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.
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
Every week, normally on Friday, I write a website review with suggestions on how to make a random site better. I have something special planned for this Friday so I have to move my Flop-Fix review to today.
My purpose here is to find a website that has something wrong, point it out, and give suggestions on how to fix it. My suggestions are entirely my own and based on my past experience, research, or observations. I found my review candidate this week with the query "jewelry stores Happy Valley, OR" and th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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.
When was the last time you read your own website? Even though that seems like a simple, even a silly question, can you remember when you last read through your entire website?
If you're like most business owners, you probably haven't read through your website since the last redesign, or worse, since you first launched it several redesigns ago.
No doubt that your business has changed since your website was last launched. Here are some simple examples of things that might have changed in your store that you neglected to change online.
It's time for this week's Throwback Thursday Daily Golden Nugget. I'm jumping back to March 2011 to my discussion of Older, Wiser, Faster Indexed Websites to specifically revisit the difference between new websites and old websites, and how Google indexes them.
New Websites
People don't race to shop at your store as soon as you build a new website. Before that can happen, Google needs t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
'Tis currently the season for jewelry stores to upgrade their websites in preparation for the upcoming holiday season.
Website upgrades are good, as long as you are upgrading to something better. Everything online can be tracked and learned from. Before upgrading your website you should be reviewing all your previous collected data to see how you can improve.
The defacto standard in website tracking is Google Analytics, a massive tracking and analysis system that m... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to Daily Golden Nugget number 218 from March 25, 2011. Back then, Google was generating SERP instant preview images for websites, a feature that was then dropped in April 2013, but it I want to cover a different topic from that Nugget that I never wrote about in detail...
The weather in North America has been quite drastic through this winter. Snowfall and low temperature records have been broken all season long, and we're all counting the days until March 21st, which is only two weeks from now. Thankfully temperatures seem to be on the rise.
On the other hand, two weeks ago, the temperatures in New Jersey were lower than in Fairbanks, Alaska!
I'm certainly not a cold weather person, but many people are. In this week's edition of the Friday website review I'm headi... 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
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.
Two weeks ago I wrote a Nugget about the potential decline of your website's ranking when you launch a new website. The scenario proposed in that Nugget assumed you transferred all your existing content and SEO settings to the new website, but you changed your URL structure, causing the decline. Preventing that decline requires the setup of 301 redirects so ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
January 2014 is over and for the next few days everyone in the jewelry industry will be focused on Valentine's Day related sales. And after that, you'll have only 8.5 months to get ready for the next holiday season.
Too soon to think about it?
I don't think so.
Back in September 2013, Google announced their new Hummingbird engine along with their new mobile centric focus. Now, a full 4 months later, I finally have some real data to help understand what e... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'd like to start off the first new Daily Golden Nugget of 2013 with a potential New Year's Resolution for your jewelry store.
Here it is: Hire a dedicated employee to work on your website.
I realize that it might be a bad time to be telling you to increase your payroll spending, but like all New Year's Resolutions, your goal should be to get this done before the end of the year.
Hiring an employee to work on your website is no small task. It's going to be harder for you to find a qualified website employee than it wo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Massive changes to any website completely scare the bajesus out of us! The potential for lost Google PageRank, broken links, voiding user bookmarks will harm your business. How does that harm happen? In the simplest sense your telephones will stop ringing, your internet sales will slow down, and fewer people will walk through your front door.
But sometimes you can't avoid the massive changes, say, every 18 months when you want to redesign your website. Of course a "redesign" could just be an upgrade of the style sheet that controls colors and how your pages are laid out. A redesign doesn't need to include changes to the URLs of your website; it all depends on the content management system you are using.
Massive changes can occur because you are switching to a different web programming company, or hosting company. Somet... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
While broadcasting live, we added products, blog entries, and newsletters to that site. Then we used our Google Webmaster Tools account to submit a sitemap to Google on August 13, 2010 and again on August 18, 2010.
This Gold Nugget is part of our extended series of data analysis for the holiday season.
This is what you need to know to properly coordinate your online advertising to previous trends throughout November and December. This data *does not apply* to January - October!
DAYS OF INTEREST we saw in both 2008 and 2009 (our recession years):
* Typically, the busiest day of the week for all online activity is Tuesday. However, for the jewelry industry, each year starting the second week of November, that day changes to Monday.
* We also see a lot of new activity starting the third Friday of November and continuing each Friday until Christmas.
* In 2008 and 2009, online activity on Saturdays and Sundays was always lower than the previous Monday and Friday. Interesting to note: the activity volume is 25% les... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Planning for the holiday season always seems like a never ending task. You select your holiday inventory during the summer months; plan your advertising in August and schedule dates for events; give your staff a brush-up on merchandise knowledge and sales tactics; and after all that, you even have to decorate your store.
Come January, you need a vacation!
For several years we've been tracking dates, times and jewelry types that should be advertised between November 1 and December 31. Over the next week or so, each Daily Gold Nugget will be dedicated to a single group of days and the strategy you should employ on your website.
The tips we give you this September should be enough time to help you with writing copy and gathering the necessary photography for November and December.
When did you last remodel your store? 1970? 1980? Does your store look old? Perhaps the showcases are doing their job but what about the wood paneling on the walls that's a dead giveaway of a 30 year old store?
Continuing with this line of thought, is the old store design turning away customers? Another question you could ask yourself is how often do you get first time customers in the store and then never see them again?
According to Lydia Ramsey of MannersThatSell.com, first impressions account for 93% of all opinions, and the basis for doing business "is judged based on non-verbal data - your appearance and your body language." It's okay if your retail store looks old if it's your intended style, but does it look old, tired and in need of refreshing? There is a difference.
We hope by now you realize that the idea of QR Code advertising is to use the barcode any place where your customers are not at home or at their computer, yet they are willing to give partial attention to reading a mobile website that they request to view.
Now that we've given you ideas how to use these you probably want to know how to get thee codes for yourself and make them work, we're going to give you those tools in tomorrow's Gold Nugget, but today we want to pause and explain the power of timeliness in QR Code advertising.
All of us at jWAG will always say it's important to keep your website updated on a regular basis, but when it comes t QR Code advertising you need to make a choice between using he QR Code to direct people to you, or offer them an incentive on the spot.
"...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
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.
January 2014 is over and for the next few days everyone in the jewelry industry will be focused on Valentine's Day related sales. And after that, you'll have only 8.5 months to get ready for the next holiday season.
I'd like to start off the first new Daily Golden Nugget of 2013 with a potential New Year's Resolution for your jewelry store.
