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Friday, July 21, 2017

How to Promote Your Online Store In A Cost-Effective Manner

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How to Promote Your Online Store In A Cost-Effective Manner daily-golden-nugget-1566-12
I recently came across a seminar titled "How to Promote Your Online Store In A Cost-Effective Manner" and thought it was an extremely misleading headline. Whenever business owners ask me about cost effective online advertising, they usually mean "least expensive" rather than asking me how to achieve the best ROI with their online ads.

I've also found that many business owners believe that online marketing is simple, and that anyone can do it. Preying upon this belief, there are ad a...
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AT: 07/21/2017 07:07:25 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, April 28, 2017

The Right Choice for the Tight Budget: Google AdWords vs. Facebook Ads

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The Right Choice for the Tight Budget: Google AdWords vs. Facebook Ads daily-golden-nugget-1554-43
Because the online paid advertising playing field changes monthly, my clients constantly ask for my current recommendation for where to spend their limited marketing budget. Although there are many online advertising possibilities, I prefer that businesses use Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising because the ads can be changed frequently to highlight current offers.

Beware of Changing AdWords


Google AdWords is a complicated system that can be learne...
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AT: 04/28/2017 07:39:54 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 13, 2017

Bruce G. Weber #FridayFlopFix Website Review

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Bruce G. Weber FridayFlopFix Website Review daily-golden-nugget-1539-61
One of the marketing testing methods I use is to put myself out in the real world, away from my desk, to observe what an ad will look like when encountered out in the wild. Although I do test my digital marketing ads on different devices and browsers when sitting at my desk, it's difficult to get into the same headspace that a consumer would be in then viewing an ad or a website. This is my own interpretation of the proverbial "walk a mile in their shoes."

This is why I like writing my website reviews when I'm trave...
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AT: 01/13/2017 07:52:48 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
Tuesday, March 01, 2016

New Google SERP Format Does Not Show AdWords On Right Side Of Desktop Results

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New Google SERP Format Does Not Show AdWords On Right Side Of Desktop Results daily-golden-nugget-1462-94
Since the beginning of Google time, their search results page has been formatted as a two column layout. The wider left column showed the organic results and the thinner right column had the paid AdWords ads. Eventually, Google started including paid ads above and below the right column organic results.

Google established their own set of website quality guidelines to ...
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AT: 03/01/2016 12:37:08 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, February 04, 2016

Landing Page Planning #TBT

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Landing Page Planning TBT daily-golden-nugget-1444-39
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping way back to September 2010 to the topic of landing page planning, although I didn't specifically call it landing page planning back then.

Planning your landing page long before you need to use it is an important part of a successful online marketing strategy, but before I get in too deep of how to help with the success, let me just briefly explain what a landing page is.

What is a Landing Page?

<...
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AT: 02/04/2016 12:09:52 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, February 02, 2016

2015 Holiday Season Keyword Data: Top Keyword Phrases

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2015 Holiday Season Keyword Data: Top Keyword Phrases daily-golden-nugget-1442-42
This is the last Daily Golden Nugget where I'll dive deeply into specific keyword phrases I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season. I've presented a lot of information over the last 30 days and I could spend another month sifting through it, but this stuff does get boring after a while when there's no specific goal in mind. That's an important thing to remember; it's best to perform your keyword research when you have a specific goal in mind. Every time I grind through keyword data, I seem to lose an...
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AT: 02/02/2016 12:09:18 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, January 08, 2016

David Reynolds Jewelry and Coin #FridayFlopFix Review

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David Reynolds Jewelry and Coin FridayFlopFix Review daily-golden-nugget-1425-34
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I look for a random retail jewelry store website that is using the wrong approach on their website, and I make suggestions for improvements. This week when I searched Google for "jewelers st. petersburg fl," I was given these results:

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AT: 01/08/2016 01:03:13 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, January 05, 2016

Holiday Season 2015 Search Impression and Click Results for Retail Jewelers

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Holiday Season 2015 Search Impression and Click Results for Retail Jewelers daily-golden-nugget-1422-54
Now that we closed the book on the 2015 Holiday Season, it's time to review the results. Over the course of the holiday season, I captured more than 47,000 different keyword queries related to retail jeweler websites. I'm sifting through all that information to find something actionable for retail jewelers. I've been looking for things like a list of good keywords, or popular designer brands to carry, or even where to focus your energy over the next few month...
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AT: 01/05/2016 12:24:06 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 22, 2015

How To Calculate the Google AdWords Cost Per Visitor on a Non Ecommerce Site

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How To Calculate the Google AdWords Cost Per Visitor on a Non Ecommerce Site daily-golden-nugget-1412-73
I've previously estimated and explained that the customer cost of acquisition for a retail jeweler is somewhere around $75. You can calculate this number by summing up your advertising expense for a campaign and dividing that by the number of new customers you've acquired during that period.

Since measuring the s...
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AT: 12/22/2015 10:44:24 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, October 26, 2015

2015 Holiday Run-Up Summations

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2015 Holiday Run-Up Summations daily-golden-nugget-1371-26
One month ago today, I introduced the 2015 Holiday Run-Up with the premise that this year you could create several specialized marketing campaigns, or micro-campaigns, focused on singles products or groupings of products. Implementing the micro campaigns would require lots of product photography, correctly targeting your customers, writing lots of product content, sharing that product content to social media, coordinating...
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AT: 10/26/2015 08:40:32 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, October 22, 2015

Setting Up Google AdWords Express #TBT: 2015 Holiday Run-Up

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Setting Up Google AdWords Express TBT: 2015 Holiday Run-Up daily-golden-nugget-1369-39
It's #ThrowbackThursday, and it's also the 19th installment of my special 2015 Holiday Run-Up series. Over the last 30 days, I've written out holiday marketing steps for Pinterest, Google+, VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 10/22/2015 12:25:28 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Run-Up Planning for the 2015 Holiday Season

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Run-Up Planning for the 2015 Holiday Season daily-golden-nugget-1347-81
Another summer has come to a close and the holiday season is almost here. No matter what the financial forecasts say, I want to give you some current ideas to improve your marketing methods, and hopefully your sales, through the end of this year.

Create a Uniform Branding With Your Ads


I'd like to start with a suggestion for you to review the ads you are already planning for this season. Instead of running standalone ads this year, you can use all the potential advertising methods...
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AT: 09/22/2015 11:04:07 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, September 07, 2015

Comparing Google AdWords Keyword Targeting to Facebook Audience Targeting

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Comparing Google AdWords Keyword Targeting to Facebook Audience Targeting daily-golden-nugget-1336-28
Today's Daily Golden Nugget comes from a question I received last week to explain the difference between ad targeting on Facebook and Google AdWords. In simple terms, the AdWords targeting can use a really sophisticated way to target what people are searching for. On the other hand, Facebook uses a really sophisticated way to target the demographics of the people themselves.

Let me dive a little deeper...

Google AdWords Ke...
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AT: 09/07/2015 06:51:10 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, July 17, 2015

Google My Business Smartphone App

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Google My Business Smartphone App daily-golden-nugget-1300-16
Once again, the Daily Golden Nuggets have reached another milestone: 1300!

It was 1,300 weekdays ago that I wrote the first Nugget about Google Maps. In honor of my first topic, I now write about Google Maps and its subsequent incarnations ever since, and save them for these milestones.

The original Maps service has transformed several times through the years and had names like Local, Places, Local Business, and Google+ Local. Ever since Google started using Google+ to tie all its services together, the p...
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AT: 07/17/2015 11:24:51 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, July 08, 2015

Demographics and Interest Reports: Practical SEO Guide

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Demographics and Interest Reports: Practical SEO Guide daily-golden-nugget-1293-90
Facebook is becoming well known for their ability to provide to the surface, very detailed demographic and the personal interest data about your customers. They've been able to give more details than the data Google has provided for several years. In light of Facebook's advancements, Google has improved their own demographic and interest data and made it available through Google Analytics and AdWords.

Before you can access to the demographic data from Google, you need t...
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AT: 07/08/2015 11:50:32 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Recommended Monthly Online Marketing for Jewelers

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Recommended Monthly Online Marketing for Jewelers daily-golden-nugget-1262-1
After last week's Nuggets about marketing funnels and determining a funnel cost, I received an email from a reader wanting to know my current recommendations for a marketing funnel.

