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Friday, September 15, 2017

Retailer Future: First Steps Towards Online Catalog and Ecommerce Websites

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Retailer Future: First Steps Towards Online Catalog and Ecommerce Websites daily-golden-nugget-1574-57
After many years of talking and teaching about it, I'm finally starting to see retail jewelers embracing the reality of catalog and ecommerce websites. The reality I'm referring to is the tedious process of photographing your inventory, maintaining a website, and handling all aspects of order fulfillment.

Within the jewelry industry, there are several ways to mimic an ecommerce website without actually setting it up or managing it yourself. Many large man...
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AT: 09/15/2017 07:11:02 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, September 01, 2017

Ecommerce is More than Selling; It's Retail Business Evolution

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Ecommerce is More than Selling; Its Retail Business Evolution daily-golden-nugget-1572-39
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...
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AT: 09/01/2017 11:27:11 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, August 11, 2017

Resurgence of QR Codes Brings The Real World and Cyberspace Closer Together

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Resurgence of QR Codes Brings The Real World and Cyberspace Closer Together daily-golden-nugget-1569-47
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 ...
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AT: 08/11/2017 06:48:55 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, July 14, 2017

Ecommerce Inventory: The Never Ending Update Saga

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Ecommerce Inventory: The Never Ending Update Saga daily-golden-nugget-1565-84
I was in New York City over the Independence Day weekend helping someone troubleshoot a sound and mixing board problem for a friend of mine. They recently bought a new sound board that was causing a hum when connected to the older equipment.

This little challenge was a throwback to my pre-2003 days when I volunteered as a sound and lighting engineer for community theatre productions. I knew exactly what the problem was and what was needed to solve it. I needed something called a "ground loop isolator," ...
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AT: 07/14/2017 11:56:10 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, June 16, 2017

The Ecommerce Business Plan

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The Ecommerce Business Plan daily-golden-nugget-1561-22
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.

Why Bother With A Business Plan? VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET



AT: 06/16/2017 11:08:15 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, June 02, 2017

6 Common Website Problems That Business Owners Don't Understand

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6 Common Website Problems That Business Owners Dont Understand daily-golden-nugget-1559-54
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 ...
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AT: 06/02/2017 07:25:39 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, May 26, 2017

Time To Admit When You Need Help

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Time To Admit When You Need Help daily-golden-nugget-1558-90
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...
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AT: 05/26/2017 11:15:42 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, May 19, 2017

Watch, Learn, Change, Adapt, or Just Die

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Watch, Learn, Change, Adapt, or Just Die daily-golden-nugget-1557-54
Many small businesses, not just retail jewelers, are caught in a tight monthly financial cycle. Those businesses teeter on financial ruin because the only thing needed to send them over the edge is a bad week of sales, unexpected loss of the star salesperson, tax penalties, medical bills, or the wrong choices of inventory. Each of these could be an unrecoverable setback.

According to the Jewelers Board of Trade, there was a total of VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 05/19/2017 08:03:05 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, May 05, 2017

The Marriage of Websites and Social Media

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The Marriage of Websites and Social Media daily-golden-nugget-1555-43
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...
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AT: 05/05/2017 11:12:51 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, April 21, 2017

Make Smarter Decisions Based On Your Website Reports

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Make Smarter Decisions Based On Your Website Reports daily-golden-nugget-1553-21
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.

With regard to marketing, the common p...
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AT: 04/21/2017 11:17:22 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, March 10, 2017

Comparison Of Two Bozeman, Montana Jewelers

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Comparison Of Two Bozeman, Montana Jewelers daily-golden-nugget-1547-21
In last week's Golden Nugget, I presented some interesting information showing the comparison of web page visible content to the hidden HTML code in the background. From that post, you could conclude that your website goal should be to fine tune your code to prevent too much hidden code, a problem that is known as "code bloat."

I'm digging a little deeper into this topic again today because of the emails, phone calls, a...
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AT: 03/10/2017 12:59:13 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, February 17, 2017

Shockey Jewelers #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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Shockey Jewelers FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1544-43
This is the Friday Flop Fix website review. The goal of this review is to examine the mistakes a random website is making and suggest ways to fix it. I do my best every week to take on the role of a typical internet savvy consumer as I search for a review candidate. I also use the Google Chrome browser set to incognito mode so my previous browsing history does not influence the search results I see.

For today's search, I used the phrase "jewelry stores Elgin, IL" and saw these results:

VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 02/17/2017 09:59:01 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 20, 2017

Cass Jewelers #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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Cass Jewelers FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1540-40
For this week's website review, I began my search for a "jewelry store High Point, NC" and got these results from Google:

Cass Jewelers FridayFlopFix Website Review 1540-jewelry-store-High-Point-NC-serp-51

I've circled the map in the above screen shot to point out that there wer...
VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 01/20/2017 01:24:05 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, December 09, 2016

The Jewelry Source Website Review

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The Jewelry Source Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1534-15
Record breaking ecommerce sales have been in the news this week; in fact, online sales have been higher this year than ever before. One of the headlines from comScore this week was "Eleven Consecutive Billion-Dollar Days of Online Desktop Spending from Thanksgiving through Cyber Week Mark the Longest Streak Ever". It's importan...
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AT: 12/09/2016 12:11:51 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, November 18, 2016

Franzetti Jewelers Website Re-Review

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Franzetti Jewelers Website Re-Review daily-golden-nugget-1531-88
In this week's website review, I'm going back to re-review the first website I ever wrote about way back in April 2013. At the time, I chose Franzetti Jewelers with the website http://www.franzettijewelers.com/. You can read the old review from April 19, 2013 here.

