learn a thing or two from. It's not about jewelry, but about websites and business in general.
And honestly, it's a business disaster.
There's a costume and magic shop not too far from my home in New Jersey. It's been there for at least 35 years. My mom took me there as a young boy and bought me lots of fun magic tricks, professional quality, like bags that make things disappear and scarves that change color, oh and card tricks that would ch... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For those of us working in retail, or those of us who provide services to retail businesses, we know the day after tomorrow is when we can official start promoting the Holiday Season. True, we will still get flack for "skipping Thanksgiving," or for beating the first snowfall (maybe!) to the punch, but after Halloween, it's finally fair game. Holiday movies start playing on TV, and new holiday albums came out today is the US, which will start to affect the iTunes charts this weekend.
The USA is one of the few countries that celebrates Halloween in such a big way, and that day now represents the dividing date between "Fall" advertising and Holiday advertising. Not too long ago, that dividing date was Thanksgiving.
Of course, I'm only referring to the USA. Other countries that don't celebrate or commercialize Halloween in... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Even though Halloween is 10 days away, you are probably heavily planning your Holiday Season advertising without really considering any last minute Halloween ads. You don't have to plan too much to whip up some last minute marketing for Halloween. Your website's home page, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and any email marketing over the next 10 days could use a dash of Halloween humor.
Here are some of the products that are popularly advertised for Halloween and some headlines an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I've never been a fan of long term search engine optimization services where a small business is expected to pay large sums of money for some type of online work that's suppose to increase your website ranking. So much of the SEO industry was built on scams and false claims that it's hard for anyone to really trust someone who says they can do the job. SEO scam artists used to give you long lists of technical jargon to explain what they were going to do for you and most people blindly trusted them because they were "the experts."
My personal philosophy has always been one where the bulk of the basic SEO work is handled immediately and then the website owner is trained how to maintain it on their own without having to perpe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Rosser Reeves was an American advertising executive from the 1950s, who changed the way the world thought about advertising. He had a style of writing sales copy that drew people in and made them think about themselves rather than the product.
He's credited to many tag lines that are still well known today, like "it melts in your mouth, not in your hands."
His view of marketing was that you always need to state your "Unique Selling Proposition," or USP. He coined that phrase which so many online marketer use today without understanding where it came from or what it actually means. Reeves' philosophy was to state your USP over and over again until people remember you for it.
In yesterday's Nugget I explained the importance of carefully choosing which vendors and designers to carry in your store based on their willingness to help you with the marketing for their product line. The suggestion I presented yesterday was that the vendor should have a press kit with photos of their products, finished ads, write-ups in magazines, designer bios, stories about the making of the j... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
How many sterling silver lines should you carry in your store? Over the last few years the increased price of precious metals had all fine jeweler wondering that same question. The answer is probably as many as it takes to satisfy the desires of your local customers. The sterling silver jewelry from Frederic Duclos is known for forward thinking new styles whereas Thistle & Bee
VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
All business owners want to see more people walk through their door. Obviously you can't grow a business if you don't have customers. Repeat customers are good and most of the jewelers I talk to say word of mouth referrals from those repeat customers seem to be the biggest source of new customers.
It would be wonderful if we could rely on word of mouth advertising to grow our businesses, but we can't. Every business owner hopes that each new customer will be longstanding with many return visits... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Prior to computers and sophisticated tracking methods, it was difficult to organize your customers into groups. With the advent of computers and the internet it's much easier to group your customers and target your marketing, but most people incorrectly assume that only your internet advertising can be specifically segmented and targets.
In the last 3 Daily Golden Nuggets, I provided ideas on how you could use segmentation to increase the response rates of your traditional media in hopes that I could dispel the myth that segmentation is only for digital advertising. In today's Nugget I'll briefly explain the idea of "Search Engine Marketing" (SEM) and why so many online marketing guys use it as one of their buzz words.
Let me first give you an overview of what Search Engine Marketing is... It's basically the overall catc... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
On Sunday, February 3, 2012, Super Bowl XLVII was brought to a screeching halt by a blackout during the third quarter. For a brief moment the television went black and the announcers were silent. My friends and I sat there wondering if our television broke.
Up until that point throughout the game we were already interacting with our smartphones and iPads to read game related tweets from friends, and watching our respective Facebook pages for other commentary. Ther... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Internet memes are everywhere. Add a profound or funny statement to any picture of a cat and you might just have your own meme that goes viral today.
You can learn a lot from a cat. They teach us humans that we should simply sit around and do nothing every once in a while. House cats seem to sit around all day enjoying their free time. All they care about is a clean litter box, frequent petting or brushing, and being fed. And when you run out of food, you better make a quick run to Petco otherwise little kitty will stomp... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday I detailed the differences between online advertising in 2008, 2010, and then my suggestions for this year. Here's my unified advertising suggestion list again in case you missed it:
1. Offline advertising 2. Website landing pages 3. Email advertising 4. Google AdWords Remarketing 5. Advertising with Facebook sponsored posts 6. Google+ Page posts 7. Google +Local 8. Blogging using Google Authorship 9. Mobile Website 10. YouTube 11. Twitter
It's time to take a quick look back through 2012 to find the best and brightest of our Daily Golden Nuggets. I'm splitting these into 3 categories of the most read of 2012, top landing page for 2012, and my personal top picks from 2012
#1 Most Read 2012 Nugget was on July 3, 2012 Google Free Merchant Center is Now Paid Shopping I can't blame Google for wanting to increase their revenue. They provide so much for free that it's easy to balk at them when they start charging for a service that was so succes... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the end of one year and the beginning of another, and that means it's time for predictions for next year.
I have 4 predictions for retail jewelry stores for the 2013 year. Here they are...