Here are my recommendations for monthly online marketing, in this o...
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AT: 05/26/2015 01:12:01 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Determining the Cost of Different Methods of Marketing in Your Funnel

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Determining the Cost of Different Methods of Marketing in Your Funnel daily-golden-nugget-1258-48
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I explained how to analyze the cost of your marketing funnel. Today, I'll follow up with some specific funnel ideas to help you formulate your own plan.

Understanding Previous Marketing


Here's a tricky question to think about... Do you measure ad success by the number of people it brought...
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AT: 05/20/2015 09:09:37 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, May 19, 2015

The Misunderstood Cost of the Marketing Funnel

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The Misunderstood Cost of the Marketing Funnel daily-golden-nugget-1257-3
The truth of the matter is that your business will never survive without some type of marketing. Word of mouth marketing is not enough anymore to support your business. Simple posts to social media and meager ads in community newspapers won't support your overhead, or even put food on your table.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, you should VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 05/19/2015 11:16:30 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, February 02, 2015

Content Marketing Costs Will Change Based On The Target Need and Who Creates It

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Content Marketing Costs Will Change Based On The Target Need and Who Creates It daily-golden-nugget-1181-56
I'll be the first to admit the website content creation difficultly level is pretty high. Content includes infographics, photos, podcasts, PDFs, videos, testimonials, and, of course, the written word. It takes hours to prepare each of those types of content but the return on that time investment come in the form of several years of attracting customers throu...
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AT: 02/02/2015 09:53:20 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
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
Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Google My Business: AdWords Express Reporting

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Google My Business: AdWords Express Reporting daily-golden-nugget-1127-81
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm going to review the latest AdWords Express functionality that you'll find within your Google My Business account. This is slightly different than the last time I explained it in this previous Nugget.

Today's Nugget is part of my ongoing series explaining the new features within the Google My Business dashboard that allows you to control all of your Google related business...
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AT: 11/18/2014 10:19:49 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, October 27, 2014

Getting The Proper Invoice From Your Google AdWords Agency

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Getting The Proper Invoice From Your Google AdWords Agency daily-golden-nugget-1111-64
Winds of change are coming for agencies that manage Google AdWords. The changes will be a big eye opener for business owners.

From my point of view, there are a lot of agencies that prey upon small businesses who don't know how Google AdWords works. Companies like DrivenLocal, ReachLocal, and even YellowPages all sell a good story but offer a limited paid advertising service.

Over the years, retail jewelers have called me after receiving an in-store visit from their local YellowP...
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AT: 10/27/2014 07:46:30 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, October 24, 2014

Romm Diamonds SERP Review

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Romm Diamonds SERP Review daily-golden-nugget-1110-70
This is the Friday Jewelry Website review where I randomly find a retail jeweler's website from a random city to dissect and review. When I start this journey every week, I never know if I'm going to find a great looking website, a poorly functioning website, or something that's embarrassing to even look at.

Every review has a chance to touch upon topics of SEO, SEM, aesthetics, and usability. These reviews are usually not too in-depth, but just a cursory review that usually only reveals the most obvious issues.

The conclusions of evaluations...
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AT: 10/24/2014 08:27:36 AM   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
Thursday, July 17, 2014

AdWords Test Budgets Help Discover Keywords

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AdWords Test Budgets Help Discover Keywords 3114-daily-golden-nugget-1039
Google changes the way AdWords works all the time. I'm continually reviewing all their changes just to keep up with the latest features. It's not easy.

Regardless of the new features Google AdWords has, the first thing you need to decide when setting up your new AdWords campaign is the list of keywords to target.

What keywords are best? That's a real tough question to answer since Google hides them from you in your Analytics reports.