My review process was pretty unsophisticated 3.5 years ago. It took a while for me to realize that I should be ...
VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 11/18/2016 01:00:33 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, October 14, 2016

Jeweler's Choice #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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Jewelers Choice FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1526-70
In honor of the jewelry shows taking place in Miami this weekend, I've chosen a Miami Beach jeweler for this week's website review. It all started with a Google search for "jewelers miami beach, fl" and these search results:

Jewelers Choice FridayFlopFix Website Review 1526-jewelers-miami-beach-fl-serp-49VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 10/14/2016 12:16:48 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, July 08, 2016

Happy Jewelers #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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Happy Jewelers FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1512-39
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


AT: 07/08/2016 11:03:44 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, March 21, 2016

Social Media is The Glue Holding The Customer Life Cycle Together

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Social Media is The Glue Holding The Customer Life Cycle Together daily-golden-nugget-1476-81
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...
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AT: 03/21/2016 06:46:04 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, March 14, 2016

4 Ways To Prep Your Website For Eventual Ecommerce

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4 Ways To Prep Your Website For Eventual Ecommerce daily-golden-nugget-1471-33It 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...
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AT: 03/14/2016 01:21:56 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, March 11, 2016

Diamonds Fine Jewelry #FridayFlopFix Review

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Diamonds Fine Jewelry FridayFlopFix Review daily-golden-nugget-1470-62
It's time for the #FridayFlopFix where I review a random website from a local retail jeweler. The goal is to find some obvious mistakes, or flops, and suggest ways to improve upon, or fix, things.

This week, I'm looking for a candidate jeweler in Meridian, Idaho. This is the Google search results page I saw when looking for "jewelers Meridian, ID":

Diamonds Fine Jewelry FridayFlopFix Review 1470-jewelers-meridian-id-se...<br />
							<span class=VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 03/11/2016 01:12:10 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, February 23, 2016

The Unbalanced Branding Relationship Between Retail Jewelers and Jewelry Designers

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The Unbalanced Branding Relationship Between Retail Jewelers and Jewelry Designers daily-golden-nugget-1457-37
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 ...
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AT: 02/23/2016 02:12:48 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, January 18, 2016

Local Business Suffering? It's Time To Think About Your Global Audience

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Local Business Suffering? Its Time To Think About Your Global Audience daily-golden-nugget-1435-33
I realize that over the last 12 months, I've spent most of my time talking about Google to the exclusion of the other search engines. Many SEO professionals, myself included, feel that if you can achieve high ranking in Google then you should easily be able to achieve high ranking in any search engine. It seems only natural since Google is the de facto search engine, right?

While Google might be the most popular search engine in the U.S., it's not the most popul...
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AT: 01/18/2016 12:22:16 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Insights for 2016

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Insights for 2016 daily-golden-nugget-1418-76
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-...
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AT: 12/30/2015 08:23:36 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, December 15, 2015

4 Common SEO Problems Found in Product Catalogs

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4 Common SEO Problems Found in Product Catalogs daily-golden-nugget-1407-22
Although all evidence says that e-commerce and online product catalogs are the future of retail business on the web, many jewelers have been slow to deploy those types of websites. In preparation for this current holiday season, I was working on the search engine optimization (SEO) settings for several sites that either launched e-commerce sites or large product catalogs. I'll explain a few of those settings in this Daily Golden Nugget.

Many of the good content management systems and ...
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AT: 12/15/2015 12:49:47 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Customers Do Use Mobile Devices For Product Information While Shopping In Your Store

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Customers Do Use Mobile Devices For Product Information While Shopping In Your Store daily-golden-nugget-1403-83
Since 2010, the predicted website and internet usage trends right before the holiday season have suggested that more people will use their smartphones to pre-shop retail stores and to look up product information while in a store. What better way to save time during the busy holiday shopping season than to look for online product information and find stores that carry the items?

While out shopping with my mother o...
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AT: 12/09/2015 12:24:03 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, November 27, 2015

Kuhn's Jewelers Website Flop Fix

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Kuhns Jewelers Website Flop Fix daily-golden-nugget-1395-3
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...
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AT: 11/27/2015 12:20:42 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, September 25, 2015

Carlson's Jewelry Smithing Website Review

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Carlsons Jewelry Smithing Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1350-68
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. I'm starting my Google search this week with the phrase "jamestown ny jewelers" to find the review candidate for today. That search yielded these results:

Carlsons Jewelry Smithing Website Review 1350-jamestown-ny-jewelers-serp-37VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 09/25/2015 12:04:02 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, June 12, 2015

J&M Jewelry Mobile Website Review

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J&M Jewelry Mobile Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1275-33
Welcome to the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal for today is to find and perform a usability review of a random jewelry store mobile website. I'm performing the review on, and taking screen shots with, my iPhone 6.

The first review for today is to see if a google.com search through the Safari web browser would yield the same results as a search using the Google search app on the iPhone. Here's a side by side comparison of the two methods:

VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 06/12/2015 07:22:44 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, June 11, 2015

What Is A Money Site?

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What Is A Money Site? daily-golden-nugget-1274-3
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...
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AT: 06/11/2015 08:44:10 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, June 05, 2015

The Jewelers of Las Vegas Website Re-review

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The Jewelers of Las Vegas Website Re-review daily-golden-nugget-1270-61
In honor of the big jewelry shows in Las Vegas that came to a close on Monday this week, I'm searching around Las Vegas again for this week's website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget.

I was still in New Jersey when I wrote last week's review of another Las Vegas jeweler, but this time I'm sitting in my hotel room at The Excalibur writing this weeks.

Last week, I simply searched for...
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AT: 06/05/2015 12:55:26 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, June 03, 2015

Don't Ruin Your Ads; PhotoShop Disasters are Avoidable

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Dont Ruin Your Ads; PhotoShop Disasters are Avoidable daily-golden-nugget-1268-97
I angst a lot over the poor photo quality I often see used on jewelry websites and in print ads. Someone will never know the detail of intricate fine jewelry unless they are holding it in their hand or looking at a perfect quality photo.

