Interview with Clothes.ie

My First Interview!


















This month I was invited to my first interview as Shen Wong Jewellery with Clothes.ie. This is very exciting as Clothes.ie are a Fashion website in Ireland that are really starting to take off!


How I Did It!

I simply reached out and tweeted Clothes.ie that I would like to feature on their website. To sweeten the deal I offered them an item from my product line for their readers as a competition prize. They responded positively and arranged the interview within a month.

If you are in a similar startup situation, I would advise you to start small and contact new or small fashion sites and bloggers to feature your products. It will help you gain a bit of experience and exposure before you move up to the likes of Vogue or So Sue Me!

Tip: Always ensure that the interviewer includes a link to your website and social media pages. Not only can it increase sales opportunities and connections, but it can improve your Google search rankings.

I hope you found this post helpful. Please leave a comment to share your thoughts and ideas.

Read my interview with Clothes.ie here.

How to Win an Award - Then brag about it!

How to Win an Award in 3 Steps

Step 1: Be in to Win!

Find a competition in your field/industry/business that you feel is worth entering. Most importantly, one that you feel there may be a chance of winning. 

For me, as a new start-up business based in Dublin, Ireland I wanted to establish myself as a reliable business. At this launch stage I don't have the results yet to prove myself for a national award, nor do I have the fan base for a big support. So I opted for a local business competition that no one really knew nothing about, Key To The City. 

Key to the City is a competition for Dublin businesses. Winners are the top three businesses with the most votes via a Facebook app. This sounds like a competition that I can win as initially there were only 40 entries, plus the business at the third of the league only had 170 votes. I know that if I put in the work, I stand a real chance of beating this. 

Step 2: Spread The Word

Promote your entry. Even though you are only at the nomination stage, share it across all social media. Fans want to hear about your business. Plus, they want to know how well you are doing.

If you entered an online voting competition, then this is the perfect opportunity to spread the word about your business to everyone, while asking for votes!

How I asked shamelessly asked for votes:

- Post on my Facebook business page

- Post on my Facebook profile

- Called all my friends to ask them for support & to vote for me

- Emailed EVERYONE on my email address book

- Messaged individually every Facebook friend

- Post on Google+ page

- Join & post on Google+ communities

- Post on Twitter

- Post on Twitter & tag community pages when close to winning

- Ask all families & families of friends

- Post on forums

- Post on LinkedIn

- Message everyone on LinkedIn

- Post on community forums (Etsy where I sell have their own forum)

- Join & post on relevant Facebook communities

- Join & post on communities for all educational institutes attended

- Invest in Google Adwords to promote

- Invest in Facebook Advertising

- Write a blog about it!

I also asked everyone I met. There is no limit as to who you can canvas votes from. You just need thick skin.

While conversion rates for votes can be low, when you do everything, it all adds up. Plus every time you mention your business, you are spreading the word about your brand. This is particularly good, if you are looking to sell internationally. I would really only do this at the early stages of the business, you want to be careful not to cheapen your brand. I wouldn't canvas this way regularly either, it will get very annoying!

TIP: When asking for votes, make sure to provide a motivation for the public. For my competition, the organizers are offering a €100 shopping voucher for all voters. I lead with this when I am doing a generic post on my Social Media walls. If there is no prize, then maybe you can offer a prize of your product/services.

Step 3: Brag About It

If you picked the right competition and put in the hard work, hopefully you will come out on top. Even if you don't get the award, you can still be a 'winner'. I intend to promote my result even if I'm just in the top 10 - 'Top 10 business nominated for...'. If I do win, I will be incorporating the words 'Winner of The Key To the City Award 2013' to my marketing materials, both digital and print! 

Of course I will also be entering jewellery making competitions as that is the industry that I am in. I have entered two so far, hopefully I will win one soon!

Aside from the honor of winning an award, there are also other benefits.

Benefits of Award Nomination:

- Improve your credibility to customers & investors,

- Improved brand awareness (to voters & other nominees),

- If your business fails, an award or good result will look on your CV, 

- Can improve your website search results as the host should include a link to your page on their website.

I hope you found this post useful. Do you have any suggestions on winning awards or gaining votes? Please do leave a comment as I would love to hear your thoughts.

Endorsement is Important - Online Startups

To all start ups I would advise you to seek endorsement where ever you can. It will make your new business look more official and reliable to potential customers. This is especially true for a start up business based solely online.

By endorsement, I mean joining an organisation that promotes your business. As a jewellery maker, I am in the crafting industry. Recently, I have been accepted as an Associate Member of the Crafts Council of Ireland. Just to be clear, this is an organisation formed to promote skilled craftsmanship, it is not a gathering of witches (yes, I had to explain this to a friend!). 