Prediction #1. The problem of easy tracking of users from point of origin online to an in-store sale will NOT YET be solved. This is one of the largest problems that retail jewelers face; in fact all businesses that use online marketing to increase the business of their brick and mortar stores face this problem. The true ROI ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"Hello, Holidays!" "Want to get beautiful gifts?" "Beat the Rush with these Early Christmas Gifts" "Just in time for holiday parties!" "Ready for the Holidays?" "Start Planning Your Holiday Gifts" "Early Cyber Monday Deal!" "New Early Black Friday Specials Online Now"
There's no doubt about it this year. In the United States is seems like every big brand launched their holiday marketing campaigns exactly at the same time on November 1, 2012. In fact I received a cute email from Tiffany & Co. at 5:07pm on ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the start of a new month and for many of you it's the official kickoff of the holiday season. Hopefully your marketing strategy is in place and you're ready for the flood of customers... of course in the United States we actually need to wait until after Election Day for those customers to start flooding in since no one likes to spend money during an "election season."
All joking aside, there are marketing methods that you should be including in your mix this y... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last week I gave you a list of Halloween themed headlines that you could use in your marketing messages for this week. Today I'm going to give you a list of headlines that you could use throughout November 2012. These headlines were recorded during November 2011 as part of one of my long term continuing research projects on email marketing and website headlines.
November is a very robust month with more opportunities to broadcast a marketing message than you may realize. The general th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'd like to share with you a specific tactic to increase customer service, create immediate social marketing, lower buyer remorse, and create long term online marketing. This tactic will cost little or no money, and your customers will do it for you.
Facebook and Google+ are common apps on smartphone and tablets. They allow all of use to interact with our friends and family throughout the day with nonsensical things, photos, shared memories, and random quotes of something you overheard. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In the last few days I've give you several business building ideas and methods to use email marketing. Now it time to take those emails and make money with them for the next two years... yes, 2 years.
My point of view is that each of your customer emails should be more editorial content than just images with a coupon or sale announcement. The daily emails that I send out are pure editorial content without any graphics because they are intended to be educational, but for your jewelry store you should try a few different formats of emails to see what your response rate will be.
As a retail store you should avoid 100% text emails and you should avoid 100% image emails. Somewhere in between is the perfect balance for your store.
Successful emails typically include blurbs of text but also nice looking "creatives," whic... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The other day I wrote that you could ethically bribe your customers into signing up for your emails by telling them you "occasionally send out offers and promotions." I only call it a bribe because that's a much more acceptable reason for someone to hand over their email address to a jewelry store.
Let's face it, most customers will not sign up for yet another email list, and potentially open themselves up to spam, unless they feel there will be a strong benefit for them. Service businesses have an easier time convincing people to sign up for "informational newsletters" than a jewelry store will. Let's face it, when was the last time you were willing to hand over your email address to the cashier at your favorite shoe store, or clothing store. They, just like you, are a retail store that customers will expect to get promotional... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here's a brief topic you probably already know about, but just didn't know it had a name.
Have you ever signed up to a website and had a confirmation email sent to you? Have you ever forgotten your password and requested the website send you an email confirmation to prove your identity? Have you ever received a purchase confirmation email from a website after placing an online order?
All those emails are referred to as "Transactional Emails." In fact any email that someone requests from a website in some form or another falls into this transactional category. It's important to understand the value of these emails because in 2003 the CAN-SPAM Act specifically defined what they were and that you (the website owner) do not need permission to send this type of email.
Here are some email marketing ideas that will boost sales in your jewelry store.
One of the most powerful ways to grab someone's attention via email is to send them an email on their birthday and anniversary with the simple subject of "A special Birthday/Anniversary Wish From Your Jewelry Store."
Many of you reading this probably have customer relationship software that tracks birthdays and anniversaries. There are several direct mail marketing companies that will take your customer information and send out batches of post cards every month for all the birthdays and anniversaries.
When it comes to email you NEVER want to batch send all the emails to everyone with a birthday in that month. The better strategy is to send individual emails on the actual day. Inside that email you can offer a free gift or perhaps a d... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I can't say enough about the importance of regular email newsletters. They boost traffic to your website, remind people that you exist, show people you are smart in your field, and of course are useful for promotions.
The success of your email marketing depends on which of those strategies you decide to use, and if you stay with it. Email marketing might sound like a thing of the past since so many social media sites seem to be better the better, more modern methods of communication. You might also be scared off by the low email open rates, email bouncing, and that horrible "but why did they do that" feeling you get when someone unsubscribes.
It's all worth it because you control the email marketing, not the social media sites; because it's a method of communication that you can rely on; because most people don't read eve... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I explained how Google AdWords Remarketing could be used to tag your customers so your ads would follow them around the internet. Here's the link if you missed it: http://ow.ly/diFTj
I'm continuing the discussion of Google AdWords Remarketing today with a little more in depth explanation of how versatile Remarketing can be.
To make Remarketing work on your website you have to add a small piece of JavaScript code to the programming code of your site. This usually requires the help of your programmer since most websites don't have the ability to insert code like this on the fly. When it comes to adding Google JavaScripts most programmers know that you usually just insert the same code globally to the footer of all pages.
The simplest version of Remarketing is implemented with a glob... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google AdWords has several different uses depending if your website is e-commerce or not. With an e-commerce website, it makes a lot of sense to pay for online ads that drive traffic and hopefully result in sales. Remember that driving traffic does not result in sales unless people like your website and it's easy to use.
Normally when people think of AdWords, they think it will cost a lot of money for per click, and that the monthly cost will drown you. Honestly it's no different than the money a jewelry store pays for a billboard or a radio ad, and the results are at least trackable. There's no way to track the number of people who read your billboard and take action, and there's only guessing when it comes to tracking radio ad results. So switch your billboard and radio budget to AdWords and don't worry about being drowned.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
How's the holiday 2012 marketing planning coming along?
In this Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to give you some exact strategies to build up holiday marketing strategy using Google AdWords Remarketing. With these ideas you can build your audience starting today but they will not see your ads until you activate them in November.
To accomplish this you will already need a Google AdWords account and to create an audience remarketing tag. I usually recommend multiple remarketing tags to better segment your audience, but in today's Nugget I'm only going to refer to a single tracking tag; let's call it the "Holiday Tag."