I have a simple idea of a perfect quality photo: just be in focus and properly lit.

I like to use photos with interesting backgrounds to attract attention and then high definition photos with pure white backgrounds on the product det...
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AT: 06/03/2015 06:53:42 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, May 21, 2015

#TBT Get Help Writing Those Jewelry Product Descriptions

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TBT Get Help Writing Those Jewelry Product Descriptions daily-golden-nugget-1259-69
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back, almost to the beginning. My 8th Nugget was a really good idea for writing good online jewelry sales copy that I want to revisit today.

I recently wrote how to avoid the thin content trap in jewelry catalogs, a...
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AT: 05/21/2015 11:25:35 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, May 15, 2015

John Tolle Jewelry Website Review

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John Tolle Jewelry Website Review  daily-golden-nugget-1255-82
This is the Friday website review where I search for a jeweler in a random town around the United States then review their website. By reviewing a live site, I'm usually able to highlight good and bad points that we can all learn from.

For this week, I wanted to find a retail jewelry store in Laguna Beach, California. Here's the SERP when I googled "jewelers in Laguna Beach, California":

John Tolle Jewelry ...<br />
							<span class=VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 05/15/2015 11:24:59 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, May 12, 2015

E-Commerce Isn't The Answer for A Declining Business: Learn Who Your Customer Is First

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E-Commerce Isnt The Answer for A Declining Business: Learn Who Your Customer Is First daily-golden-nugget-1252-91Last week, Rob Bates, News Director for JCK wrote an interesting article with theories of why the jewelry industry is in a funk.

You can read that article yourself, but in brief, the 6 theories posed were:
  1. 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


AT: 05/12/2015 11:10:32 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, May 11, 2015

Learning From the Marketing of a Marvel Mouse

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Learning From the Marketing of a Marvel Mouse daily-golden-nugget-1251-76
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...
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AT: 05/11/2015 11:43:41 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Plan Your Next Contest To Be The First Step in Your Sales Funnel

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Plan Your Next Contest To Be The First Step in Your Sales Funnel daily-golden-nugget-1242-6
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.

Over the past 4 years, I've been helping retai...
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AT: 04/28/2015 11:06:20 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, April 27, 2015

Future Progress and Profit is Unattainable Without Proper Planning

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Future Progress and Profit is Unattainable Without Proper Planning daily-golden-nugget-1241-76
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.

The Early Internet<...
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AT: 04/27/2015 12:24:32 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, April 23, 2015

The Thin Content Jewelry Catalog Trap

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The Thin Content Jewelry Catalog Trap daily-golden-nugget-1239-64
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to the topic of "thin content" that I first explained back in September 2011.

Thin Content Explained


In simple terms, thin content refers to a web page that has very few words on it. Google likes to refer to this content as pages "with little or...
VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 04/23/2015 11:11:27 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, April 17, 2015

Adams Fine Jewelry Website Review

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Adams Fine Jewelry Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1235-64
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:

...<br VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 04/17/2015 09:30:38 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, April 13, 2015

The Push and Pull of Hardware, Software, and Customer Service Technology

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The Push and Pull of Hardware, Software, and Customer Service Technology daily-golden-nugget-1231-21
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...
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AT: 04/13/2015 07:13:12 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, April 10, 2015

Klutts Jewelers Website Review

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Klutts Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1230-23
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.

Here's the Google SERP for Morgan City:

Klutts Jewe...<br />
							<span class=VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 04/10/2015 06:23:19 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, April 07, 2015

3 Email Follow-Up Ideas Engage Customers After a Jewelry Store Contest

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3 Email Follow-Up Ideas Engage Customers After a Jewelry Store Contest  daily-golden-nugget-1227-21
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...
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AT: 04/07/2015 09:31:34 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, April 01, 2015

Image Quality As a Factor in Customer Satisfaction and Ranking

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Image Quality As a Factor in Customer Satisfaction and Ranking daily-golden-nugget-1223-39
Apparently Google is turning a few more heads with its recent search engine ranking algorithm changes again. I'm not talking about Mobilegeddon, which will happen on April 21, 2015, but their latest announcement about e-commerce product images.

Google has put a lot of effort into improving how it understands images and the types of images that people would like to se...
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AT: 04/01/2015 09:49:16 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Can One Blog Be Used to Promote Two Websites?

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Can One Blog Be Used to Promote Two Websites? daily-golden-nugget-1222-74
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...
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AT: 03/31/2015 07:24:30 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, March 27, 2015

Spinelli Jewelers Website Review

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Spinelli Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1220-81
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:

VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 03/27/2015 11:41:41 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, March 19, 2015

Good and Bad Implementations of QR Codes

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Good and Bad Implementations of QR Codes  daily-golden-nugget-1214-92
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...
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AT: 03/19/2015 11:26:57 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, March 18, 2015

You Should Fear Mobilegeddon

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You Should Fear Mobilegeddon daily-golden-nugget-1213-17
Over the last two weeks, I've been detailing why it's important to have a correct mobile setup for your website. Google's decision to use mobile friendliness as a ranking factor has a lot of people worried that...
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AT: 03/18/2015 06:49:38 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, March 16, 2015

10 Ground Rules For Employees When Using Social Media

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10 Ground Rules For Employees When Using Social Media daily-golden-nugget-1211-39
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...
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AT: 03/16/2015 07:10:04 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, March 06, 2015

Taylor's Gold-n-Stones Website Review

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Taylors Gold-n-Stones Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1205-15
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...
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AT: 03/06/2015 07:26:57 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, February 27, 2015

Google+ Local Now Shows Shopping Mall Information

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Google+ Local Now Shows Shopping Mall Information daily-golden-nugget-1200-63
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.