According to Google's search engine op...
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AT: 07/17/2014 10:59:55 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, May 29, 2014

Understanding the Need for AdWords Negative Keyword Lists

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 Understanding the Need for AdWords Negative Keyword Lists 4455-daily-golden-nugget-1004
Over the last two days, I've briefly explained how to set up a single ad using AdWords Express and then how keyword targeting works within the full version of Google AdWords. In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll introduce you to the concept of ...
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AT: 05/29/2014 11:57:17 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Comparing AdWords Keyword Targeting to AdWords Express

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Comparing AdWords Keyword Targeting to AdWords Express 2058-daily-golden-nugget-1003

In yesterday's Nugget I explained how to set up a single ad using AdWords Express, the simple ad platform within Google Places for Business. During the Express demo setup, I presented yesterday I chose these keywords:

* jewelry stores
* engagement rings
* jewelry
* diamonds
* diamond necklace

I then created this sample ad:
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AT: 05/28/2014 03:58:13 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Setting up Google AdWords Express

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Setting up Google AdWords Express 8182-daily-golden-nugget-1002

In this Daily Golden Nugget, I'll show you step-by-step setup of Google AdWords Express.

AdWords is Google's online advertising platform that shows paid ads in search results and millions of random websites on the internet. Google makes most of its money through this advertising service, and many businesses experience good jumps in business when using AdWords.

Unfortunately for most businesses though, Google AdWords is really difficult to set up. A few years ago, Google realized the difficulty s...
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AT: 05/27/2014 11:37:36 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Using a Unique Landing Page for AdWords Targeting

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Using a Unique Landing Page for AdWords Targeting 209-daily-golden-nugget-882In September 2013, shortly after Google announced their new Hummingbird algorithm, I decided to set up a special website test to see exactly how organic traffic and paid traffic would differ on a unique landing page.

On one of the website I manage I set up a landing page with 1469 words of content, 16 photos, and 37 links to other pages on the website. Indeed, this was a very complicated page that fully explained the business, all the services they provide, and the products they sold.<...
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AT: 12/10/2013 11:55:39 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, October 17, 2013

Insights into AdWords Keyword Bidding and Landing Pages

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Google has been a busy little bee with all their recent changes. They've made major changes to Google+, Google Search, Google Analytics, and Google AdWords in the last 30 - 40 days. Personally I been walloped by the changes because I work with each of these systems every day. I should feel like a kid in a candy store with all the exciting shiny new features, but instead I feel like a kid trying to understand that 2+2=4.

I'm only mentioning this so you understand that there are times when even the professionals need to re-learn what they take for granted.

Back in 2008, I was teaching a course on Google AdWords, but today most of the things I taught in that course became eventually useless. The class I once taught was to show jewelers how they could create and manage their own AdWords campaigns. I take it all back now; un...
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AT: 10/17/2013 04:04:15 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, June 26, 2013

How To: Segmentation in Google AdWords

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How To Segmentation in Google AdWords 8398-daily-golden-nugget-763Over the last 2 days I've given you some ideas on how to accomplish your keyword research and write blog posts to specifically target people interested in Le Vian jewelry. The steps I explained can be applied to any jewelry designer when you want to use content marketing to attract customers.

"Content marketing" is the process of adding lots of information to you website in hopes that search engines will rank you highly for specific keyword phrases. But sometimes content marketing isn't enough because you are left to th...
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AT: 06/26/2013 08:58:49 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, January 31, 2013

Testing Online Ads in 24 Hours

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Testing Online Ads in 24 Hours 787-daily-golden-nugget-659Getting started with any new advertising method always carries a little bit of trepidations. Your advertising budget could be exhausted easily if you made the wrong choice. Common questions that might cross your mind might be: Will it work? Will it not work? Will I reach my target audience? Will the audience I reach spend any money?

With offline advertising you have to rely on demographics and circulation statistics for each medium. With online advertising you can't rely on previously know statistics because it's all up to you to figu...
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AT: 01/31/2013 05:47:56 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Google AdWords and Mobile Website Ads

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Google AdWords and Mobile Website Ads imageGoogle AdWords is probably one of the most predictable methods of online marketing to increase website traffic. Google has made it very easy to set up a campaign, insert phrases to target, create generic advertisements, and launch the campaign. With a little knowledge you can pay them a lot of money and increase your website traffic by 909%.

