Online marketing is not always about finding the right ads, or expensive photography, or search engine optimization, or even the right online marketing company.
Another important part of online marketing is simply you; your personality and your time--oh, and your communication skills.
It's time to brush up on your typing and online communication skills, because that's what today's Daily Golden Nugget is all about.
There are hundreds of various local online forums that you can get involved with. Here are some forums that we know of that you could get involved with today:
1. Local Chamber of Commerce community forum websites 2. Your bank's website may have local forums 3. American Express has online forums
Although Facebook is technically not an online forum, you can use it as one to interact with your local community. Of course, you don't just have to look for forums related to small businesses or retail jewelers. You could look for online forums about your hobbies, parenting, or travel. The goal is to find some online venue where you can participate.
Then create an account and get involved. DO NOT SELL! Participation in online community forums is not for selling. Instead, you are presenting yourself and your point of view. When the opportunity arises, you should talk about your business and what you do. You could also include your website address in your signature.
The goal is to get people to notice you (in a good way) and to talk about you. Getting involved in local forums means you are reaching out and telling the community you are there. Random people who otherwise would never find you are exposed to your personality, your knowledge, and occasionally some information about your products and services.
This is not a full time job, nor should you worry about wasting time on forums every day. Check in once in a while, perhaps on weekends. Read. Answer questions. Post questions. Interact.
Before you know it people will be linking to your website and eventually someone will walk in the door saying "Wow, John! Nice to meet you! I was reading your post on that website this week, and I feel I can trust you so I came in." That might seem cheesy, or contrived, but believe us it's not.
Neither your website nor you are islands. Get involved online somehow and reap real, lasting rewards.
"...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:
