How to Tell Natural Color from Dyed & Sapphire for September

This month is how to tell natural from dyed beads; September's gem, sapphire; and a special offer to newsletter readers for our new bead book.  Scroll down, or click one of the links below on the html version to go to a certain section.  
See us in the UK during September and October - for dates click here. First bead show at Staffordshire Moat House, Stoke on Trent, on Sunday 12th September.

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How to Market your Website
How to Tell Natural Color from Dyed
Sapphire: September's Gemstone
How to Make a Killing Selling Bead Jewelry
Free Shipping on orders over US$50 or £32

How to Market your Website

Many think they can build a website and customers will come crawling to buy.  Reality is far from that.  There are millions of new websites every week, and as with any business, you have to do the hard work to bring in sales. 

Fortunately you’re in a niche market promoting hand-crafted jewelry, so it’s not as difficult as say, selling clothes – but it will be pretty tough!  This part is very important and you should consider buying a whole book on the subject (see here).  I’ll quickly outline the best eight ways to bring traffic to your site:

1)    Make it easy for search engines like Google to find you
This means investigating what the most-relevant ten keywords are that describe what you sell.  So if your top seller is jade necklaces, then “jade necklaces” and “jade necklace” are two good key words. 

Be as specific as possible – just “necklace” is not enough.  You could add “hand crafted jade necklaces”.  Keywords don’t mean literally that, they can be phases too. 

Add these words to the meta tags between <heading> and </heading> codes on your sites HTML – you can do this using your HTML editor’s HTML View.  If you don’t understand, Google search “how to make meta tags”.  Include these keywords within your front page text too – search engines love that.

2)    Carefully select your front page heading and sub-heading
Search engines put a lot of weight on these, so you need to be as specific as possible.  Your business name may not be better than “Hand Crafted Jade Necklaces” as a heading.  Think what words customers will search for. 

3)    Submit your site to Google
All this will improve your page rank (the position of your site in a search) on search engines.  Submit your site to Google as soon as it’s finished – just Google “how to submit my site to Google” to find out how.  Google is by far the best and largest search engine, although you may want to add to Yahoo and Microsoft too.

4)    Show your URL (wed address) in as many places as you can
Both on and off line.  Get business cards printed with www.thenameofyourbusiness.com. 

Every time I stay at a hotel or chat in a bar, I hand out a business card before I leave.  I get a lot of orders this way.  Put the URL in a signature on all your e-mails, every e-mail program does this (go to help to learn how) – something like Beautiful Hand Crafted Jewelry at www.mybusiness.com, and configure to appear on every e-mail, including reply letters.

Each September, I get little calendar cards printed for the following year and then enclose one with every order.  Customers’ keep these to refer to, reminding them of my business every time.

5)    Build a link page and exchange links
A link page is a page within your site to advertise other businesses – see an example at http://www.mrbead.com/links.htm.  It helps your customers. 

However, the real benefit is impressing search engines by links into your site - the more you have, the better your page rank.  Nevertheless, links must be relevant to what you sell and preferably from sites’ that get a lot of hits.

Email business similar to yours, praising their site and suggesting “we both gain if we exchanged links”.  Post a link to the link page on your front page.

6)    Every page needs a link back to the home page & a call for action
This ensures you won’t lose sales.  The call for action link can be Buy Now or Add to Basket.  Make these very clear.

7)    Write little articles about what you do
Like How to make a Necklace, and submit these to newsgroups your have joined (your email program will find these).  You can also get free help of how to submit articles these across the web from http://ezinearticles.com/benefits.

Write informative, not as an advert, but mention your site with a URL at the end.  In the future you can use these on newsletters for potential customers to subscribe to.  Add a form on your front page so they can join for free like www.MrBead.com and use free software to mail them.  A great service for, who I use for my newsletters is YourMailListProvider, click the link.

8)    Use auto responders everywhere you can
These send your message out right away 24-7.  You can set up auto responders through your host or get them free online, search Google.  Arrange replies to be auto-mailed from enquiries to your price list, brochure, FAQ, etc.  

Use auto responders for extra sales following a purchase.  Some auto responders give multiple responses over time – like a week or a month after a sale.  Very useful, as many customers only respond to your message after being exposed to it several times. 