Google AdWords Remarketing uses a web browser cookie to track users. The cookie is activated by a small JavaScript, called a "tag." Since JavaScript runs almost everywhere, you have the ability to cooki... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here's a boiled down cheat-sheet of what it takes for a jewelry store to get started with Google AdWords Remarketing.
I recommend hiring a marketing company that has experience with Google AdWords. They will help save the aggravation of getting this to work for yourself. A good company would work through these steps with you.
1. Look at your Google Analytics account for the usual Exit Pages where people leave your site. Try to figure out why people leave after looking at those pages. Determine if you can create a marketing campaign around those reasons.
2. In Google Analytics, look at the page path people go through on your website. This is in the Audience > Visitor Flow area of GA. Identify a few combinations of pages that people visit that you would consider potential quality customers.
In this installment of the Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to explain how you can use Google AdWords Remarketing to target market to people who have visited your website.
Over the last two days I've given you some brief introductions to Google AdWords--not so you would feel pressured to learn to do it yourself, but so that you would know what to ask for when hiring an internet professional to manage AdWords for you. There are a lot of people out there that know how to manage AdWords; some are certified by Google, and others aren't.
Just because someone is certified doesn't mean they know what they are doing; a sad reality I learned a long time ago when hiring employees for my own company. Use what I tell you here as part of the interview process before hiring someone to work on your AdWords.
Today is the 2nd anniversary of the Daily Golden Nuggets. As I begin the 3rd year of writing about jewelry website SEO and online marketing tips I want to remind everyone that you can submit a questions or comment for a future Nugget. Just reply to a daily email or submit a question through the contact form on the jwag.biz website.
Last Monday I attended a special training session for Google AdWords to learn the latest stuff about Remarketing. AdWords Remarketing is a special form of AdWords that only shows ads to people who are part of an interest group, or those who have already been to you website.
Even though Google announced Remarketing in March 2010 very few people have heard of it or use it. Any AdWords adverti... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I've worked closely with a few jewelers who didn't know anything about their own email list. These are jewelers who had newsletter signup boxes on their website but newsletters were never being sent out.
In most cases I found out that either the employee who set up their email newsletter accounts no longer work there, or they canceled the email marketing service. The store owner never saw a value in the email newsletter list but instead of removing it from the website, they just let it sit there.
Those I spoke to said they would figure it out eventually, but in the mean time they were still paying for the monthly subscription fee.
For my own ongoing research, I've lost track of the number of email lists I've signed up for. I fill out every email form I see, which is probably between 5 to 10 new lists per week. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Avid movie watches will often wonder what "landed on the cutting room floor" during the movie editing process. Today's Daily Golden Nugget is one of those snips that didn't make it into Matthew Perosi's Email Marketing seminar at JCK on June 2, 2012.
Typically your email program will hide images from you until you permanently add the sender to an approved list, or a white list. To load the images you simply click the "view images" or "show remote content" button.
While the images are still hidden, the email program will show you the alternative text behind the images. Do you take the time you edit the alternative text behind the images?
Many companies don't realize the importance of "alt" text and how it can make or break an entire email campaign.
One of the most overlooked SEO pages of any website is the sitemap page. It might seem silly, but this is the single page from which a user can find any other page of your website.
This is especially important if your website has several layers of pages hidden deep from your home page and someone is quickly trying to get back to a page they were reading yesterday.
Other than functionality, sitemap pages are also important for Google. Most of the time Google will not bother to read more than 2 levels deeper into your site than the page they land on. If Google follows a link to your home page they will spider many of the 2nd tier pages that link from the home page, but they may not read the 3rd or 4th tier pages at all.
Think of your sitemap page as a cookie jar for Google. Every page of your site looks like a 2nd t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
When's the best day of the week and time of day to send an email? The answer is one which varies from year to year, and from person to person. It all depends on who you talk to and what industry they track.
MailerMailer.com is a good source for email research data, another good source we found last year was Kissmetrics.com. We've included links to both places at the bottom of this email, but we warn you, the data from both places contradict each other.
We've had our own research accumulating over the last 9 months and we're pretty confident in our own ideas. Let's share two things that will help with your holiday email planning.
The first thing you need to know is that you are being watched. We're not talking about the guy looking over your shoulder, but rather by your ISP, and by all other ISPs. These guys are ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"The local jeweler has done such a good job creating an experience, it needs to be done online" -Matt Lauzon, Founder & CEO of Gemvara
We grabbed that quote above during "The Great E-Commerce Debate" seminar at JCK on Friday June 1, 2012. It might be a simple idea Matt Lauzon is suggesting, but doing it is a different story all together. Later in the seminar he also added that no one in the jewelry industry, himself included, has completely figured out how to provide the online customer service that compares to what you provide in the store.
That's not to say you shouldn't try. You can't ignore the internet and hope your business will survive. You also can't keep waiting for better technology to come around before you start to get your feet wet. Ignoring change just leaves you further behind.
Managing your own email list can be tricky business when trying to do it on your own, whether directly from your own computer or when you are using the email program of a paid service.
Sending emails directly from your own computer is more likely to get you labeled as a spammer, and black listed, than if you pay an official email company. When doing it on your own, the first thing you need to watch out for is the number of email recipients you BCC in the email at once. We suggest not sending to more than 30 people at a time. Any more than that and your ISP will probably get angry with you and give you a warning about email abuse and spam. It assumes more than thirty people could not possibly be expecting an email from you all at once.
When sending emails from your own computer you don't necessarily have to follow the off... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Many retail jewelers tell us they are collecting names and emails but want to wait until they have 100, or 300 before doing anything with them. The truth is that you need to start with 10, or 30, then keep adding new emails every week as you collect them.
ISPs (the guys who actually control the internet) have hardware filtering which recognizes typical spam patterns. One recognizable spamming pattern is when too many emails sent at once from an email address that's never sent bulk email before. If you suddenly send out 1000 emails over a single night you will get blacklisted.