During the course of ...
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AT: 02/27/2015 12:49:53 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Building a Personal Brand For Business Success

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Building a Personal Brand For Business Success daily-golden-nugget-1197-3
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...
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AT: 02/24/2015 10:18:41 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, February 20, 2015

Coffin and Trout Fine Jewellers Website Review

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Coffin and Trout Fine Jewellers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1195-14
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of today's review is to take a critical look at a random retail jeweler's website in hopes of finding something we can all learn from.

At the start of each review, I launch a new Google Chrome incognito window. This allows me to search for a jewelry store without any influence from my previous search history or personalized results.

Searching Google for "jewelers Chandler AZ" returns these results:
...
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AT: 02/20/2015 08:44:00 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Product Photography Example and Analysis

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Product Photography Example and Analysis daily-golden-nugget-1193-61
In this Daily Golden Nugget, I'm going to analyze the photography of a popular e-commerce jewelry site. In this exercise, I hope to reveal some aspects of photography that you can apply to the photography on your own jewelry website.

For this exercise, I'm going to search Google for the Verragio style INS-7074R. This is a very popular engagement ring style and it's easy to find many different website selling it. What I hope to find is a website that took its own photos instead of using the photos ...
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AT: 02/18/2015 12:06:39 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Modern Customers Want to See Product Photos and Product Information on Your Website

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Modern Customers Want to See Product Photos and Product Information on Your Website daily-golden-nugget-1192-17
The internet has become a very visual place, especially on social media. While blog content may thrive with well written information, as of today, on Facebook and Google+ you won't get noticed without some type of visual. This is especially a complete change for Facebook because in 2013, they lowered the visibility of status updates with images because they were combating meme over usage.

Product photography posts...
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AT: 02/17/2015 08:30:19 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, February 13, 2015

Paula's Fine Jewelry Website Review

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Paulas Fine Jewelry Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1190-22
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...
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AT: 02/13/2015 12:32:35 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, February 05, 2015

The Value of Content Creation and Content Curation, Part 2

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The Value of Content Creation and Content Curation, Part 2 daily-golden-nugget-1184-93
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...
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AT: 02/05/2015 09:42:48 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Understanding And Establishing Your Own Content Curation Channel

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Understanding And Establishing Your Own Content Curation Channel daily-golden-nugget-1182-1
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I proposed a few scenarios on how you could create content needed to attract customers to, and convert customers on your website.

Content marketing is a large part of the modern day business strategy, but the creation process is so long and expensive, that many business owners are ready to give up after t...
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AT: 02/03/2015 12:59:25 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 30, 2015

Watkins Jewelers Website Review

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Watkins Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1180-97
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Today, I'm going to perform an incognito Google search for a random jewelry store candidate in Blackstone, Virginia, then review their website.

The goal of this weekly website review is to learn something new, or at least to see an implementation of something good or bad that you never knew.

When I used the search query "jewelry stores in blackstone va" I was given these results:

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AT: 01/30/2015 08:58:12 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Maybe You Need More Conversions Rather Than More Visitor Traffic

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Maybe You Need More Conversions Rather Than More Visitor Traffic daily-golden-nugget-1178-29
So it turns out that your home page is good at attracting visitors, but not turning them into customers. It's a fact that the most visited pages of your website are really bad at convincing people to stay, or to go further towards turning into customers.

Good calls to action are what drive people further into your website. Without them, your website just flounders. Sadly...
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AT: 01/28/2015 08:05:01 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 23, 2015

Gold City Jewelers Website Review

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Gold City Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1175-46
Welcome to the Friday jewelry website review where I randomly select and review the website of a retail jeweler. The goal is to dissect their online accounts to see how they might be ranking highly, and what they might be doing right, or wrong, with their online identity.

I use Google's Chrome browser in incognito mode when searching; otherwise the search results will be skewed based on my personalized search results and the top ranked sto...
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AT: 01/23/2015 10:45:59 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, January 21, 2015

How Jewelers Should Mitigate Security Risks from Google Business View

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How Jewelers Should Mitigate Security Risks from Google Business View daily-golden-nugget-1173-65
A few years ago, Google undertook an extremely ambitious project to extend its Street Mapping technology inside buildings. Specifically, they created a way that Google Maps Street View could reach inside individual retail stores to create virtual walk throughs of those businesses. These virtual tours are called Google Business View, and the businesses taking advantage of this technology are reporting more engaged customers and higher sales.

The Business View virtua...
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AT: 01/21/2015 12:29:52 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, January 20, 2015

When It's the Right Time to Rebrand a Business Name in Google+ Local

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When Its the Right Time to Rebrand a Business Name in Google+ Local daily-golden-nugget-1172-87
I was recently analyzing the Google+ Local account for a new jewelry store. The owners bought the previous bead store that was at that location and remodeled it into a new jewelry store. My analysis discovered a situation I'd not yet seen, or in fact, even envisioned. Of course, that makes it a perfect topic for a Daily Golden Nugget!

It's obvious that every new business needs to design their store and stock their shelves with merchandise. Before you even get to that...
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AT: 01/20/2015 10:35:13 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, January 19, 2015

Jewelry Designers Have Unrealized Power to Control Google Image Results

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Jewelry Designers Have Unrealized Power to Control Google Image Results daily-golden-nugget-1171-54
Google Image Search made a few advancements over during 2013 and 2014 that has led to ever-increasing consumer usage. As more e-commerce sites emerge across all industries, there are millions of new product photos that are being absorbed into Google's Image Engine.

Although every e-commerce website might have their own unique database identifier, it seems like all websites are also publishing the manufacturer's part number as well. A few years ago, this was fro...
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AT: 01/19/2015 08:29:15 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 16, 2015

C. Aaron Penaloza Jewelers Website Review

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C. Aaron Penaloza Jewelers Website Review  daily-golden-nugget-1170-70
Welcome to the Friday website review. The goal of these weekly website reviews to learn something that can better your own website by analyzing someone else's live website. Every week I simply do a Google search in a random town or city throughout the U.S.