Yep, 909% is a real number that I've seen a few times. I've also seen the real advertising cost involved with that number and the minimal sales. Just because you increase your website traffic doesn't mean you will actually have sales.

A...
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AT: 10/09/2012 04:58:43 AM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, July 27, 2012

Google AdWords Primer

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I'd like to turn my attention to Google and tell you about AdWords. This is one of the topics I usually stay away from because it's difficult to explain it in a Nugget without having your eyes glaze over. But I'd like to offer a brief overview anyway because something here should pique your interest...

Google's search results pages and millions of other websites across the internet are littered with ads, AdWords ads. They appear as text ads throughout most of the Google owned websites, but many other websites have banner ads, Flash Ads, and text ads that are served through the AdWords system.

Companies large and small, and many people just like you and I can sign up with Google and run ads for our business. Although Google says they charge you every time someone clicks an ad, the truth is that you need to prepay for you...
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AT: 07/27/2012 09:46:58 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, March 30, 2012

A Slap of Truth for Jewelers and Jewelry e-Commerce

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If you attempt to set up an e-commerce jewelry website without a dedicated monthly budget you will set yourself up for disappointment. Not failure, but very slow progress and low sales.

That's a bit blunt, but e-commerce does need to be treated like a separate business entity with its own expenses and even employees, or at least an employee that spends a lot of time in front of the computer managing it.

The big players in our industry have established a strong foothold in e-commerce selling. Kay, BlueNile, JamesAllan, Zales, Tiffany, and a few others have the deepest of pockets of advertising dollars to beat out all the local retail jewelers.

If you want to have a jewelry e-commerce site you need to navigate your way through the variables of setup, monthly maintenance, and monthly marketing. Some of the variables ...
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AT: 03/30/2012 11:45:21 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, November 10, 2011

Small Business Saturday SEO Suggestions for Jewelers

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As mentioned a few days ago, American Express is trying to popularize Saturday, November 26, 2011 as the day when people should go out and buy local, not online, and not from big brand stores. This is the 2nd year in a row they are promoting it and they call it "Small Business Saturday."

Those looking to support their local community will visit the stores they already know about. Other shoppers might make an extra effort to read their local newspaper or direct mail circulars and ValPak, Money Mailer, or similar ad mailers.

Smartphones are everywhere and we are already inside the mobile age. Mobile websites are a thing of "today" not "tomorrow." However, if you don't have one yet there are still many things you can do to beef up the chances of being found on Small Business Saturday.

The first thing you need to do i...
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AT: 11/10/2011 00:01:35 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, November 01, 2011

All Gold Ring Roads Lead Back To Your Store

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There's a tactic we commonly use when creating AdWords campaigns that allows us to target online ads to appear to people who have already visited your website. The idea is that if someone took the time to browse through your website, they were probably interested in your jewelry, but weren't interested enough to purchase at that moment; so we keep showing them ads to make them remember the jewelry store.

This is a very successful strategy that Google AdWords has enhanced greatly in the last 12 months or so. Google explains the effectiveness in the fact that people are targeted with specific offers. These offers were not, and will never be, visible on the regular website, making the person feel like they found a special deal or even say to themselves "wow, thankfully I didn't buy that a day ago."

We're explaining this proc...
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AT: 11/01/2011 12:10:46 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, October 27, 2011

Holiday 2011 Run-Up: Mobile AdWords for Jewelers

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Over the last 6 months we've monitored an average 97.52% increase of mobile visitors to jewelry websites across our network. The actual number of mobile visitors to a single website is pretty small each month, as in about 60 visitors, but that number has nowhere to go but up.

Did you know that you can create mobile AdWords ads? According to Google, 1 in 3 mobile searches have local intent.

According to what we mentioned yesterday, 87% of people walking are using their cell phone. Of those surveyed, it was found that people use mobile search 77% of the time spent on their phone. Finally, 33% of that 77% are searching for something locally.

What does that mean with real numbers?
100 people walk by, 87 of them are using their cell phone.
Of 87 people, 77% or 67 of them are using a search engine.
Of those 67...
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AT: 10/27/2011 01:16:32 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, October 21, 2011

Holiday 2011 Run-Up: Website Tuning and Customer Retention

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We have two last topics to cover today that will complete our week long of Holiday Run-Up Google AdWords directions.