This is why if you've been collecting email addresses in your store for the last 5 years but haven't used them yet, you could be setting yourself up for a fall by sending an email blast to all of them in one day. Email marketing needs to start slo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As part of the best practices of opting in to newsletters and deals, you should require that everyone confirm their email address. To do this you need to send a confirmation email to the person after they sign up. Most paid email services take care of this process automatically for you as per of the newsletter signup form that you would add to your home page.
If you don't pay a service, you shouldn't simply capture an email address through your website and start sending special offers, you still need to send a confirmation email. You do this simply by manually sending an email out to the customer and having them reply. That's a lot of work, which is why you should just pay a monthly service to do it for you.
Many customers will type their email address wrong, or they simply do not understand the correct format of their e... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday we attempted to explain the difference between using m.domainname.com and domainname.mobi for your mobile website.
Our bottom line was that it all depends on how long your domain name is, and if you want your domain name to exactly match your jewelry store's name.
Shortened mobile domain names really do help users. Bank of America uses "bofa.mobi" on all of their mobile marketing literature.
Typing B O F A . M O B I on a mobile device is a lot easier than typing out M . B A N K O F A M E R I C A . C O M.
Although, the people over at Bank of America are clever because if you type bofa.mobi in the smartphone, it redirects you to www.bankofamerica.com/mobile/richui.do#_home, and that's a much longer URL that no one would want to type into their smartphone.
Over the past week we've given you several ideas for blogging. We hope that each Golden Nugget gave you actionable ideas how to make you blog better. Today's a great day to start blogging if you haven't yet started.
Google says "you need to build great content on your website" to be found in Search, and blogging on your website is the easiest method. Even though we say this day in and day out many jewelers do not listen to us, or worse, don't believe us. We don't take offense because, just like we don't quite know how a laser is used to weld a head to a ring, most jewelers don't know how the internet works.
We don't quite like blind faith, and so, it's now story time...
The ability to search Google for anything you want at the exact moment you want it has changed the world we live in today.
Your website is not an island. It's now a crucial part of your full marketing strategy. Sure, back in 1997 it would have been safe to think about a website as an island.
Your jewelry store's website should be the most interesting, most informative, most accurate, and most up to date component in your entire marketing model. If you've not yet turned your website into the center of your marketing world, then you need to change your strategy... Today.
Here's how to turn your website from that bastard child into the beloved favorite...
Introduce all your marketing teams, and tell them they have to work together or you will be sad to replace them. Everyone needs to work together, and this includes your billboard guy, postcard gal, newspaper ad man, social marketing guru, email newsletter guy, and your website people. ... 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
Your mobile website should be brief, only including enough information to accommodate the specific needs of the user. Of course the needs of the user will be dictated by your own advertising.
If your advertising invites customers to "shop from home using a mobile website" they will assume you have a fully functional mobile commerce system. On the other hand you can avoid the expectation of mobile commerce if you advertise that someone can "browse jewelry conveniently on the mobile website before coming into the store." Your subtle changes of words will make all the difference.
Many large retail stores already give consumers easy access to mobile websites loaded with detailed product information and consumer reviews. These types of websites are fantastic in-store shopper assistance tools. But that's not the shopping expe... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We tracked some amazing data during the last 6 weeks. It will take quite a while to process it all, but as soon as we have something valuable to share we will publish it out there as an eBook, webinar, or other online blog post. Stay tuned!
The New Year marks a time when many people and companies will start new projects or set new goals... and make those infamous unrealistic resolutions that never last past February 1st. Well, this year we'd like to provide a little suggestion as well.
Try email marketing, and stick with it.
As expected, ever since December 25th our email box hasn't heard a sound; well, maybe a few crickets. Several months ago we signed up to the email lists/newsletters for nearly 100 different jewelry stores around the world. Our signup lists includes large retailers like ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It was predicted that this holiday season was going to see a huge jump in the number of smartphone users for holiday shopping.
Predictions from Google Think Insights and from data presented at the Mobile Marketing Summit in NYC on September 8, 2011 both stated that mobile would be a big player this year.
We decided to check in on the stats now that we are 2 weeks into the season.
75% increase is what we're seeing right now!
The actual numbers we're tracking are showing approximately 25,300 mobile users from a current total 38,300 mobile users. To put it differently, that's about 5.7 mobile users to your jewelry website right now.
Is your website mobile-ready or are you suffering your users through the pinch-zoom madness? Whether you have a mobile site or not, we'd like to give you a quick tip for you... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Headlong into the holiday season already and you are either hoping for better or already happily surprised.
We're already hearing it both ways. Depending on the location, some jewelers have higher sales, some are the same as last year, and we've even heard from one that didn't have a single phone call or walk-in at all last week!
We're pretty sure that no matter what situation you are in you would be happy to get a few more quick sales this season so here are two fast tips to fish for some extra customers today.
1. Send an email to your list.
Alright, so we published that entire Holiday Run-Up and many days of email examples, but have you used those ideas? A few months ago we signed up for email newsletters from several dozen large and small jewelry stores. We're monitoring the messages and intensity of ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In the United States we refer to this day as Black Friday. Many businesses other than retail are closed to celebrate the long weekend of Thanksgiving. It's the only day off from work before Christmas and the Holiday Season is officially kicked off. A large percent of consumers will go shopping today.
It's time to make those lists and check them twice...
We've not spoken about Foursquare in a while, but it's still growing, and to us it's clearly the winner of the location based services. Facebook has moved away from promoting it's check-in service and Gowalla has reformatted itself more as a tourist guide map.
This Nugget was published on November 25, 2011 in hopes that our readers that morning would take action before their store opened that day.
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 crunch time! Well, maybe not really, not yet, but that's the mindset we want you to be in today. Imagine it's the last few days before the holiday. This year the major holidays of Hanukkah, Yule, Christmas, and Kwanzaa are all within the 7 days of one another, and last minute reminders on December 19th could really boost your season end sales.
All of our Daily Golden Nuggets so far have concentrated on selling new merchandise, but one of the easiest last minute reminders should be about jewelry cleanings, prong checking, and watch battery replacements.