Needless to say, I am delighted with my membership. I had to submit a detailed application which then had to be assessed by a panel that only meets a limited number of times a year. This endorsement is a big deal to me. On top of obtaining a greater sense of pride for my work due to official recognition, there are also many practical benefits.

Benefits of Endorsements

• Improved SEO - Membership/Endorsement may include a bio about your business and a link to your website. If the organisation has a good website then they may rate highly with Google and a link from them to your site should improve your page ranking.

• Trust - Even if your potential customer has not heard of the organisation that 'endorsed' your business, it can help develop trust and faith in your company.

• Increased Awareness - By featuring on another page or becoming a member of an organisation, more people will immediately know about your business (even if it is just a handful, depending on the organisation).

• Learn from others -  By joining a good and relevant organisation, you should gain access to information that will be beneficial to helping your business specifically. 

• Support - You will be connecting with like minded people in similar situations, you never know, you might meet someone who can help and support you.

I hope you found this post helpful. If you are in the crafting industry based in Ireland, I would highly recommend you join the Crafts Council of Ireland. You will receive much useful information. www.ccoi.ie/

Author: Shen Wong

Maker of Fun Loving Jewellery at www.ShenWong.com

14 Steps to setting up an online business - Priorities

When setting up an online jewellery business, or any business for that matter, there seems to be an an infinite number of things to do. Once you have set up your business plan, it can be overwhelming to know what to do and in what order.

Today I will be sharing my list of priorities, hopefully it will be useful to someone else setting up their business.

Please note, this post is not an 'How To' post, it is just a list of what I do.

1. Decide on business name (research online to find minimum competition for those key words).
2. Register business name with your local office to check availability.
3. Register your domain name, do at same time as Step 2 to check availability.
4. Choose the keywords to optimise for e.g. Organic - Fruit - Dublin
5. Write a paragraph about the business & post on webpage, incorporating keywords.
6. Register your website with Webmaster tools so it comes up on Google search results. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
7. Set up social media pages and link them to your website for SEO. Try to use the same name for them all, incorporating business name. Write a bio for each, incorporating keywords. I write off the top of my head rather than using same copy as Google does not to like block duplicate content. It may not matter for short Bio's, but I also prefer original content. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en
8. Manage expectations by posting a goal launch date on all the sites & pages.
9. Start working on your products. Steps 1-8 was to lay the foundation for search engines to find your site.
10. Develop your website with a basic homepage and about us.
11. List your products. Make sure to use your keywords throughout product descriptions. Basically your keywords should be naturally placed on every page related to you.
12. Register your page with SEO optimising site such as https://www.attracta.com/. Do this after listing products as you will understand better what to say about them. Once registered, I don't think you can change the information submitted.
13. Make sure to update your social media pages minimum twice a week throughout the whole process.
14. Once you are happy for your site to get some traffic, announce on your launch on social media pages.

My list is not perfect, but it's what I do on a generic level. I am selling my products through Etsy at the moment, but still working on my own site, so not ready to go fully live yet. 

Leave a comment if you have any suggestions. I am always keen to learn.

by Shen Wong

Renaming Dublin Designer to Shen Wong

Going forward this blog will be renamed under the Shen Wong brand.

For the purposes of SEO (explained in my earlier post), it was becoming too much to optimise for the Dublin Designer brand and Shen Wong Jewellery, so I had to merge everything into one. 

Over the week I will be refreshing the layout of this page. Keep an eye out for the new look. 

Sometimes we have to sacrifice preference for SEO. *sigh*

Goodbye Dublin Designer and hello Shen Wong Blog. 

Did you ever have to change your branding to suit SEO? Leave a comment to share your thoughts. 

by Shen Wong 

7 Steps to using Instagram for Online Business - Building SEO

Intro

You set up your website, put up good pictures of products with enticing descriptions and many people will think  your done. Well unfortunately that is just not enough. One of the (many) most important things with an eCommerce website is for it to be found. To do this you need to optimise your website for search engines, this process is called SEO. 

There are many thing you can do to optimise your website. One strategyis to create inbound links. This means setting up links to your website, Google loves this. The more relevant links that directs to your website, the better. Social Media is a great way to achieve this. 

The Social Media that I will be talking about today is Instagram.

