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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, 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, 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, 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
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:

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AT: 06/12/2015 07:22:44 AM   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...
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AT: 05/12/2015 11:10:32 AM   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...
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AT: 04/23/2015 11:11:27 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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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, 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
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
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
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
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
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
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