You have to admit that most of us will want to look our best when entertaining family and friends over the holidays. Not only do people dress to impress but they also want their jewelry to impress. What good are those 2ctw., IF, D earring studs if they are so dirty t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Marketing campaigns in early December each year shift from talk of Black Friday and Cyber Monday to campaigns mentioning the "12 Days of Christmas." Many of these marketing campaigns will align themselves with the 12 items in the popular song in hopes to create memory retention.
If you are looking for ways to create memory retention, you don't have to limit yourself to the overly popularized use of those 12 days and items; instead, you should try to be a little more creative. Let's look at some ideas that might spark your own.
The Holiday Season comes jam-packed with many religious traditions, cultural traditions, and popularized TV/movie/theatre traditions. Any one of these can be adapted to help your own brand or specific product positioning.
Creating branding or product positioning for your store or jewelry shoul... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
We've spent each day this week reviewing important marketing tips and SEO ideas as they relate to key shopping days in the holiday season. Today's topic is Cyber Monday, the heyday for those of you that have e-commerce websites.
This year Cyber Monday falls on November 28, 2011. Cyber Monday of 2010 was reported to have 1,028M in online sales according to comScore, but according to our own data it wasn't the highest day for online visitors to jewelry store websites. The biggest traffic day award goes to December 20, 2010, the Monday before Christmas.
The philosophy behind Cyber Monday is that disappointed shoppers from Black Friday and the weekend are still trying to complete holiday shopping but ran out of time over the weekend. Many e-commerce websites will announce Cyber Monday specials to capture the online sales.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.
Advertising in the days leading up to Black Friday will be flooded with "Door Buster Deals" that entice those potential shoppers looking for the best deals of the Holiday Season and you can easily participate in that advertising strategy with minimum, last minute investments.
Hopefully with our Lookbook suggestion yesterday, you have a clearly defined strategy of which products you will be pushing for the holiday season, but if you haven't yet selected a line of jewelry with retail prices of under $200 and under $100 then we've got some ideas for you. It's these price points that consumers will be attracted to on Black Friday, and it's these items that you need to announce in your Thanksgiving Day email.
Yes, we're actually suggesting you send a Thanksgiving Day email this year. According to Responsys.com there was a 46% ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
We assume many of you are doing last minute post card printing or are just about to mail out the invitations for November's pre-holiday store events. There are lots of last minute media buys being offered for strategic newspaper and local magazine and advertising.
What's happening with your online stuff? Have you planned your website content yet? Website theme? Email marketing strategies? Suffice it to say we've thrown a lot of ideas at you in the past 35 days, but if you've not taken any action yet you will miss the season.
Today we're going to throw more actionable email marketing ideas at you. As usual, these ideas are based off successful campaigns from previous years.
Let's start with emails focusing on upcoming events. You might have a few important events i... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We avoided deep Facebook marketing topics during our official Holiday 2011 Run-Up. We hate Facebook entirely, but every time we try to do the research, analyze the data, and publish our findings, Facebook changes their interface again and voids all our work! It's rather frustrating.
Let's take a step back from our own work and look at what other experts are saying about using Facebook during the Holiday Season. We'd like to share some thoughts from Crystal Vilkaitis; she's the director of social medial for SnapRetail and she works with independent retailers teaching them how to use social media.
Crystal suggests to use Facebook for photo sharing on Facebook. As we already know, photos and videos attract a lot of attention in Facebook, and she agrees. In a recent blog post Crystal suggested a few strategies for Faceb... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
During the first week of October one of the jewelry website SEO strategies we gave you was to add your holiday website content to your website immediately so Google could find it and serve it up to holiday shoppers when the time came.
Well, that time is just about here. Many national brands launched their holiday websites yesterday, November 1, 2011. Let's look at them:
Blue Nile: http://www.bluenile.com 1. Their background was changed to include their signature snowflake. 2. BlueNile's website design signature is the home page large red ribbon. That red is now darker, less noticeable. 3. As of yesterday they added a small red bow next to "Find the Perfect Gift," which in... 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."
Officially we have closed the last chapter on our Holiday 2011 Run-Up. The book was getting to be too long and we wanted you guys to read it instead of being frightened to death by its magnitude. If you haven't downloaded it yet, you can still do so from our Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/JewelerWebsiteAG.
We still have a lot of important research data that will help you make the most of your marketing dollars during the most important part of your year. Although not included in the Run-Up book, it makes sense for us to continue presenting our findings.
A few weeks ago, and on page 32 of the Run-Up, we gave you several days of subject line examples for your holiday email marketing. They were straight forward examples to get you thinking, but we didn't present ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've had an entire month of Holiday 2011 Run-Up Daily Golden Nuggets. All together, they are published as a 121 page book and available from our Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/JewelerWebsiteAG.
Today's Daily Golden Nugget is the last one from the Run-Up book. There are a few lingering topics we didn't cover, so look for those throughout November.
Today we need to talk about your mobile website, and the need to appeal to the smartphone users. Regular phone owners will not be looking at your mobile site, so your target should be the technology users. Just like all marketing, you need to know who your target audience is and then how to appeal to them.
Some of the data we are presenting today comes from the Holiday Mobile Marketing Summit we attended in NY... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last 6 months we've monitored an average 97.52% increase of mobile visitors to jewelry websites across our network. The actual number of mobile visitors to a single website is pretty small each month, as in about 60 visitors, but that number has nowhere to go but up.
Did you know that you can create mobile AdWords ads? According to Google, 1 in 3 mobile searches have local intent.
According to what we mentioned yesterday, 87% of people walking are using their cell phone. Of those surveyed, it was found that people use mobile search 77% of the time spent on their phone. Finally, 33% of that 77% are searching for something locally.
What does that mean with real numbers? 100 people walk by, 87 of them are using their cell phone. Of 87 people, 77% or 67 of them are using a search engine. Of those 67... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Of all the chapters in this Holiday 2011 Run-Up, this might be the most important. Consumers are using smartphones today, right now, this exact minute. The data is undeniable and we're going to step through it and show you what the experts are saying and how you can use mobile technology yourself.
