Over a hundred years ago, Teddy Roosevelt said “If You Build It, They Will Come”. That saying has lived on and been turned into advertising slogans by all sorts of companies: Up here in Canada, it’s used by a big beer company.

With all due respect to Mr. Roosevelt and those who adopted and adapted his comment, I’ve often questioned its accuracy: “Build it and they will come”. Yes, maybe they will come. But first, “they” need to know about “it” and secondly, they need to want whatever “it” is. That automatically means someone needs to advertise the “it”. You may have built or be selling the most wonderful item on the planet, but unless you tell folks about it, how will anyone know about it? So I say instead: “Blog it and they will come!”

I see lots of vendors, myself included to a small degree, busily twittering in 140 words about their latest listing and hoping someone will go and check it out. Well anytime I do that, I get nice little notices telling me someone is following my tweets and inviting me to follow theirs. More often than not, what they tweet about is of no interest to me at all. And has it generated any sales? Not so far! My tracking never shows that someone came to my site or Ruby Lane page from Twitter!

The same applies to Facebook: it’s supposed to be a friendly place, for friends. Nowadays, more and more people are using it as a quick way to tell their friends about what they’re selling, not what they’re doing or thinking. After years in sales, both in the real world and online, I have learned one thing: it’s harder to sell to friends than to strangers! And there’s nothing that turns off a friend more than having you constantly trying to sell them something. So why clog up their Facebook pages with advertising? And again, my tracking shows no-one has visited me from Facebook to look at my items either.

So what does work online? Blogging … that’s what! Blog it and they will come. Ruby Lane provides terrific traffic stats and when you couple it with Google analytics, you can see where your traffic is coming from, what they are looking for etc etc. Well guess what? Apart from Ruby Lane itself, most of the traffic to our shop at Ruby Lane comes via my personal websites and my blogs, especially the latter.

I have two blogs on Google’s Blogger. They’re free … and boy do they work when I work them. I blog about vintage and fine jewelry in one blog; the other is specific to jewelry by Gustave Sherman. Now, if there’s one thing I can count on it’s this: as soon as I post a new blog piece, Google indexes it within a few hours, and next day, my traffic shows I’ve had visitors from my blogs. There’s not a day goes by that my stats don’t show traffic from my blogs. Sometimes a visitor has come over from a piece I wrote months back. Of course! Once Google has indexed it, the moment someone searches that topic, eg. “Sherman Jewellery”, my blog is one of the first things that Google pulls up.

I got a real buzz a couple of days back when our jewelry email list was talking about “fakes”. Someone had unfortunately bought a fake Schiaparelli. As the members of the group offered consolation and advice on what to look for, one member posted a link to help that buyer out. The link was to my vintage jewelry blog where I had written months back about being scammed buying fake Schiaparellis. You know what? It felt great to know others were sharing my blog with their peers and using it for information they might have trouble finding otherwise.

Of course, just as I’m doing here, I blog for Ruby Lane too. What a terrific opportunity Ruby Lane gives us in letting us share our expertise and experiences with other vendors and buyers. And yes, my stats show I get traffic from this blog, too. So I say again “Blog it and they will come!”
Yeah, I know. Blogging is hard; it takes time; you get writer’s block; you don’t know what to blog about etc etc. I know all the excuses. I get slack sometimes too. Sadly, when I slack off, so does my traffic! Look, anything worth having takes time and effort. If you do nothing, you get nothing. Companies world-wide spend a fortune on advertising. In the music industry, marketing and promotion is 90% of making an artist famous. A singer can have all the talent in the world but if no-one is marketing her, no-one knows about her. Ditto, you can have the most awesome jewelry pieces or antiques, but who knows you have them if you don’t tell them about it? Blogging has got to be the cheapest and most effective form of advertising anywhere. Do it!

So Teddy, forgive me for altering your original statement but today it’s more a case of “BLOG IT AND THEY WILL COME!”

Viga Boland
Vintage Jewelry Showcase on Ruby Lane
http://www.rubylane.com/shops/vivijewels