Handmadejewelryhandcraftedjewelry’s Weblog

Handmade Jewelry-Handcrafted Stud Earrings-Butterfly Jewelry

Despite what all the so-called internet gurus say, internet marketing is not as easy as collecting money while you sleep, well at least not for us! No, we did not wake up today to piles of money being deposited into our personal bank accounts. Not yesterday, not today and probably not tomorrow! But that dream is still there and we continue to work on it hoping that someday all our hard work will pay off, big time!

Getting top ranking in the search engines will drive targeted customers to your website, some days it seems more difficult than others. One day your site is climbing steadily up the ladder of success and the next day you’re gone, vanished without a trace. It can be frustrating to say the least. But keep at it , change the things you need to change and hopefully it won’t be long before your website is climbing again. Patience is a necessary virtue to market handmade jewelry online.

Until then we’ll continue to do what we have always done, sell handmade jewelry and unique gift ideas. I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t quit your day job quite yet. A lot of people get fed up with their life and want to start something new. One of the easiest looking things to do seems to be working at home on an internet business. Looks can be deceiving and frustrating, very frustrating. The list of things to do never stops with an online business and it takes a long time to establish that internet empire. If we didn’t have an existing business we would have been broke a while ago.

The only ones making money on the internet seem to be people telling you how easy it is to make a million dollars online. So how come they don’t have a page rank? For instance we got an estimate from an SEO company, $4,000 for optimization and $500 monthly maintenance for a year, guaranteed #1 ranking. We have a better page rank then they do! Maybe they should optimize their own site first and then give us a call!

There are so many scams that it becomes frustrating trying to do an honest business online. When all is said and done, it seems the only thing left to do is put ads on your site and make a little money to pay a few bills. That really wasn’t the plan we had in mind. We have worked hard to get traffic to our site to sell our handmade jewelry and unique gifts; we don’t want people clicking off our page to some other jewelry supplier. We want visitors to our site to become our customers. We have a 90% re-order rate with our wholesale jewelry and gifts. We are not ready to sell out to ads quite yet.

Perseverance is a virtue and today I’m feeling virtuous (that doesn’t happen all that often!). I’m not ready to jump at that dangling carrot, I’m going to stick with it and keep doing whatever needs to be done to get quality customers to our site. I’m not going to give in to the lure of easy money. If we made a successful business offline, we are sure to be able to make a successful business online.

We initially went online so we didn’t have to print an 80 page catalog, the expense was killing us as we are constantly adding new products and handmade jewelry lines and revising items to make them sell faster. The website is so easy to keep up to date. We have saved a lot of money, quite a few trees and made it easier for our customers to order. Our website has done its job.

Our main source of targeted customers comes from Wholesale Jewelry and Gift Shows, but more and more we are getting inquiries from around the world because of our website. It takes a lot of time and SEO work to get the targeted traffic so don’t waste your efforts on the wrong keywords and phrases. Do your homework and you’ll get lasting results!

The effort you put into your website shows to your customers and the search engines as well. Approach it like a “real world” business and you will do well.