Make Money Selling Jewelry from Home
With nearly 30 million people buying jewelry online every day, there is a real opportunity to make money selling jewelry from home. Here are insights and tips for success.
Choosing What to Sell—Here Are Your Online Jewelry Business Options
To start a jewelry business online, you need to start with a product. You’ve got a ton of options:
Sell your own creations. If you are a jewelry designer or crafter, making and selling your own product is an attractive option. You will have to build a brand from scratch, but you will have 100% control of every aspect of your home based jewelry business.
Become a wholesale reseller. You buy the product from a producer in bulk at a discount, and then sell it through your own channels at a higher retail price. Like selling your own creations, you have a great deal of control. But wholesaling comes responsibility and risks. Will you be able to sell what you buy? Will the costs of storing and shipping eat up your profits? Those are only some of many questions.
Become an affiliate marketer. You focus on selling, but the supplier company you decide to work with handles everything from sourcing, storing, packaging and shipping the product. Companies like Bella Branch, LilyFair Jewelry, Jared, Sugar Bean Jewelry, and KA Gold Jewelry offer commissions between 5% and 25%, which could be a good way to make money selling jewelry from home without the risks of wholesaling or crafting your own merchandise.
Sell through an established direct sales company. Some companies like Avon sell a variety of products with jewelry as just one of their product lines. Others, like Stella & Dot, Trades of Hope, Paparazzi, and Origami Owl are focused on jewelry. If you want the support of a network of other sellers, an established brand, and a robust seller support infrastructure, direct sales is a solid option to start a jewelry business online. If you’re going to do this, you’ll need to accept credit cards online. We recommend Square for payment processing. It’s simple, fast, and easy.
In this beginner's course (11 Language Subtitles Available), you'll learn how to generate more traffic to your businesses's website, increase your ranking on Google, generate compelling content that will drive interest and sales, create social media posts that people will want to share, and learn how to keep customers coming back. This course is for business owners, entrepreneurs, and working professionals.
Evaluate Your Online Jewelry Business Options
If you are not selling your own jewelry, we strongly recommend you look closely at the companies you might deal with for your home based jewelry business. Consider such things as:
Reputation of the company. Look at time in business, how people review their products and service, and what controversies might be associated with them.
Product brand: How is the product presented? What does it, look like? How about its packaging, and its marketing materials? Does it excite you and feel like a fit for you?
Product lines: How are the products made? Do they offer you a good market niche in a very competitive field? How extensive is the offer—more to sell gives you more options.
Seller support: What do you get from the company? Do they give you training, online support, sales and marketing tools, promotional programs, and other access to help?
Fees, costs, compensation, and restrictions: Look at the fine print to determine your costs, risks, and limits for starting your home jewelry business. Some companies charge quite a bit of money for brochures, others charge for a website and restrict what you can do on your own. What it costs to get in and your profit margin? What competition will you face?
The Digital Marketing Online Revolution to Making Money Selling Jewelry
The key to making money selling jewelry from home is to make the very best use of digital marketing methods. When you start a jewelry business online, digital marketing replaces the energy- and time-intensive old ways of showing at fairs, throwing parties, and putting up flyers up all over town. Nothing gives you a better payback of your efforts.
Online marketing includes setting up your web site and using social media, search engine optimization, email, pay-per-click, and guest posting. The Digital Marketing School is ready with help and information at no cost that can transform you and your business.
Benefits of Digital Marketing for Your Home Based Jewelry Business
1. Start now!
Getting started is easy. Once you have done your research, you can get going with just a few clicks. Pick your business model and your products. Then you can start selling jewelry from home with just a bank account, a computer, and an internet connection.
2. Minimal upfront costs.
Depending on the business model you choose, you can get started on the cheap. Getting on a marketplace and setting up an ecommerce platform is often free on sites like Shopify, Etsy, eBay, Zibbet, and Amazon. Your website will cost you a few dollars for a URL and hosting. Using a website builder will add a few dollars to your start up, but nothing major.
3. Expanded reach.
Traditional marketing methods are limited to your own physical ability to show up. It’s expensive, too. Selling is such a numbers game. You need to reach a ton of people in order to find the few who will buy. That’s not easy if you are limited to the physical world. Digital marketing beats everything when it comes to reaching the most people with the least effort at the lowest cost.
4. Target a specialize niche.
Trying to sell everything to everyone is not effective. When you can really focus on the people most interested in buying, you are more efficient and more effective. Digital marketing tools allow you to identify, find and reach a very specific audience of buyers.