In the past 12 months we've heard many retail jewelry store owners tell us that "their customers do not use smartphones" and they don't need to create a mobile website even though those same jewelers themselves have an iPhone or an Android. This is similar to what we heard in 2003 when jewelers claimed their customers didn't use the internet and they didn't need a regular website.
We have our own in-house mobile research methods, and we've been tracking mobile usage for more than a few years, but to get a broader view of the mo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
You can spend 10 months trying to fine tune your Google AdWords campaign, really learning the ins and outs of how to attract your target customers to your jewelry store, but nothing you learn is going to prepare you for the affect that the Holiday Season has on AdWords.
The Holiday Season is about gift giving, and the holiday gift giving mentality is different than the rest of the year.
As you are most defiantly aware, jewelry is the gift to give throughout the year when someone is celebrating a birthday or job promotion, to say thank you, or to cheer someone up. Jewelry is given during economic hard times as a way of saying better times will come and during economic good times to celebrate what you have.
However, even though the Holiday Season has religious celebrations at its core, gift giving can greatly overshado... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Cyber Monday is the Monday immediately following Thanksgiving Day in the USA. Last year the company comScore tracked $1,028M (that's a Billion) in online sales that day. Sales were up 16% from 2009.
Cyber Monday got its name from the idea that holiday shoppers who were discouraged by their in-person weekend shopping experience would continue their shopping on-line that Monday morning.
This year Cyber Monday is November 28, 2011. Your strategy, should you decide to accept it, is to remind your customers early that morning about your jewelry store and what you have to offer. Even if you don't have an e-commerce jewelry website, you still need to get their attention.
According to our research we expect that on Cyber Monday morning, your customers will be tempted by emails from Macy's, Kay, Tiffany, David Yurman, Jar... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today's Daily Golden nugget is a continuation of the holiday email research from the website Responsys. During the Holiday 2010 Season, Responsys tracked emails from more than 100 large retailers and published a report of holiday email trends.
We've taken their generic retail research data and reworked it for the retail jewelry store. The ideas presented here come directly from Responsys, with a little jWAG tweaking.
Let's turn our attention to the flurry of emails sent to consumers on the morning of Black Friday. For 2011, Black Friday in the USA is November 25th.
Any emails for Black Friday should be sent out during overnight hours, perhaps about 3am or 4am, so customers can find them waiting on their Smartphone first thing in the morning. Remember that many shopping malls and large department stores will open a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Many large retailers and department stores have started a new trend of promoting online sales on Thanksgiving day and even opening their retail stores late in the evening on Thanksgiving Day. Responsys.com tracked a 32% increase on Thanksgiving day email traffic in 2010 and according to comScore, online sales for Thanksgiving Day 2010 jumped 28% to $407 million.
With this data it's obvious to us that that people are reading emails from their smartphones after their Thanksgiving dinner. They might be relaxing on the couch with the family, even watching the big game on TV, but secretly they are planning their holiday purchases.
You don't need an e-commerce website to benefit from a Thanksgiving Day email blast. You could use the email to plant an early thought and/or direct the person to your mobile website so they can view... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
During the months of November and December, email marketing experiences a huge spike in usage as the entire retail industry seems to remember that they can contact consumers through this "old fashion" communication method.
We have been monitoring emails from a handful of jewelry stores over the years, but we know that some of the best holiday email research comes from the website Responsys. For this Daily Golden Nugget and for this part of our Holiday Run-Up 2011, we're going to directly reference their research.
During the Holiday 2010 Season, Responsys tracked emails from more than 100 large retailers and found that every holiday related message contained one of the following types of messages somewhere in the body of the email. As usual, we've modified these where appropriate to make your job easier.
Starting today and continuing for the next several days (yet to be determined) we're giving you our concentrated action SEO, SEM, and mobile marketing action plan for the Holiday 2011 season.
Welcome to the Holiday 2011 Run-Up!
Last year's Run-Up presented a 9-part Online Marketing Plan; how many will be in this year's? We don't know yet because we're still putting it together.
The 2011 jWAG Run-Up will have the most recent search engine optimization techniques, best search engine marketing ideas, methods to improve your online catalogs, and mobile marketing ideas presented as action items to plan for and then execute on specific days of the holiday season.
BE WARNED: This is where we tell you exactly what to do so you have the best chance of winning sales over your local competing jewelry store. We're not... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Yesterday's Nugget was pretty long to get through, but we really needed to explain how to use Google Website Optimizer ( http://bit.ly/qEVCUP ). It is such an important tool and it's easier than Google Analytics. Although, if you are still wondering what you would want to test then today's Daily Golden Nugget is for you.
Some basic things to test with Google Website Optimizer: 1. Captions on images 2. Font size, line spacing, and font family 3. Adding or reducing white space around the site 4. Culling your content or swapping it with bullet points 5. Font and link colors, underlined or non underlined links 6. Button sizes and colors 7. Jewelry photography methods using different background other than pure white 8. Headlines 9. Repositioning your call to action message<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This Daily Golden Nugget is probably a little more advanced than most others. Thankfully, though, it's not too technical because the Google tool we're going to explain takes care of all the confusing tech stuff.
We want to introduce you to the world of website split testing, also known as A/B testing.
As we've said in the past, your website is never really complete. You need to keep working on it to improve your conversion rates, lower your bounce rates, and overall increase your sales. But other than simply watching the daily sales reports, how do you know if your website efforts are getting better?
The answer is A/B testing, and with it you can create 2 variations of the same web page and have Google run its magic until the better of the pages appears.
In case you're just tuning in, this post is one in a series of training for jewelry store owners. Today's topic is "Conversion Rate Optimization" and how to find someone to help you measure and improve it.
Measuring your conversion rate on any single web page will be tedious. We've previously said you could use the free Site Overlay tool inside Google Analytics to do it, but before you even get to the actual testing you need to outline your goals and how you will achieve them.