This week I'm looking for a review candidate in Terrell Hills, Texas. Using Google Chrome's incognito mode I searched for "jewelry stores in Terrell Hills, Texas" and was given this SERP:

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AT: 01/16/2015 07:57:29 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, January 15, 2015

2014 Holiday Keyword Data from Google Image Search

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2014 Holiday Keyword Data from Google Image Search daily-golden-nugget-1169-47
Google Image search has really started to mature. Not just in its ability to find and surface images, but also with the way that people are using it.

In fact, if you look at this Nugget from last week, you'll see that 75% of the search impressions are generated through Google Image Search and 57% of actual organic visitors come from Google Image Search too.

The image searc...
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AT: 01/15/2015 09:39:38 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, January 14, 2015

2014 Holiday Keyword Report for Repairs, Watches, & Services

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2014 Holiday Keyword Report for Repairs, Watches, & Services daily-golden-nugget-1168-52
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.

My analysis today will focus on a ...
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AT: 01/14/2015 08:21:04 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, January 13, 2015

jWAG Celebrates 5 Years of Freely Writing Stuff That Really Matters

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jWAG Celebrates 5 Years of Freely Writing Stuff That Really Matters daily-golden-nugget-1167-70
January 10, 2015 marked the 5th anniversary of the Jeweler Website Advisory Group, lovingly known as jWAG.

On January 10, 2010 at 1:10pm, this philanthropic endeavor was launched with a very long live web show event where we presented a lot of research based information about jewelry websites.


Typical jWAG Approach


As the founder of jWAG, I've made sure that all the information presented in seminars, webinars, blog posts, and Daily Golden Nuggets c...
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AT: 01/13/2015 08:23:10 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, January 12, 2015

2014 Holiday Keyword Report for Jewelers, Jewelry, and Jewelry Stores

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2014 Holiday Keyword Report for Jewelers, Jewelry, and Jewelry Stores daily-golden-nugget-1166-83
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...
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AT: 01/12/2015 10:02:43 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 09, 2015

Marry Me Jewelry Website Review

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Marry Me Jewelry Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1165-16
Welcome to the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The purpose of this review is to examine a live retail jewelry website in search for the good and bad traits. There's always something interesting to learn from in every week's review.

For this week, I started with a search using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode. I stay incognito while searching for a review candidate so my own browser history will not influence the search results I see. Through your search history, Google has a way of knowing which websi...
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AT: 01/09/2015 01:05:40 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, January 08, 2015

2014 Holiday Diamond and Engagement Ring Mobile Search Report

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2014 Holiday Diamond and Engagement Ring Mobile Search Report daily-golden-nugget-1164-16
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...
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AT: 01/08/2015 09:54:29 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, January 07, 2015

November and December 2014 Web Keyword Data for Retail Jewelers

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November and December 2014 Web Keyword Data for Retail Jewelers daily-golden-nugget-1163-36
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 ...
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AT: 01/07/2015 12:27:16 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, January 05, 2015

Regin: A Real Threat For Anyone Outsourcing

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Regin: A Real Threat For Anyone Outsourcing daily-golden-nugget-1161-87
Many Hollywood action spy movies portray government agencies with amazing computers that can access unlimited computer systems, security cameras, computer networks, and more beyond our imaginations.

You usually have to suspend belief with movies like Mission Impossible and Eagle Eye because government agencies can't activate a cell phone's camera or activate the cell phones of everyone standing around you, right?

Well, maybe they can, or someone can, and they might have been doing it since 2008.

Pay att...
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AT: 01/05/2015 08:00:11 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 02, 2015

Clinton Jewelers Website Review

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Clinton Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1160-88
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal for today is to review a random website in order to learn something good, or bad, from someone else's work.

Review Candidate & SERP


To find my review candidate, I normally choose a city at random and search for local jewelers, however, this week I wanted to find a winter themed town name with a nearby jeweler. Using Google Maps I found the unincorporated community of Snow in Clinton County, Kentucky.

Using the "Search Nearby" feature within G...
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AT: 01/02/2015 07:43:39 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, December 26, 2014

Harby Jewelers Website Review

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Harby Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1155-27
In keeping with my Christmas themed week of Daily Golden Nuggets, for today's website review I searched and searched for a retail jeweler located in a "Santa" related town or location. That task wasn't easy! I started by using Google Maps to search neighborhoods near this list of Santa named towns. Since all of the names on that list weren't really towns, I couldn't use my usual method of searching to find today's website review candidate.

My search eventually took ...
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AT: 12/26/2014 10:58:53 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, December 25, 2014

Wake Up With the Same-Sex Engagement Ring Market

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Wake Up With the Same-Sex Engagement Ring Market daily-golden-nugget-1154-6
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...
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AT: 12/25/2014 07:32:22 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Researching Keywords for your Content Marketing

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Researching Keywords for your Content Marketing daily-golden-nugget-1152-68

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.

According to this marriage proposal survey, the most popular day of the year for popping the question is still Christmas Eve, followed by Valentine's Day, then Christmas Day...
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AT: 12/23/2014 01:51:06 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, December 22, 2014

Jewelers Would You Rather Sell Bridal Jewelry or Engagement Rings?

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Jewelers Would You Rather Sell Bridal Jewelry or Engagement Rings? daily-golden-nugget-1151-59

No matter your best efforts, your customer simply do not care about your bridal line. For them, you might as well be the Invisible Man.

You probably think I'm nuts when I say that, especially since you sell engagement rings all the time. The fact is that most jewelers are incorrectly trying to target "bridal" customers when they should be targeting "engagement rings." Even the phrase "wedding ring" is better than "bridal" or "bridal ring."

