photo by echoforsberg

Your target market is the first thing you must clarify before you can even dream of being successful in your home based jewelry business.

One Mistake That Will Kill Your Jewelry Business Even Before it’s Begun

Don’t make the mistake of starting your business plan with your product instead of the market.

Whether you like it or not, handmade jewelry sellers are a dime a dozen. The handmade markets online and off are saturated with them.

This means that you have to market well, and market smart.

The easiest way to market smart is to start with the market and give ‘em what they want. Read the rest of this entry

This jewelry business article shares some great business advice for any new jewelry businessperson.

How to Market Your New Jewelry Business

Trying to break into the competitive jewelry selling market can be a daunting task. There are so many different styles, mediums, and particular types of jewelry to choose from that it can become overwhelming. New jewelry business owners trying to market their lines should take the time to adequately prepare a thorough marketing plan before jumping into marketing your new jewelry line. Read the rest of this entry

Wouldn’t you love to sell more handmade jewelry from your website or webshop?

Your jewelry sales numbers can make or break your business. But how do you improve those numbers?

Here’s how you improve your jewelry business step by step.

1. Get traffic to your product page
2. Figure out your conversion rate
3. Improve your jewelry product description.  If you are starting from zero, use the jewelry description tips to start fresh, or if you think your numbers aren’t bad, change one element on your original.
4. Wait a month (or 2,000 page views, whichever comes first) then calculate your conversion rate again.

What You Do Next:

Evaluate: Did your sales go up or down?

Then… take the best of the two versions and modify one aspect (headlines are a good place to start), then do it again.

Little by little, by testing different elements and tracking your results, you sell more handmade jewelry over time.  Guaranteed.

Other Ways to Test

You can get faster results by split testing.  Split testing is where you have two versions of the same page running at one time, and you send a portion of your page traffic to each using something like Google Website Optimizer.

If you have lots of traffic, you can test more than one element at a time.

Google Website Optimizer will only help you if you have your own blog or website and can access your HTML code. If you have a webshop like Etsy, where you can’t modify the code, use the steps I outline in this this post.

Good luck and go get more handmade jewelry sales

Best,

P.S. Here’s a one-click option I’m trying because Website Optimizer just confuses the heck out of me.  It’s called “Conversion Chicken” and it installed with a single click.  There’s a free version so no credit card needed.

Have a comment about Sell More Handmade Jewelry?  Share your thoughts and questions below:

What’s the key to jewelry business success on the web?

Is it a pretty website? Nope.
Is it pretty pictures? Nope.
Is it lots of Facebook friends? Nope.
It’s not lots of Twitter followers, or Etsy hearts, or lots of shop or website traffic either.

How about profit margins?  Well… we’re getting closer.

Give up? It’s conversion rate. Yup, it’s about actually getting sales.

What’s a conversion rate?

Your conversion rate is your visitor to sales ratio.

So how do you calculate your sales per visitor?

Here’s the calculation:

(Sales / Unique Visitors) = Conversion Rate

For example, if you had 100 visitors to your web shop, and 1 person bought something from you, that’s a 1% conversion rate.

Why Focus on Conversion Rate?

Increase that rate, and you increase your income just like that – without increasing traffic!

All those other things? The pretty website?  The pretty pictures?  Facebook?  Twitter?  Getting search engine traffic?  Of course they’re important too, but you need all that traffic and all those pretty graphics and photos to bring in sales. No sales, no success.

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I want to make this one point crystal clear though before you think you can drop prices to increase sales conversions.  That’s a recipe for disaster.  Make sure you make a profit.  In physical product sales you need a sustainable profit margin.  Don’t ever think it’s about getting sales at all costs.  Making a profit after your labor and supplies is important too.

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The best part about increasing your conversion rate is that you get more sales with the same traffic levels.  This means your income goes up even if your visitor count stays the same.  So when you do get more visitors, your income automatically increases that much more too.

I found this great blog post by Alice Seba that perfectly matched this jewelry marketing principle:  Conversion: Less Volume, More Results. It’s a great article on how to figure out your sales conversion rate.

Once you know what your conversion rate is, you can start improving it.

Questions?  Comments?  Whatcha think?

P.S. Focusing on results exactly matches what I teach in Handmade Results Weekly.  Throughout the training program we discuss different ways to get more traffic, increase conversion rate, and just do better in less time.  We’re reopening to new students soon, so if you want to get some handmade jewelry business training and learn how to make the internet work for you, get on the notification list, and I’ll let you know when we reopen.

Happy New Year Everybody!

I’m recovering from the holiday season and getting back into the swing of the regular routine, and I’m curious – what are your business resolutions this year?

What about other resolutions?  Do you want to get more focused?  Do you want to get more organized?  Do you want to learn anything in particular? I’m going to share some of mine, but I want to hear yours first.

Just comment below – I’m all ears!