The first topic is fine tuning your AdWords landing pages for those gift givers. As we previously explained, the gift giver has a predetermined budget, and they will spend that budget even if the gift recipient would never have spent that much on themselves. You should fine tune your website to help those gift givers.

First, let's add a bunch of new links inside your product catalog. You need specific links that say:
"Gifts for Under $100"
"Gifts for Under $200"
"Gifts for Under $300"
"Gifts for Under $500"

These links don't have to be real pages; in fact they could be fancy URLs that lead the user into a special search page for your website. You're going to need your web programmer's he...
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AT: 10/21/2011 12:19:53 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, October 20, 2011

Holiday 2011 Run-Up: Holiday Bundles to Help AdWords

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As we navigate through the murky and expensive waters of Google AdWords during the holiday season, there are a few other things that could help close that sale.

Have you ever seen those holiday gift baskets at your favorite big box store? Here in New Jersey we have several Costco and BJ's stores. Right now, in the middle of October, they already have shrink wrapped holiday gift baskets for sale. There's a basket bundle of video games, another for movies, and of course a basket of edible goodies.

These baskets present the gift buyer with a perceived greater value. Among those bundled items is probably one quality item and then the rest are lower cost to produce or perhaps even closeout items from the manufacturer.

The movie "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" had its ups and downs in the ratings a...
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AT: 10/20/2011 01:11:38 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Holiday 2011 Run-Up: AdWords Trademark Issues & Ad Copy

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Over the last 2 days we've given you ideas for targeting Pandora jewelry in your AdWords ads. Since the price point on Pandora is so low, the product lends itself nicely for gift givers on a limited budget. We're going to continue talking about Pandora today but before we give you specific ad ideas, we need to offer you some advice on Google AdWords trademark policies.

The procedure explained below will work for any vendor, not only Pandora.

Google AdWords monitors ads and will automatically disqualify and disable them when found to violate a trademark. It doesn't matter if you are a Pandora "Gold Store" or a "Silver Store," you are still not allowed to use the name "Pandora" in your AdWords ads without some type of permission.

Permission is easy to achieve if, and only if, you have a written contract with Pandora....
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AT: 10/19/2011 01:10:32 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Holiday 2011 Run-Up: Your Holiday AdWords Budget

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Speaking of budgets, let's talk about your holiday AdWords budget. From January through October you should be spending your advertising budget on targeting keyword phrases that return the highest ROI. Perhaps these are long tail phrases like "pandora rose bead," but certainly not simply "pandora bead." The long tail phrases (those 3 words or more) are usually much less expensive than the 1 or 2 word phrases.

Here's the cost as of today's measurements:

"pandora bead"
Extremely high search volume and competition
Top ad position costs $3.29 per click

"pandora rose bead"
Extremely low search volume and medium competition
Top ad position for less than $1.50 per click

During December you should expect to see the AdWords click prices to spike up to $35 for most generic jewelry phrases. Last year we mea...
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AT: 10/18/2011 10:58:48 AM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, October 17, 2011

Holiday 2011 Run-Up: Understanding AdWords for the Holidays

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You can spend 10 months trying to fine tune your Google AdWords campaign, really learning the ins and outs of how to attract your target customers to your jewelry store, but nothing you learn is going to prepare you for the affect that the Holiday Season has on AdWords.

The Holiday Season is about gift giving, and the holiday gift giving mentality is different than the rest of the year.

As you are most defiantly aware, jewelry is the gift to give throughout the year when someone is celebrating a birthday or job promotion, to say thank you, or to cheer someone up. Jewelry is given during economic hard times as a way of saying better times will come and during economic good times to celebrate what you have.

However, even though the Holiday Season has religious celebrations at its core, gift giving can greatly overshado...
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AT: 10/17/2011 01:27:20 PM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, October 06, 2011

Holiday 2011 Run-Up: Ninja Keyword Analysis

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Today's ACTION ITEM is to find out what keywords people are using to find your website, and then to make sure the content on your website is suitable. Not only that, but we'll show you how to find important keywords that other jewelry stores are not competing for.