Google shares plent...
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AT: 12/22/2014 08:00:24 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, December 19, 2014

Sam's Fine Jewelry Website Review

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Sams Fine Jewelry Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1150-52Today is the Friday Daily Golden Nugget website review. Normally I search a random town name in the United States in search of a website review candidate. But for today, I decided to add a little holiday cheer and look for a town with a holiday related name.

I started with this list of holiday towns, but it turns out that most of those are "populated places" or ghost towns. It seems like many forefathers were willing to name towns after Christmas, but over the dec...
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AT: 12/19/2014 10:18:12 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, December 18, 2014

2014 Holiday Season Website Statistics

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2014 Holiday Season Website Statistics daily-golden-nugget-1149-70
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:

2014 Holiday Season Website Statistics 1149-google-analytics-sessions-overvie...<br />
							<span class=VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 12/18/2014 08:10:01 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Holiday Season Email Marketing and Landing Page Review

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Holiday Season Email Marketing and Landing Page Review daily-golden-nugget-1148-17

The 2014 Holiday Season is flying by. Hanukkah began last night and Christmas Eve is one week from today.

Holiday decorations are everywhere, even on Google's search results...

Holiday Season Email Marketing and Landing Page Review 1148-google-holiday-serps-97 VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 12/17/2014 08:05:12 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Prenuptial Agreements With Your Online Agency - Part 2

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Prenuptial Agreements With Your Online Agency - Part 2 daily-golden-nugget-1147-82
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...
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AT: 12/16/2014 08:12:22 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, December 15, 2014

Prenuptial Agreements With Your Online Agency - Part 1

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Prenuptial Agreements With Your Online Agency - Part 1 daily-golden-nugget-1146-88
Jewelers are in the business of helping couples get to the moment when they profess their love and vow "til death do us part."

Few relationships are intended to last forever, or even a lifetime, but when you get into bed with a business partner, you are rarely thinking about the day when you will break up. When you're in business for yourself, you should be making forward steps to improve your business, but also prepare yourself to different possible future outcomes.

Even though a busines...
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AT: 12/15/2014 12:13:23 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, December 12, 2014

Jewelry Website Reviews in Malibu, California

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Jewelry Website Reviews in Malibu, California daily-golden-nugget-1145-39
This is the Friday jewelry website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week I'm snooping around the interwebs of Malibu, California in search for a great jewelry store.

My hope is that I'll find a store whose website will lure me in and get me to visit them in person. I never know where these reviews will go when I start, but the hope is that we'll all learn something from it.

I start my search using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode to prevent my own search history from providing pe...
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AT: 12/12/2014 12:10:14 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Internet Marketing Agencies - Changing With Technology

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Internet Marketing Agencies - Changing With Technology daily-golden-nugget-1143-44
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...
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AT: 12/10/2014 08:20:17 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, December 09, 2014

How To Avoid Business Decline During a Website Redesign

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How To Avoid Business Decline During a Website Redesign daily-golden-nugget-1142-17
The request has come far too often. I get a phone call from someone wanting to redesign their website. They tell me that their website is old, hasn't been updated, and they just want to start over.

Along with the request to redesign a website, I'm also usually told that they don't want to tell their current web programmer that they will be canceling service. Some business owners have decided that they want to file for a surprise divorce of their programmer.

While I can appreciate diss...
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AT: 12/09/2014 09:56:41 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, December 05, 2014

Mauzie's of Colorado Website Review

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Mauzies of Collorado Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1140-6
Let's imagine that there's a special gift giving day coming up soon and I need to buy a gift. Assuming that I live in Englewood, Colorado I might do a Google search for "buy jewelry gifts in Englewood Colorado."

Today is the weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal of this review is to randomly search Google for a retail jewelry store and learn something from scrutinizing how they manage their website and online identity. There's always something to learn from these reviews, whether it's learning from someth...
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AT: 12/05/2014 08:16:04 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, December 04, 2014

Internet Tax May Not Seem Fair but E-Commerce Sites Are Already Responsible

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Internet Tax May Not Seem Fair but E-Commerce Sites Are Already Responsible daily-golden-nugget-1139-63
There's a heated debate over internet tax happening in the United States Senate this month. Whether or not to collect sales tax from e-commerce websites has been argued for several years along with a proposed federal law, called the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013.

According to the new reports from today's Google search on the topic, it's unlikely that further debate about internet tax will yield any results before the end of December 2014.

Now t...
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AT: 12/04/2014 09:35:31 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Reporting The Number of Black Friday Related Emails in November 2014

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Reporting The Number of Black Friday Related Emails in November 2014 daily-golden-nugget-1137-resized-99
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


AT: 12/02/2014 12:33:06 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, December 01, 2014

How To Drive Website Traffic and Sales on Cyber Monday

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How To Drive Website Traffic and Sales on Cyber Monday daily-golden-nugget-1136-28
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...
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AT: 12/01/2014 08:06:16 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, November 27, 2014

Reason Why Online Ad Costs Increase During the Holiday Season

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Reason Why Online Ad Costs Increase During the Holiday Season daily-golden-nugget-1134-45
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...
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AT: 11/27/2014 08:51:06 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Google Shopping and Double Management of Your Inventory

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Google Shopping and Double Management of Your Inventory daily-golden-nugget-1133-61
I've seen a lot of chatter online recently and in business magazines about the management of store inventory and how it relates to online advertising. Many of the conversations stem from the requirements for the new online advertising system called Google Shopping and how it will help online sales for this holiday season.

For today, the eve of Thanksgiving in the United States, I wanted to briefly cover the topic of online inventory, inventory uploads, and how that works with Google Shopping.<...
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AT: 11/26/2014 09:43:11 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, November 14, 2014

Coastal Jewelers Website Review

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Coastal Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1125-84
This is the Friday website review where I take a look at a random retail jewelry store website and dissect it to discover all the good and bad things we can all learn from.