    My Instagram page

How To 

1. Download Instagram to your smartphone. 
2. Set up your account with your business name. This will then be a relevant link to your website. Please be sure to use your business name & not anything else. For me, Shen Wong was taken across most SM platforms, so I used ShenWongCo as my alias. Ideally I should have used ShenWongJewellery so I could optimise for "Jewellery" also, but that was too many characters than most would allow and the competition for that word is too heavy anyway. 
3. Decide on the 3-5 keywords you would like to optimise for. Use these words in your description
4. Decide on the pictures you should be posting. I like to post pictures of my jewellery, me wearing my products and some 'behind the scenes' images of me preparing my creations. 
5. When posting up images describe it in a few words, but try to fit in some key words. Be sure to include your website!
6. Tag your pictures. Instagram allows up to 30 tags. By tagging your pictures, there are better chances of people finding them & then liking & following you. This is good for SEO & spreading awareness for your website. I use tags like #jewellery #bracelets which are both relevant to help people find my pictures & useful keywords for my SEO.
7. Post often so your followers don't lose interest. 

Tip: Set up a custom auto correct on your smartphone. I have a full list of possible tags I will use, plus a short bio with my key words that I add to all my image posts. When I type 'instabio' into my phone, my description and tags auto populates. Saves me typing it out each time.

That's it on this topic. If I have missed anything or if you have found this useful, please comment. 

You can find me on Instagram @ShenWongCo. 

Sample images that I post on Instagram

Written by Shen Wong  

Inspiring Sun

With the sun blazing my mood is at its best. The sun doesn't just give us life, but it makes us live life. Driving home from work today, I didn't feel just motivated, but invigorated and inspired. I want to throw myself into my new business, Shen Wong and be the maker of fun loving jewellery that people will come to love.

With all my researching into other jewellery businesses, trying to understand their language and the tone they use to communicate to their customers, I started to lose myself in my messaging. While research is important, I think that when it comes to writing for your business, be it in a blog or product description it is even more important to let your personality show.

My own tone can be quite silly, but I think that's ok. Once I express myself passionately in my words, it will come across as genuine to the reader. At least that is what I think now. Tomorrow I am going to rewrite all my personal and product descriptions to convey my own crazy, quirky and silly self.

Don't get me wrong, that type of language works well for the likes of Tiffanys etc. but I need to differentiate myself. Anyway, I want to have fun along my journey, and it's simply too much work trying to talk like someone else. 

If you like this post then please leave a comment. I would live to hear your thoughts. 

Just a pic of me showing off my bracelets.

by Shen Wong

Re-branding to Shen Wong

After a lot of careful consideration and discussion with friends, I have decided to re-brand my business and blog from Dublin Designer to my own name, Shen Wong. Renaming is always scary, but I think nothing shows more confidence in the products you make than putting your own name to it. I have become so proud of all my creations that I want people to know I made them.

It was a lot of work amending everything, but fortunately/unfortunately for me, I decided to do the change before anyone knew much about the business at all, so there was no audience attachment.

All my Social Media pages had to be changed. Due to ShenWong already been taken on most platforms, I had to add a little extension, but with the character limitation of Twitter, I had to keep it short, so ShenWongCo is the alias I choose.

I also had to rename my Etsy store, frustratingly, ShenWong was taken, so I had to come up with another extension. I couldn't go with ShenWongCo as Etsy is dedicated to handmade crafts, so I didn't want to sound corporate, you have to think very carefully about your audience. In the end, I settled on ShenWongJewellery as it is relevant and can improve my search rankings for 'Jewellery' (some day maybe, there is a lot of competition).

My wonderful cousin helped me create a new logo using my name. I LOVE IT! Leave a comment to let me know what you think about my re-branding or new logo. If you ever had to re-brand, I would love to hear of your experience.

Packing it all up - Handmade jewellery boxes

For jewellery, the packaging is it's first impression. If you receive jewelry delivered in a plastic wrapped, ripped envelope, it can completely ruin the whole experience and make everything inside feel cheap. Jewellery is supposed to make you feel good about yourself, from the outside in and it all starts with beautiful packaging!

Preparing something that will make my customers smile before they even see their jewellery is what I have been thinking about and working on for a while now. After a few days of working with different materials, folding and cutting away, I think I finally have it. Simple hand folded origami jewellery boxes and ribbon tied, hand cut 'Thank You' labels. There is a LOT of work involved with doing everything by hand, especially when you use heavy paper but I think the end result is worth it.

I am absolutely delighted with my boxes and cards. Now just patiently awaiting my first customer. Hopefully I won't have to wait too long.

Credit Due: Learn how to make these lovely boxes on Pintrest. Thank you JasminBlancBoutique! Click here to view tutorial.

by Shen Wong