First you need to navigate over to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This is Google's public location for their AdWords Keyword Research tool. If you have an AdWords account, you should log into that instead and go to your Reporting and Tools tab, then the Keyword Tool option.

Once you get to the Keyword Tool, you will find a form at the top where you can type in a "Word or phrase" or a "Website." To start this exercise let's type "www.jamesallen.com" into the website ...
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AT: 10/06/2011 12:29:00 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
Monday, September 19, 2011

Is That Designer Brand Good Enough For Your Website?

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We recently had a customer request to have the brand Phillip Gabriel put on their website. We did so, and they said we misspelled the vendor's name. We realized that Phillip Gabriel uses the name Phillip Gavriel in their logo, but seem to switch back and forth between Gavriel and Gabriel on official documentation, such as their footers on the phillipgabriel.com website.

This brand, from Royal Chain, has made a curious choice for their jeweler customers--do they market their brand as Phillip Gabriel or Phillip Gavriel?

Our jeweler, for example, saw it as an error that we used the spelling "Gavriel" instead of "Gabriel," and we wanted to dig a little deeper into this. Could Royal Chain be hurting themselves, and the retail jewelers trying to sell this brand?

Not unlike BVLGARI/Bulgari, which you'll see uses both, too...
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AT: 09/19/2011 01:46:40 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, August 08, 2011

5 Types of Online Jewelry Catalogs, Part 5

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This is the last Nugget in our series explaining the different types of online product catalogs that retail jewelers could have.

Many newcomers in e-commerce (jewelry or otherwise) think they will set up websites overnight and start taking orders tomorrow. Certainly, this is possible if you have a Type 1 catalog we described a few days ago, but the reality is most run forward blindfolded with a poor execution strategy and lofty expectations. They end up with very bitter feelings of the entire experience and blame their web programmer for dysfunctional websites when in fact the jeweler should have researched the process.

Let's try to shed some light on the most difficult type of product catalog you could ever set up. We're trying to include all the details your hired website company doesn't tell you. After all, they just ...
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AT: 08/08/2011 11:39:09 AM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Alt & Title And Be Rewarded.

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Design is one of the foremost concerns for your website. Trying to figure out the aesthetics that best please your customer is very difficult. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you personally like, because the customer will like something completely different.

You need to program your website so it best functions for your users.

Typical design concerns are:
* Width of the website. Do you want to be full screen or static width?
* Colors.
* What web browsers do you want it to work in? IE, Firefox and Safari are the big players.
* Do you want the website to work on a mobile device?
* Do you want to use a lot of images as part of the design?
* Do you want Flash? Remember Flash does not work in IE 64-bit, the standard browser for Windows 7.
* Do you want your website readable by users with visual impair...
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AT: 04/06/2011 02:00:27 PM   0 COMMENTS
Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Keyword Research Ideas

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Trying to figure out the best keywords for your online marketing campaign can be pretty tricky, especially if you have a brand new jewelry website.

We know that all jewelry stores want to advertise "bridal" or "engagement rings" but those phrases are so tough to conquer. You're better off permutating those phrases into "local" versions by simply including your town name.

For example: "engagement rings in springfield" or "springfield engagement rings"

As you write content on your website, as long as you add your town name right next to your money phrase, you will be able to tackle the local market.

While we're on the topic of "bridal" we 'd like to give you some valuable advice. Don't try to target the keyword phrase "bridal jewelry." This is a worthless phrase for jewelry stores because it triggers SERP mat...
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AT: 02/23/2011 01:24:13 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, December 24, 2010

Some Holiday Season 2010 Statistics

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We're not going to talk about anything new today. Instead, we wanted to share industry statistics and our own findings for this 2010 holiday season. Everything reported is for online sales or statistics.

These statistics were reported from comScore.com
Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 25) $407M, up 28%
Black Friday (Nov. 26) $648M, up 9%
Cyber Monday (Nov. 29) $1,028M (that's a Billion!) 16%
Green Monday (Dec. 13) $954, up 12%
Free Shipping Day (Dec. 17) $942M, up 61%

The week of December 17 (Free Shipping Day) saw 52.7% of online transactions with free shipping. comScore also reported that there was a greater trend for online buyers to wait until Free Shipping Day before making the final sale. This is a clear indication that free shipping is a deal winner when selling online. VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET


AT: 12/24/2010 09:38:31 AM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Why Are You Selling Burgers to Vegetarians?