For today's review, I started with a search for "jewelry stores in Kennebunkport, Maine" and was given this Google SERP result:

Coastal Jewelers Website Review 1125-jewelry-stores-kennebunkport-me-serp-64VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 11/14/2014 07:50:36 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, October 31, 2014

TR Jewelers Website Review

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TR Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1115-17
Today is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, and it's a special one too! In honor of Halloween, I decided to search for a jeweler that would be in, or nearby any town with a Halloween themed name. Naturally the first part of this adventure was to locate some towns with Halloween related names. I found these...

The first one I found was Scary, West Virginia. No jewelers in that town but I did find a store called Elizabeth's Attic within about 5 miles. Honestly their website is downright scary, VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 10/31/2014 06:59:40 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, October 17, 2014

Fabri Fine Jewelry Website Review

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Fabri Fine Jewelry Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1105-71
Welcome to the Friday website review, where every week I randomly review the website of a local retail jewelry business somewhere in the US. The goal is to find something good, or bad, that we can all learn from and apply to our own business.

For this week's review, I'm heading over to Washington state and searching for "fine jewelry stores bellevue wa." When doing these searches, I always use the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode. This allows me to see non-personalized search results.

In case you don't know, Google trac...
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AT: 10/17/2014 11:32:58 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, October 03, 2014

Champaign Jewelers Website Review

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Champaign Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1095-10
One of the common errors in the English language is the confusion between the words Champagne and Champaign.

Champagne is a region in France where the sparkling wine, champagne, comes from. Those French "regions" are similar to states in the US. Although there are vineyards all over the world that produce sparkling wine, it's not "champagne" unless the grapes were grown, and the wine was produced in that region of France. The capital city of Champagne is Epernay, which I visited a few years ago. I've include...
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AT: 10/03/2014 06:20:27 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, October 02, 2014

Google Analytics: Exit Page Report

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Google Analytics: Exit Page Report daily-golden-nugget-1094-6
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


AT: 10/02/2014 07:01:54 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, September 29, 2014

Planning the Online Tracking Needed to Help Sell Your Products

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Planning the Online Tracking Needed to Help Sell Your Products daily-golden-nugget-1091-23
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.

Here a recap:

1. You need to select some items that you'll use in your holiday promotions. Read this to find out how to select the best items.

2. You then need to plan your o...
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AT: 09/29/2014 08:52:49 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, September 26, 2014

Roth Jewelers & LR Jewelers Website Review

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Roth Jewelers & LR Jewelers Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1090-72
Welcome to the Friday retail jewelry website review. Every week, I select a random location around the United States in search of a review candidate. The object of this review is to learn something that might be able to help you with your own website.

I always try to write the review with an unbiased point of view, and I especially hope that the jewelers reading this will use these reviews to better their online presence.

For this week, I'm using the search phrase "jewelry stores Waterlo...
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AT: 09/26/2014 06:11:23 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, September 25, 2014

Domain Names Used to Track How You Sell Your Products

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Domain Names Used to Track How You Sell Your Products daily-golden-nugget-1089-50
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


AT: 09/25/2014 08:43:16 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Online Marketing Campaigns To Sell Your Products

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Online Marketing Campaigns To Sell Your Products daily-golden-nugget-1088-60
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...
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AT: 09/24/2014 06:18:19 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Offline and Email Marketing Campaigns To Sell Your Products

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Offline and Email Marketing Campaigns To Sell Your Products daily-golden-nugget-1087-57
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.

Today, I'll go into some detail about launching the ...
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AT: 09/23/2014 06:34:59 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, September 22, 2014

Building a Marketing Campaign To Sell Your Products

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Building a Marketing Campaign To Sell Your Products  daily-golden-nugget-1086-68
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...
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AT: 09/22/2014 07:36:51 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, September 19, 2014

Berning's Fine Jewelry Website Review

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Bernings Fine Jewelry Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1085-32
Welcome to the Friday retail jewelry store website review. For this week's review, I'm searching for "jewelers Tempe, Arizona" using Google Chrome in incognito mode.

If this is the first time you're reading my reviews, then let me explain that I review a different random retail store website every Friday. These are sites have no relation to me or the website agency services my company provides. These are just straight forward, cursory reviews of what a website looks like, how it functions, some SEO analys...
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AT: 09/19/2014 11:06:04 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, September 18, 2014

Massive Product Databases and Online Marketing of Products

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Massive Product Databases and Online Marketing of Products daily-golden-nugget-1084-11
Let's talk products.

Do you have them on your site? I'm not talking about links to offsite vendor catalogs, or even iframe widgets either. You need to have an honest-to-goodness product catalog on your website that you control.

During the days of the Internet Bubble of the late 90s, everyone would flock to your website to see what you sold. There were many early attempts at e-commerce and online shopping, but setting up an e-commerce system yourself is co...
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AT: 09/18/2014 09:46:26 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, September 11, 2014

Website Redesign Case Study

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Website Redesign Case Study daily-golden-nugget-1079-88
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...
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AT: 09/11/2014 08:24:52 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Improve Your Website's Success With These 3 Methods

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Improve Your Websites Success With These 3 Methods 1664-daily-golden-nugget-1063
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I gave a list of four things that could improve the success of your website and how you use the internet.

Here's a quick refresher of those four:
1. Anticipate customer needs...
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AT: 08/20/2014 02:03:44 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, August 08, 2014

Four Jewelry Store Online Catalog Reviews

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Four Jewelry Store Online Catalog Reviews 2194-daily-golden-nugget-1055
I decided to give myself a little challenge today with this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, Friday Website Review. I'm back in Bordeaux, France today, and in honor of that I decided to search for any town or location within the United States that was named after Bordeaux, France. I only found one, and apparently it's a small settlement in the US Virgin Islands, so I decided to check it out.

