I can speak from personal experiences that it is possible to achieve international sales without any special marketing techniques. For myself, that became apparent when I sold Chines Snuff Bottles on eBay. A collectible item. For that reason the international buyers would go the extra step in figuring out how to deal with communicating and purchasing from an English website/store without any extra effort on my part.
This chart that shows how the International Internet is now the fastest area of online revenue growth.
It describes perfectly my own personal experiences with International "buyers". With the exception of a couple shown on this chart I would say that it closely represents my percentages of International sales when selling Chinese snuff bottles.
So.. without any extra marketing techniques the buyers will come and buy if we are selling something desirable, competitive and collectible. Of course certainly having a simple site translation capability is a big plus.
In order to really get in and get our semi precious gemstone and gemstone jewelry design sites in the face of potential International buyers there are other things I am learning are necessary.
What if we sell gemstones that other Countries mass produce. Things like gemstones that are mass produced and sold cheaply because labor can be pennies on our dollar.
I know that I can not compete with these run of the mill semi-precious gemstones. Basic minerals and especially basic shapes. Especially oval, round and straight forward domed gemstones. It seems like the Asian and India markets dominate mass producing these common semi-precious gemstones. We can compete with the freeform designer type semi-precious gemstones though. Just like the Chinese Snuff Bottles that are desirable. Truly collectible bottles are not able to be mass produced in any market. Each can be and should be unique. Freeform and or designer type semi-precious gemstones are desirable to jewelry designers in many Countries. Unique and unusual freeform semi-precious gemstone cabochon minerals.
I believe that for a Lapidary this opens the door for International sales Making it quite feasible to enter into International SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
But how is it done? It does take a little more than just placing a language translator on our gemstone and jewelry design sites.
I have just started to search for information on how to best communicate my semi-precious gemstones to the International markets, shown in the chart above.
I thought it would be a good start to make a blog entry to maybe stir up some discussion, experiences, advice and guidance from other Lapidaries who are involved with or interested in talking a bit more about how to get our semi-precious gemstones into these markets.
These first couple of terms (International SEO and SEM) that I stumbled upon while searching for information about how to sell Internationally.
Here are a few more terms/phrases that I am still investigating.
Deliver qualified global visitors
Visibility within foreign search properties
Global internet search
E-Globalize
CE Certification
Power supply conversion
Gate way page.
The first most interesting and seemingly a great place to start is with the Gate Way pages which is directly related to SEO and SEM.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we can use keywords and phrase information and construct what is called a “gateway” page, or page that introduces our company/site.
Part Two
http://www.prlog.org/
Taogem.com/
http://taogem.com/
Lapidary / Gemstone Community Forum
http://gemstone.smfforfree4.com/
