Jewelry-Making DIY Basics – What is a Crimp?

By Paul Brandon

Crimps play an important part in jewelry design, but their roles in jewelry design are often ignored for the more visible parts.

What is a jewelry crimp?

A jewelry crimp is a device that can be pinched or pressed together with the purpose of holding findings onto a jewelry piece or fixing beads in place.  Jewelry crimps usually take one of four forms: crimp tubes, crimp beads, crimp-on eyes and crimp-on hooks.

Jewelry beads are spheres with the hole cut through.  When they are flattened, they usually form an hourglass shape.  Crimp tubes have a uniform diameter and flatten into rectangles.  Twisted crimp tubes have a spiral pattern cut into the tubes that might add patterns to the crimp, but they still flatten into rectangles.

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16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

By Denise Wakeman  and Patsi Krakoff

You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

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Is Your Website Design Killings Sales?

By Harvey McEwan

Building a business not only means setting up an organisation that effectively provides services or goods, it also means building a brand that customers trust. While there are many ways to do this – the most important one being that you actually provide everything that you say you will – it’s still possible to find good businesses falling down when it comes to presenting themselves online. This problem tends to occur when companies find themselves stuck with an efficient and unattractive website that turns customers off.

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How to Set Up a Blog Site the Right Way

By Jeff Schuman

There are millions of blogs on the Internet today. However many of them are very poorly designed. In this article let’s talk about setting up a blog site the right way so you can benefit both from search engines and repeat visitors.

Blogging today is really a form of social media. Certainly you are able to control the content you put into your blog, but you can also control how people perceive your blog when they come to visit it.

Blogs can become more attractive just by doing easy things like adding banners to them. If you do affiliate marketing you can give your blog personality by adding a few banners for products you represent.

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Setting Up a Free Website

Websites and Your Business

Setting up a website to promote products and services online are all part of modern day business marketing. Unfortunately not everyone can fork out large sums of cash to build professional looking websites with highly complex dynamic content, content management and eCommerce capabilities like shopping carts and online payment facilities.

In fact, most small to medium sized businesses require nothing more than a simple and affordable website to gain some sort of online presence – but they have no idea as to where to begin their website journey.

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Jewelry-Making DIY Basics – What is a Toggle?

By Paul Brandon

To work effectively with friends, customers and suppliers, jewelry makers should learn the terminology of jewelry-making supplies.  The right terminology will help define a need for the right jewelry closure when images are not available.

Jewelry toggles make up a second category of jewelry closures, along with lobster claw clasps, for handmade artisan jewelry, mass-market costume jewelry and fine jewelry.  You will see toggle closures on jewelry pieces from Tiffany and David Yurman down to special Mothers Day gifts that only a mother would wear.  Toggle clasps can fasten jewelry and enhance jewelry appearance.  Many jewelry-makers use toggles as closures for their necklaces, bracelets, and anklets.

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By Nici Bruckner

Jewelry is one of the most misspelled words in the English language…. so how DO you spell it and how SHOULD you spell it if you are selling jewelry online? The source of the confusion, is like a diamond, multi faceted.

Firstly, we have the confusion caused by the MAKER of Jewelry…. the Jeweler. Note the “e” after the l…. so it makes sense that what a jeweler makes is JEWELERY right? Common mistake. A jeweler in fact, makes jewelry “The jeweler loses ‘e loses the e” when making jewelry.

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Jewelry-Making DIY Basics – What is a Split Ring?

By Paul Brandon

Knowing the terminology of basic jewelry findings will help the novice jewelry designer to make quality jewelry pieces faster.  Split rings may look similar to jump rings, but they are not interchangeable.

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How to Sell Handcrafted Jewelry Online

By Kristie Leong

Are you a jewelry maker looking for new markets for your handmade creations? You may have done the craft and jewelry show route and found that sales didn’t meet up to your expectations. All of the traveling and set-up involved in selling your jewelry at shows can become frustrating and tedious. Although you realize the better solution may be to sell your handcrafted jewelry online, you may not know where to start.

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Choosing a Name For Your Jewelry-Making Business

By Susan Purcell

The jewelry-making business is a large and competitive one, and it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. An attractive and creative name will help you differentiate yourself from your competitors and catch the attention of potential customers. If you call your business The Jewelry Box, All That Glitters or anything containing the word Midas, your work will be perceived as bland and unoriginal, just like the name.

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