Sadly, it really is just a settlement without a large town, and certainly no jewelers. Accordin...
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AT: 08/08/2014 02:17:52 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, August 06, 2014

Who's Using Google Remarketing: Sleazy Reality Slap

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Whos Using Google Remarketing: Sleazy Reality Slap 940-daily-golden-nugget-1053
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...
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AT: 08/06/2014 02:04:47 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Sorting Through Variables, ABC's, and a Little Duplicate Content

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Sorting Through Variables, ABCs, and a Little Duplicate Content 1783-daily-golden-nugget-1047
Ever have one of those days where you get mentally slapped with something so obvious that you can't believe you never realized it before?

The other day I was studying one of those infamous SEO reports to diagnose a problem on a website. The report stated that a particular website has 600 products in the online catalog when I knew for a fact that there were only 250. So here I am, staring at this report trying to comprehend why the SEO report was s...
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AT: 07/29/2014 11:41:29 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, July 28, 2014

Are Yellow Pages Bad For Your Business?

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Are Yellow Pages Bad For Your Business? 5316-daily-golden-nugget-1046
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...
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AT: 07/28/2014 09:14:09 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Jewelry Website Programming: Internet Sales Tax

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Jewelry Website Programming: Internet Sales Tax 8625-daily-golden-nugget-977The conversation of internet taxes is very complicated.

In May 2013, the US Senate voted in favor of the Marketplace Fairness Act which is supposed to simplify how sales tax is levied on items purchased from the internet. The Act called for a simplified method of free software that each state would have to provide so e-commerce website owners could more easily collect, report, and submit the sales taxes collected from online sales.

The Act contained an exclusion to exempt online...
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AT: 04/22/2014 02:12:28 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Three Ways To Accept Money From Online Buyers

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Three Ways To Accept Money From Online Buyers imageDo you think it's time to set up an e-commerce website for your jewelry store? Before you decide to dive into e-com you need to know the initial basics of how your customers will be paying you. There are some pitfalls that your website developer probably won't tell you until the last day before your website is ready.

For small websites with few products you should consider using Google Checkout or PayPal for their BuyNow or integrated shopping cart features. But if you have hundreds of products that change regularly you should set up your own merchant account and onli...
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AT: 09/26/2012 05:10:48 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, May 15, 2012

There's Money in The List; The Wish List

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Wish lists are in important part of any successful jewelry store. Inviting a "just browsing" customer to start a wish list creates the potential for future sales, especially when you also ask for the email address of their significant other to whom to send the wish list to.

Some stores hold evening events a few times each year where no buying is allowed, but everyone creates a wish list.

Do you maintain wish lists in your store? What do you do with them when a customer writes them out?

We know of a few jewelers that still keep index card sized wish lists even though their point of sale computer allows them to computerize it. Those index cards do have a classic charm and an obvious personal sales touch to them, and of course they are still the only option if a jewelry store doesn't have an easy to implement compute...
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AT: 05/15/2012 10:57:13 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, May 14, 2012

196 Days and Counting Until Cyber Monday

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Cyber Monday is the Monday following US Thanksgiving holiday. After a long weekend of shopping consumers eagerly take to their computers seeking the best online deals. So much online shopping transpires that day that it's hard to believe people get any real work done.

This year Cyber Monday falls on November 26, 2012, just 196 days from now. That's not a lot of time to get your e-commerce jewelry website up and running.

HOLIDAY WARNING: If you don't start working on your e-commerce website by June 1, 2012 you probably won't have it live in time for this year's holiday season. From our experience, it just takes too long for a jewelry e-commerce website to be designed, programmed, photography, and product upload.

According to comScore, the 2011 Holiday season was 15% higher at $37.2 billion than in 2010. Cyber Mond...
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AT: 05/14/2012 08:12:13 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Holiday 2011 Run-Up: Content Answers Questions

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There's an idea among first time website owners that it's best to slap up a website with perfect jewelry photos, prices, and a Buy Now button and they can sell online. At the other end of the scale there's another camp of first time website owners that feel it's best to slap up a website with basic information about the jewelry store and they will attract new customers into the store.

Both of these ideas are completely erroneous. There is no way to slap a website together and become a success. What's worse is that we know, and our staff has attended, many seminars at jewelry trade shows where both of these myths are perpetuated.

You might be familiar with the phrases "Business card Websites" and "E-commerce sites from vendors." The business card site is a basic 1, 2, or 3 page website that puts your name online. The e-c...
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AT: 10/04/2011 11:02:44 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Doorway Pages and Landing Pages

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What type of jewelry website would you prefer? One with a product catalog on the home page and no jewelry store details other than online selling? Or would you prefer a website that has detailed store information in addition to a full catalog of all the items you carry in the store?

It really doesn't matter which you choose, just as long as you take the time to learn what will attract buyers to your site. What attracts buyers? Words do.

The more words you put on your site the better the chances are that you will attract random organic traffic to your site. Yesterday we explained the value of adding a blog to your site. But what if you simply didn't want to do that?

One common strategy for optimizing large e-Commerce sites is to create dedicated landing pages for sections of the catalog. Another common name for these l...
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AT: 03/09/2011 10:05:07 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, February 10, 2011

Understanding the Different Parts of a Website

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The anatomy of a website is extremely diverse. Some websites have pages of information, some have product catalogs, some have photo galleries. Even if you are using the same content management system as someone else, no 2 websites will ever be alike.

Websites are just like people: some tall, some short, some fat, some thin, some wear lots of color while others are dressed in plain, white clothes... figuratively speaking. Different parts of a website are used for different reasons too, just like your feet help you walk, your hands allow you to write and type, and your eyes let you read.

You probably never consciously think about it but your feet, hands, and eyes serve you differently. Would you attempt to walk or run using your hands in everyday life?

Consider for a moment that there are some common structures to...
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AT: 02/10/2011 12:58:07 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, December 02, 2010

Grand To-Do List of Website Marketing

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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...
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AT: 12/02/2010 11:43:01 AM   0 COMMENTS
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