Vivalatina
Custom made jewelry service online
After 10 years in business, I have learned from my failures and small successes. Comparing my own business experience to more experienced businesses in the jewelry industry, I can see some main differences between trying to set up a business and those who succeed in making a large business from scratch pretty quickly:
They choose a low-competition niche where being seen will be easy
Or
They have the funds to hire a team to work efficiently from day one
From my experience in the jewelry industry focused on the French market and then on the US market, I can see that both markets are difficult to reach alone without money, even though I was able to find my place and make a living from it.
Being located in Mexico, I had once made a market study back in 2015 about the Mexican jewelry market online and could not find an opportunity. That was back in 2015.
Now, in 2023, the market has shifted and the Mexican jewelry market is huge online. To give an example, the monthly volume of research for the keyword "engagement ring" in France is about 90 000 while in Mexico it is 200 000 monthly searches.
I do believe that this market is just starting to grow and offer a bigger opportunity in the future. While I was planning to translate my English online boutique into Spanish through an app powered by IA, I finally decided to set up a subdomain to be free to build a jewelry shop tailored to the Mexican market needs: https://mx.vivalatina-shop.com/
The amount of quality content in Spanish is also low, so I plan that quality content should be easier to rank, and help to attract natural links, helping the DA of the root domain to grow on his own. This is a supposition as I have never done this before, but based on my own SEO experience, I think this could work.
My first trial with quality content in Spanish is this article about diamonds I published last week: https://mx.vivalatina-shop.com/blogs/joyeria-artesanal/diamante-joyeria, with 8500 words, I will monitor how long it takes for it to rank and the amount of traffic I can capture thanks to this only one publication, as well as track the links I could gain from it to test my theory.
I will let you know the resutl in a future update.
5 years ago, I made this interview with Courland Allen to present my business on indie hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-pivoted-and-found-product-market-fit-selling-online-jewelry-ed65efb07a, so I wanted to share this follow up about my business growth during this time.
5 years ago I had only one full-time employee, I was making 7 200 USD in revenue each month, and I was starting to expand my business to the US market, as my main business was then focused on the French online market.
On May 31, 2023, I now manage a team of 3 employees, and our revenue has grown up to 201 000 USD TTM, which is an average of 16 500 USD each month for the last 12 months.
I am alone to run the business (with one assistant now) with no funding and I am not able to implement any hyper-growth techniques to grow my business, so I essentially focused on SEO to grow my sales.
I have been able to focus on keyword research to laser focus on the best product keyword to create new products and grow my sales from my French online boutique: https://www.vivalatina.fr/, which has now a DA of 40 and is able to rank for a lot of keywords in my niche.
I also made a change in my approach to my business.
5 years ago, more than 50% of my revenue was made through custom jewelry services you can see here: https://www.vivalatina.fr/pages/joaillerie-bijoux-sur-mesure, while this is a profitable business, I realized it was very time-consuming as I was the only one in my business able to handle my French clients' inquiries. So I was unable to have the required time to focus on the growth of my whole business.
From this finding, I calculated that unless I changed my approach to the business, I was the slave of my own business and I would be able to only double my sales and would never have the time to extract myself from the business.
So I decided to stop marketing my custom jewelry services and focused my effort on selling generic products from our online collection (with unique designs, to be different from the competition)
My clear goal now is to sell generic jewelry designs that my team can handle the making without me being required in the process.
Also, I was able to grow our sales on our English online boutique. I will spare you the details, but in 2019, I started hiring some assistants to translate our French website into English, assuming a simple translation would make it, and this has been a big failure.
The US jewelry market is different from the French market, the product keywords are also specific to the US market, while the translation was made through Google Translate with no knowledge of marketing or SEO from my assistants, so the English website never took off really.
In 2021, I erased almost 80% of the English website's pages and started again focusing on quality with a lot of attention put to keyword research and writing quality articles like this one, with more than 4500 words: https://vivalatina-shop.com/blogs/custom-made-jewelry/platinum
Now in 2023, our traffic on the English website is only 4000 unique visitors, but the value of each visitor is 0,854 USD. The quality of our content and the choice of target keywords allowed me to reach this profitability.
In comparison, the value of each visitor on our French website is only 0,315 USD. So, visitors from our English online boutique are 2.71 more profitable than our French visitors.
For the coming years, I have planned the growth of my business by focusing on growing our sales in the US market, focusing on niche markets within my reach.
This means that, while our English website has a Domain Authority of 29 now, we aim at keywords for which the level of competition is average or easy for us. So we create new product collections like this one: https://vivalatina-shop.com/collections/24k-gold-jewelry, offering a good volume of monthly research, high-priced products, and within our range of competition.
We have identified several other niche keywords with good potential that we aim at targeting one after another. This is another example of a niche keyword with good potential for which we have created a collection: https://vivalatina-shop.com/collections/intaglio-jewelry
Assuming the success of this strategy, we would then be able to hire an SEO marketing agency to help us accelerate the growth of the business through SEO marketing.
We started back in 2012, and we have worked only in France until now.
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