Our last topic this week regarding domain names is actually about email addresses.
All too often, people will use free email systems for their email addresses. Google Mail, or Gmail, is very popular in the past year or so. Prior to that, Yahoo! was most popular, and of course AOL, Hotmail and a multitude of others are still around.
As the web becomes an important part of your business, email communications will become even more important (if they aren’t already). When you use an email address associated with your domain name, you increase the brand awareness with your customers, as well as establishing credibility.
There's a higher level of business credibility with using joe@jewelrystore.com instead of jewelrystore@gmail.com.
Free emails are, well, free. Your email savvy customers know this because most likely they are using free email services, too. Not everyone understands what it takes to get a website or a domain name, so for many people the "joe@jewelrystore.com" looks more prestigious and adds to your level of business credibility.
Setting up email addresses associated with your domain name is an easy process for your website host. You could also have your emails attached through Gmail if you like the Gmail system.
Domain name emails usually cost money every month, and normally are including in the cost of website hosting. So before you spend time and money elsewhere, contact your website host first. However, if you decide to go with Google email/domain hosting, make sure you choose the paid "Google Apps" service and not the free Gmail service. This will give you appropriate control over your anti-virus and spam filtering options.
Many services will automatically filter out emails from other countries to prevent spamming. Make sure whatever email service you select allows you the options to unblock emails from other countries, otherwise your foreign diamond suppliers may not be able to communicate with you.
"...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
BEHIND THE SCENES jWAG is Free!
There's a lot of good SEO training stuff out there, but we're the only website who use jewelry terms in our examples...
jWAG is the research and training department of JewelerWebsites.com, and we provide our online training for free. No scam, no gimmick, everything you read on jWAG
is the same SEO and online marketing techniques that we provide our paying customers.
Our Daily Golden Nugget email subscribers are occasionally offered free services so we can evaluate new SEO techniques and emerging web technologies.
A typical SEO firm will request you fill out a "quote form" before they tell you exactly what they do for you or their price. We know that
many of you guys--our readers from the jewelry industry--are cautious about your technology investments and media buying. This is why we've created jWAG, to
help you learn a little and understand what it takes to have a successful jewelry website and online marketing.
With a little SEO knowledge you can better evaluate any SEO firm before hiring them.
Will you have time to do this yourself? Maybe not, but feel free to hire your own in-house web person and give them the job of reading and using jWAG.
That will be much less expensive than hiring us or someone else.
We try to write everything on jWAG so you can easily follow without too much geek speak. All our examples are written using jewelry lexicon so you can use them directly
or copy the techniques directly without rethinking. We hope it's a great time saver.
If you do decide to throw up your hands and give up we'd hope
you give us a call, but before you do, make sure to check out your options from your POS company because they might have an easy beginner website. Another beginner
website could come from one of your jewelry vendors.
When you are ready to use the power of jWAG you should just call JewelerWebsites.com or do a Google search
for "jewelry website design" for the other experts in the jewelry website design industry.
Here are some quick links into JewelerWebsites.com:
