Far before the rise of social media, blogging was highly recommended as a means to drive traffic to websites. Some insiders even made it sound as if your website would die a sudden and sure death if it did not feature a blog. Then came social media and attention shifted to micro-blogging as on Twitter or short posts on Facebook.
So looking ahead… is blogging important for a jewellery business?
The answer is probably...uh…. yes and no – or: there is no simple answer.
There are three main upsides of a successful blog: First, you keep in touch with your customers letting them know about what’s important to your business… say latest jewellery designs, new stock, jewellery fair participations, concerns and comments on economy and policies affecting the jewellery industry. Second, you signal to search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing that your website is active and regularly refreshed, which is an important condition to list you high in search result pages. And finally your posts might get shared on social media, or you might get invited to blog on third party sites (for instance JewelleryNetAsia’s blog is open to guest bloggers), all of that providing valuable links back to your site.
So if you do it well, visits to your site from existing and new customers should be your reward. Now - whether or not you should start your own blog can be answered with those questions:
- Is your website a strategic asset to your jewellery business? If not, stop reading now. The fact you read all the way to this paragraph may justify a ‘yes’.
- Can you figure enough content for regular updates? You have interesting facts or news? You can be thought provoking, maybe even provocative?
- Can you ensure there is enough time and manpower to produce well written posts? There is nothing for free, good blog posts need resources.
If you can answer the above with ‘yes’, give it a go. Your website supplier or your internet team should be able to get you started very easily.
Here are some blogs that we really like:
- Wendy Brandes, who blogs for her own jewellery business.
- Jewelry News Network, a newsblog, whose author Anthony DeMarco is also blogging for JewelleryNetAsia.
- The blogs of Robyn Hawk , who runs more social media accounts and blogs for jewellery and gemology than we can count.
- Or, on the commercial end, there is also the The Studio blog by Rio Grande.
PS: If you find that blogging is not your thing, better remove the blog from your site swiftly. Worse than no blog is one that is completely out of date!