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Ever wonder why your marketing strategy fails, or doesn't return any real investment? You spend thousands on a billboard just to have friends say "I saw your billboard." You spend thousands on a radio ad just to have the FedEx guy say "I heard your ad on the radio today."

Each and every time you spend money on an ad, it should return enough sales to at least cover the cost of the ad. If not, well, then you did it wrong.

Wrong demographic target, or wrong placement, or wrong words, or maybe simply no one cares about what you are trying to sell. Of course, there's always the possibility that your ad slogan has some other urban slang definition and everyone's laughing at you.

Now in the second week of online marketing attempts, we are seeing random and sloppy ads from many jewelry stores.

Here's what we've see...
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AT: 12/07/2010 01:05:21 PM   0 COMMENTS
Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Google is a Copy Cat

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Competition is good; well, at least that's what some businessmen will say. Competition keeps companies honest because it prevents monopolies, and it also spurs innovation.

In June 2009, Microsoft re-branded its MSN search engine into the Bing search engine. This engine has some very nice features, but according to our tracking of jewelry websites, only 7.63% of search traffic comes from Bing, so we don't pay attention to it much.

Although, Facebook is inching closer to becoming a full-fledged search engine using Bing, so that minuscule 7.63 might increase. Again, we'll let you know if it does.

Bing has one really good SEO feature for reverse engineering your competition's website, and that's the IP Address lookup. You can put the IP address of any website into the Bing engine and find out all the other websites ho...
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AT: 11/16/2010 01:18:16 PM   0 COMMENTS
Monday, October 11, 2010

Testing Keywords with your Google AdWords Campaign

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Last week we mentioned keyword research again, and currently during our Holiday 2010 Run-Up (http://www.jwag.biz/runup) we are posting a full list of the standard keywords you should be using. It took 2 years of research data for us to easily make up that list.

If you don't have our handy dandy list, you'd have to wait a few months to watch organic traffic to your site to generate the same list.

To speed up your keyword research, and also take all the guess work out of the way, then you need to have paid online advertising through some PPC system.

With Google AdWords, you could create several dozen ads to quickly test specific keywords. You can easily identify useless keyword phrases before you spend time and money on SEO keywords that are nothing more than epic failures.
<...
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AT: 10/11/2010 02:28:13 PM   0 COMMENTS
Friday, October 01, 2010

Keywords are all Grown Up

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Every software program has bugs because it's simply impossible to find them all without thousands of people testing it.

Microsoft was criticized in 1997 for delivering Windows 98 with so many bugs it wouldn't work on most computers. It wasn't until Windows 98 Service Pack 1 (Win98 SE1) that people started to adopt the system.

Today, it's a common strategy of software developers to cut costs by just sending software out into the market without heavy testing. The "market" is, of course, the world. They then sit back and wait for customers to report bugs (or complain) and software patches are offered daily.

How many times a day do you get an update pop-up from Microsoft or Adobe or Java? Ironically, just as this sentence was typed this computer popped up the message "Java Update Available." The computer is mocking ...
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AT: 10/01/2010 11:03:45 AM   0 COMMENTS
Thursday, July 29, 2010

What the difference between Google AdWords and Facebook Ads?

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There's a lot of hype when it comes to Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. Many leading internet marketers will say Facebook is the far superior system.

The truth is we just don't know yet. The Facebook advertising system is still young. If you sign up for ads on there today you will see a lot of features that indicate "beta" and even a few disclaimers that say things like "this data may be inaccurate."

Google has years of experience with advertising and it's their primary income, so they have to get it right. Facebook approached the advertising concept completely differently than Google, and they made it much easier.

But with ease comes sacrifice. Facebook's ad system also only allows you to target people that are related or not related to your specific fan pages.

Take a look at Facebook if you are consideri...
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AT: 07/29/2010 04:19:55 PM   0 COMMENTS
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