The Jeweler Website Advisory Group exists simply to share website education with jewelers. We actually hope you will take our ideas and use them directly, but if you don't have the time, then you will need to hire someone to help you.
Here are some things to think about when looking to hire an ad agency, web designer, or even an in-house empl... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Our previous 8 Daily Golden Nuggets covered many topics of email marketing. Today we'll switch gears into a new topic that is directly related to all your email marketing, and that's your website Landing Page.
Every marketing strategy should have a message and a call to action.
Typical calls to action are: • "Visit our store" • "Visit our large showroom" • "Give us a call" • "Fill this bag with unwanted gold and bring it to us to sell" • "Visit our website" • "Click this link for more information" • "Sign up for your own wish list" • "Scan this QR code for more information"
We assume you will have website links in all your digital advertising. Those links shouldn't simply direct people to your website home page, or to a web page which is only somewhat ... 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
Today we'd like to give you some quick statistics regarding email marketing, and how they relate to your jewelry store.
At the bottom of this email, you will find the links for the web pages we're getting our data from. Feel free to look over it all yourself.
First, let's talk about the time of day to send emails. A few years ago our own research showed that the best time of day to send emails was 1PM local time. That statistic is no longer true. Now that users are able to read emails in a wide variety of ways, we are not constrained to post-lunch time email reading.
Naturally you can send your emails at any time of the day, but what time will have the best chance for someone to read it?
It turns out there are 3 different times, and each has a different audience. You could have as much as a 20% chance of s... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What's the difference between email you send to your friends and family and the email you send out in bulk to your customers?
Constant Contact is one of the popular, easy to use email newsletter management systems. They provide colorful email templates that you can manipulate and turn into beautiful masterpieces of email creativity.
Perhaps you sit and marvel at the beauty of those email newsletters before sending, only to have your excitement crushed by those built in statistics that show how few people open the email (called open rates).
There are many reasons for low open rates, including spam filters, firewalls, poor subject lines, and customers who don't view images in email. You can only track when an email is opened if the person views images. Have you ever see that "Having trouble viewing this email? Click ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Let's talk about buying shows, holiday inventory, and internet advertising.
We're right in the middle of the trade show season and every show you go to will have plenty of options for holiday inventory and new trends that could work in your store. What is the most important reason you select new inventory for your store? We'd love to hear your feedback on that.
We attended the JA show in New York City from July 26th to 28th and asked some very hard questions to many vendors both large and small. Today we're going to review some of our findings.
We tried to divide our time equally between small designers, new designers, and well established jewelry manufacturers. We asked all of them what marketing assistance they offered their retailers, specifically how each one would help the retailer add content to their websit... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google Plus continues to dominate tech news on many websites as Google publishes new tweaks of the service every day. I've been reading and testing to figure out how and why you, as a retail jewelry store owner, should get involved in Google+.
I suppose I should tell you about the video chat feature called a Hangout. Google gave us a brand new way to video conference between people. This feature allows you to video conference up to 9 friends to communicate directly through your webcam.
In a Hangout, you can all see each other in small thumbnail videos while the person talking is presented in a larger video window. The Hangout also has a chat, and a way to watch YouTube videos together.
It's quite fascinating and I know I'll find it useful when I want to hold a conference with my team when I'm traveling, but at the... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As you might already know, we usually don't publish Daily Golden Nuggets unless we have enough data to substantiate what we're saying. Although recently we've published a few "Front Line SEO" nuggets that were based on developing SEO observations, we felt they were important enough to talk about.
Today we'd like to finally examine Groupon. Is it worth it for a retail jeweler? What's the typical result? How can you make it work for you?
Groupon recently filed for their S-1 and is moving forward with their IPO as soon as possible. They've had an amazing success in only 30 months, but is their business model actually a success for the retail stores that use it?
We've spoken to a few jewelers that have used Groupon and to many other retail business owners outside the jewelry industry. They've all reported the same e... 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
Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Register.com and Domain.com are just a few of the hundreds of companies that you can now buy your domain name from. They are called "registrars."
Each of them are trying to improve their profits, yet the prices of domain names have dropped as low as $1.99 for the .info domains. As a sales tactic, each of these registrars have started promotions to have you buy more and more domain names.
"Secure your biz, co, net, org domain name and protect your trademark" is a common slogan. But how useful is this really? Why would you want 5 domains, or 15 domains?
In reality, you only ever want to advertise one primary domain name. If you have jewelrystores.com and jewelrystore.net you should simply use the .com version. The .net becomes useful only for special purpose advertising where you can tr... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As a local retail jeweler, you are faced with many advertising difficulties compared to large jewelry chain stores like Jared, Zales, Kay, JCPenny and so many others. They have millions of dollars to throw at their national advertising and branding.
These large companies create buzz around their brands and consumers naturally remember the ads, slogans, and jingles that are repeated effectively in large, unified branding campaigns.
The word of mouth alone creates online interest and random link sharing to all of these big brand websites. As a result of this link sharing, these companies gain incredibly super ranking in the search engines that will easily bury your search engine efforts as a local jeweler.
So don't fight those big brands. Instead, you need to compete on your home turf.
As 2010 comes to a close and 2011 brings hopes of a better economy, we'd like to present to you some basic SEO ideas that we've not yet covered through our Daily Gold Nuggets.
Before we get into any specifics, let's introduce you to some basic terminology and search engine ideas.
First, you need to know that there is no magic silver bullet that will make your website show up in the search engines easily. It takes a lot of hard, tedious work.
Second, if you spend just one evening researching SEO techniques on your own, you will find huge inconsistencies between what all of the search engine optimization professionals say to do. There is no way that everyone is correct, yet every one of those professionals seem to get the job done using their "proven" techniques. Google and Bing do not freely publish a real how-to d... 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.
Back in October, we gave you some guidelines on marketing for this holiday season. Today is the second Monday of the season and we'd like to review your email strategy again.
1. If you have a list already you should send an email before the end of the day today. It doesn't have to be long, just say things like "Still searching for the perfect gift? Here are some gifts that just came in on Saturday..."
