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.
If you're jewelry store is located in a strip mall or a shopping mall, Google will probably be changing your address, if they haven't already.
In honor of my 1200th Daily Golden Nugget I'm bringing you some updated information about Google+ Local today. Way back 1200 post ago I began these Nuggets with a a post about Google Maps, since then I've carried the tradition or reviewing Google business related changes every 100th Nugget. So here we are again.
I've always believed that a local business should pay attention to how their company appears online. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of random business directories where public business and store information can be found.
These business directories often get their start by purchasing lists of business names to populate into their sites. Databases of company names, addresses, owners, phone numbers, and business types are all available for purchase thr... 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
Many jewelers criticize us that almost everything we teach refers to Google in one way or another. This is simply because in our tracking we see the highest percentage of organic traffic coming from Google.com.
Today we took a random sampling of the sites we work on and looked at an average percentage of all the current traffic in the last 30 days. Here are the results:
Organic Traffic for May 2011 to Jewelry Websites: Google: 85.39% Yahoo!: 6.41% Bing: 5.94% Search: 0.83% AOL: 0.95% Ask: 0.48%
It's amazing that Ask is still holding on as a search engine. It's also pretty surprising to see Search.com and AOL showing up as organic sources for organic jewelry website traffic.
Obviously you see how much traffic comes from Google. More than 85% of organic traffic for jewelry websites comes fro... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
By now, you've visited websites that seemed to have a special message just for people in your home town, or near where you work.
The popular discount offer website Groupon uses this feature constantly. They are able to sense exactly where you are and they provide special offers to you based on the town or region you are in right now.
You might think they are spying on you, but in fact this is something we call IP Based Delivery. Every computer in the world is assigned a unique number when it connects to the internet. This number is called an IP address and it's like a phone number for your computer.
Every IP address is assigned to specific towns and your computer's IP address can be looked up in fractions of a second to determine where you are.
Most people look at the Search Engines right away, but there's a lot of other valuable information in there, and an answer to a very common question we hear a lot. That question is "Should I cancel my Yellow Pages advertising?"
Take a look at your list of Referring Sites. These are all the places that have links to you. Surprisingly, every retail jeweler website we've ever analyzed will have yellowpages.com, insiderpages.com and yp.yahoo.com all listed as referring sites.
What's even more surprising is that if you cancel your ad, or never even had one, you will still see traffic from YellowPages.com. It's usually pretty high quality with a low Bounce Rate and high Average Time on Site.
So save your monthly money and cancel that Yellow Pages ad when it's up for renewal. They won't remove your listing from their we... 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
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