5. Be a real resource.
The online world allows you the opportunity to become an expert. Enthusiastic and knowledgeable people who offer real help to customers are more successful that people who just hawk and push product. You have unlimited space online to offer tips and ideas, to offer help to customers in making choices, and to develop your own brand voice and image. Most people do research online before they buy. If you show up in that research, you are miles ahead.
6. Online is where people are buying.
In today’s busy world, people don’t have time for parties or even for going places to shop. They want to buy with a click. That is why your home based jewelry business needs to be an online jewelry business.
How to Sell Jewelry Online with Digital Marketing
Create your unique brand.
If you are selling your own creations, you will need to create a brand from scratch. But even if you are representing an established jewelry brand, you still need to define what makes you and your business unique. You need a brand of your own even selling a well-known jewelry brand. What makes you and your business unique? Is it what you sell, how you sell, how you provide service? It’s competitive out there, so you have to carve out a niche where you can stand out. Your brand will also be built on your presentation. You will need outstanding product pictures, attractive packaging, and distinctive marketing materials. Lastly, you will need to focus on how you describe your products. This matters for search engine optimization—making sure your product is seen—and for motivating people to buy.
Focus on what the customer wants.
Start with figuring out who your buyers might be. What problems, needs and wants do they have? What inspires them to buy jewelry? What is their style? How do they go about shopping? Where do they gather information? In selling jewelry from home, the customer is at least as important as your product. You’ve got to stand in their shoes to sell them. Experienced marketers create a written roadmap of their customers, their insights, and what products match them. A simple spreadsheet laying out this information is an easy way to start, and may be all you ever need.
Invent themes for your marketing campaigns.
A theme is an idea around which you organize your products to promote, your messages, your marketing materials, and your outreach tactics. For jewelry, it might be “winter weddings” or “Mother’s Day to remember.” The work you did thinking about customers should inspire some powerful and relevant ideas. If you are working with an established jewelry brand, the company may already have a full calendar of themes planned. All you need to do is make them your own.
Success takes planning.
To start a jewelry business online and to make money selling jewelry from home takes planning. Effort alone won’t get you there. Start by slotting in promotion themes on a calendar. Then list out what tactics you are going to use to sell. Figure out what you need to do, step-by-step, and what resources you need. It is a lot of work and things can change as you go, so only detail about three months in advance. You can keep adjusting your plan as opportunities crop up, as you learn more, and as your situation evolves. Keep setting goals for yourself. Everyone has distractions and set-backs. Goals keep you focused and consistent.
Create a website.
Even if the company has a website option, you still need one of your own. It is where you will be driving traffic, where you will be creating your brand, and how you will be interacting with customers. Here you showcase your product and your expertise. You can always link to the jewelry brand’s site to close the sale and handle order filling. Thankfully, you can find many options for setting up a website without having to write any code.
Optimize for search.
If your customer can’t find your product, you won’t sell much. Being found is called search engine optimization (SEO). You need to do it on Google, but also on any platform you use. Amazon eBay and Etsy are all platforms where customers search for products. SEO is not hard to do, thankfully. The Digital School can get you to a solid start.
Use a social media account to promote
Getting traffic to your site is key. Open a social media account on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Lots of people swear by Pinterest. Though you might be tempted to sign up for all of them, you cannot do a good job spread so thin. Yes, it is easy to post, but that isn’t the best use of social media. You have to offer something of value that starts a conversation. If all you do is post about product, you will drive people away. Offer helpful tips and ideas, then ask questions. Always respond. And realize that only 2% of your followers actually see any given post—that’s called “organic reach.” Social media companies have squelched organic reach; you have to pay to be seen unless your post gets significant interaction. Focus you time and money on doing one social media account really well before adding a second.
Put other digital marketing tools to use.
Run ads on social media. Consider pay-per-click ads on Google. If you pick your audience well, you will get good results for little money. Email is an old tactic that still works if you provide people with worthwhile content they welcome. Like with social media, emails that push product get deleted or unsubscribed. It is very important to only email people who opt in to avoid getting in trouble with laws and regulations. Consider writing a guest blog or partnering with other sellers in categories that make sense, like fashion or beauty. It is a great way to get your name and product out there—and don’t forget to link back to your site.
Using Digital Marketing to Make Money Selling Jewelry from Home
Jewelry is a hot market—and a big one. From fine gems to artisanal works of art and everything in between, you have tons of choices for a niche you can dominate. Traditional marketing works, but it is a lot of work—and expensive.
Digital marketing frees you from the limits of your time and energy, while truly stretching your budget. If you are planning to start a jewelry business on line, or if you want to bring your home based jewelry business to the next level, we at the Digital Marketing School can help you perfect your digital marketing game.