2. To build your email list in person, you could ask every customer for their email when they check out. However, customers don't freely give out their email addresses any more. You have to give them a reason to want to give it, and a simple weekly or monthly newsletter is not enough anymore. Here are some good ideas that currently work:
"If you give me your birthday or anniversary we will send you a $50 gift card... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Sometimes the information we publish gets very focused on a single topic and perhaps those reading get confused with what is important from day to day. Honestly, it's difficult to really point a finger and say what's more important than another.
We're going to take a step back and try to list the most popular internet marketing ideas for retail jewelers according to specific categories. We always try to maintain or focus on local retailers, but even e-tailers can take advantage of our ideas.
Some of the items below are repeated in each category, and this list is by no means all-inclusive. The items in each list are also not in any particular order since different internet marketing experts will rank them all differently.
To attract new non-mobile customers to your store: 1. Need a website. 2. Website n... 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
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
In yesterday's Gold Nugget, we described the strategy of changing your website home page in early November to take advantage of the women shoppers that purchase earlier in the holiday season.
Today we will briefly explain how to turn this idea around to target the men shoppers that typically wait until the first and second weeks of December to shop.
David Geller explains the many differences between the sales pitch toward men vs. women. Here's one example he used last time we attended his workshop: When selling a diamond to a lady, put it in a setting so she can try it on; however, when selling a diamond to a man, hand it to him in tweezers with a loupe. Men want to know more of the technical aspect than the beauty or emotion of it.
We don't consider large diamond ring purchases to be a last minute gift item; that ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've given you several action plans for producing content for the holiday season, but so far we haven't told you how and when to use it. That information starts now.
If we asked you who procrastinates more--a husband or his wife--what would you say? Do we need to find statistics that state 99.999% of men procrastinate more than their counterparts? We don't really have that kind of measured data other than looking at our own family and friends. But it sure seems like all the women we know can plan way in advance for all parts of life, including printing out directions.
All joking aside, let's apply this idea to our marketing strategy: "Women shop early and men procrastinate."
Starting early in November you need to restructure your website's home page with large photos of jewelry and watches "for him." The captions... 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
"...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.
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review 
While there's a lot of chatter about 
Last week, Rob Bates, News Director for JCK wrote an interesting article with 
I remember back in the late 1990s when I was helping people set up their first email addresses and told them that email would eventually be more important than their telephone number. Since then, the internet evolved in ways we never imagined and, although email didn't cause telephone obsolescence, some say that both methods of communication are going away.
In today's Daily Golden Nugget, I'm reviewing website traffic and email headlines leading up to Father's Day in the USA, which was June 15 this year. 
Talk to any search engine marketing professional and they will say that you need good content on your website in order to rank well search engines, and engaging content on social networks if you want to interact with your existing audience, and gain new followers.
It was a pretty exciting day yesterday at the MJSA Expo in New York City. It was my honor to be one of 
This is a continuation of 
In a previous Daily Golden Nugget, I explained that you need to 
As a computer engineer, programmer, and networking engineer, I have seen my share of technical disasters since I first got involved with computer in, um, 1984. I got my first computer, a Timex Sinclair, in '84 and quickly learned the BASIC programming language.
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I reviewed a simple method for 
Back on September 10, 2013 I told you that your website needs to 
Yesterday, I gave you my list of predictions for 2014. Those predictions were things that might happen whether you want them to or not. Today, as we start a New Year, I want to give you a list of things that would make good New Year's resolutions for jewelers. Any one of these alone would help improve your business if you stick with it all year long.
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I briefly explained that 
People search for random phrases during the holiday season. Here's one such random, and very specific search:
Back in October 2013, I wrote a Nugget about 
This is the fourth edition of my Daily Golden Nugget series of holiday email reviews. In the previous reviews I showed you 
There's really no way to point at any one type of online service as "online marketing." Google, Microsoft, and Apple have taken all the pieces of the internet and woven them together. Ultimately you should be involved with all social networks, mobile ads, search ads, e-commerce, and a fantastic website. 
Happy Halloween!
Even though Halloween is 10 days away, you are probably heavily planning your Holiday Season advertising without really considering any last minute Halloween ads. You don't have to plan too much to whip up some last minute marketing for Halloween. Your website's home page, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and any email marketing over the next 10 days could use a dash of Halloween humor.
In yesterday's Nugget I explained the importance of 
How many sterling silver lines should you carry in your store? Over the last few years the increased price of precious metals had all fine jeweler wondering that same question. The answer is probably as many as it takes to satisfy the desires of your local customers. The sterling silver jewelry from 
All business owners want to see more people walk through their door. Obviously you can't grow a business if you don't have customers. Repeat customers are good and most of the jewelers I talk to say word of mouth referrals from those repeat customers seem to be the biggest source of new customers.
How Agile Can Your Marketing Be?
Internet memes are everywhere. Add a profound or funny statement to any picture of a cat and you might just have your own meme that goes viral today.
Yesterday I detailed the differences between online advertising in 2008, 2010, and then my suggestions for this year. Here's my unified advertising suggestion list again in case you missed it:
It's time to take a quick look back through 2012 to find the best and brightest of our Daily Golden Nuggets. I'm splitting these into 3 categories of the most read of 2012, top landing page for 2012, and my personal top picks from 2012
It's the end of one year and the beginning of another, and that means it's time for predictions for next year.
"Hello, Holidays!"
It's the start of a new month and for many of you it's the official kickoff of the holiday season. Hopefully your marketing strategy is in place and you're ready for the flood of customers... of course in the United States we actually need to wait until after Election Day for those customers to start flooding in since no one likes to spend money during an "election season."
Last week I gave you a list of Halloween themed headlines that you could use in your marketing messages for this week. Today I'm going to give you a list of headlines that you could use throughout November 2012. These headlines were recorded during November 2011 as part of one of my long term continuing research projects on email marketing and website headlines.
I'd like to share with you a specific tactic to increase customer service, create immediate social marketing, lower buyer remorse, and create long term online marketing. This tactic will cost little or no money, and your customers will do it for you.