9)    Affiliate programs
These allow other website owners to benefit by referring your site. This works by you giving a special link to your site, generated by the affiliate program, to related sites.  Each time a purchase is made from this link, you pay the person owning the other site a fee, usually a percentage of the sale.  To give affiliates incentive to promote your jewelry, offer than a high commission, like 50%.  For more: Google search “affiliate programs”.

10) Pay per click adverting can be very effective
Within a few minutes of setting up a Google account, you can see your add at the top of search!  The system works by bidding how much you’re willing to pay to place your add in their Sponsored Links (see on the right & top of a search page).  You bid on keywords or phrases and only pay if someone clicks the add. 

However, it can get expensive if you’re not very selective of the keywords used and where they’re exposed.  The secret is only to use very-specific keywords that a buyer of your jewelry would use to search, then place the ad low on the page in a location where you know your customers are. 

For instance “jade necklace” is bad because you would get too many clicks and few sales – “custom made jade necklace” is better.  Read instructions from Google before you start so you know what you’re doing.                    top of page

How to Tell Natural Color from Dyed

It’s hard to tell if the color of a stone is natural - but one giveaway of dying is to look closely with a magnifying glass into the bead holes.  You may be able to see a different color inside. 

Sometimes the dye is uneven with varying density across the strand - resulting in not all the beads being the same shade of color.  One other sure way to tell dying is to break the bead open.  However, it’s even possible for the inside of a bead to be the same color as outside, yet still be dyed!

Another method to expose dye is to put the beads on a damp white towel. Wait a few minutes to see if the color bleeds on the towel. If there’s noticeable color transferred, there will be a ring of color around the neck of whoever wears the beads in a necklace!

Dye & bleaching
Ancient Romans’ dyed agates.  The process makes your beads more attractive and has few drawbacks.  It’s so common, that even if a seller tells you the beads aren’t dyed, they properly are!  The dye usually won’t come off, but it’s still best to rinse some stones before using them just in case.  Don’t fool yourself, the truth is:

·         Almost ALL jade and pearls are dyed (white pearls are bleached).

·         Most porous stones like chalcedony and quartz are dyed.  Natural chalcedony comes only in pale periwinkle gray. 

·         Blue topaz and garnet beads are dyed to make them appear more vibrant. 

·         Almost all coral is dyed, especially red coral.

Sapphire: September's Gemstone

Sapphire is the birthstone for September, and is chemically and structurally the same as ruby, an aluminum oxide.  However, where rubies are only red, sapphires come in every color but red: blue, golden yellow, reddish-orange, or violet.  The most valuable sapphires have a vivid royal blue color. Some sapphires do change their colors between blue and violet depending on the light.

Sapphires are extremely durable, only diamonds are harder.  Sapphires are generally cut into cushions, rounded rectangle or oval shapes. However, fancy sapphires may be triangles, squares, marquises, pear shapes, cabochon cut, or smooth domes.  Sapphire is the anniversary stone for the 5th and 45th years of marriage.    

Dark blue and lilac sapphire is said to enhance ones creativity while guarding against distraction. It is also good for sexual relationships because it tends create deep bonding between people and brings loyalty.  

Light blue sapphire is the inspiration stone. It helps to bring new thoughts and makes one feel excited and full.

Green sapphire brings a lucky sense to ones life for it allows things to run smoothly.  
Orange works on a totally different level by not allowing you to deceive yourself. It makes you look at things in their basic form without distorting it to conform to what you want it to be. Brings true knowledge - a good stone for students, teachers, writers and researchers.   

Pink sapphire allows one to surrender to another for the good of the all.

White sapphire helps you take care of yourself and to tend to your personal needs. Yellow sapphire connects you to the total you with all of your inner knowledge. It also helps you to see what you do not know so you can look for an answer,  rather than believing you already know the answer.

Blue chalcedony can look similar to sapphire at a fraction of the cost.  Although a very fine-grained variety of quartz. It has a waxy luster with a compact fibrous structure. Natural chalcedony is usually grayish blue and sometimes with hints of pink, however it can be color enhanced to light blue. It is said that chalcedony was used as a sacred stone by the Native Americas, promoting stability within the ceremonial activities of the tribe. Chalcedony is thought to augment emotional balance, vitality, stamina, endurance, kindness, charity and friendliness. It also supposedly alleviates hostilities, irritability and melancholy.    
 

For our Chalcedony click MrBead or MrBead.co.uk                                                              top of page

How to Make a Killing Selling Bead Jewelry

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