Leather Consortium UPDATE

[calanneh]

My 2cents worth. i would like to thank Johanna and MS for supporting us and coming up with new projects which could help newbies get started.

Group hug

Ditto!

cal

[UKRay]

"I do not think a forum is the ideal place for an online store or to showcase leatherwork to outside buyers. I am certainly never going to look at a forum if I am looking to buy something".

I would agree Leerworker, a forum is not the first place you might look but Leatherworker.net isn't just a forum is it? There is no reason why the Leatherworker.net 'brand' shouldn't encompass a leathergoods marketplace.

As it happens, I regularly buy from folks on the forum and I know plenty of others who have done so. This forum is a focus for sharing the very best leatherworking practice so why look elsewhere for top quality leathergoods. Thanks to the internet, we live in a 'global village' so it makes sense to shop where you know the goods are the best on offer.

I would simply like to see a 'marketplace' where members can put their goods on display and sell with confidence. Given that we know and appreciate Johanna's care and concern for the well being of the leatherworking community, I would be happier if this happened as part of the Leatherworker.net web presence. Hopefully it could provide much needed income to expand the site even further.

I have run a website for the past eight years that attracts around 140,000 visitors each month. This doesn't happen by accident. Johanna has proven, time and again, that she is able to build a large scale web project, expand it and KEEP IT RUNNING. This is the hardest bit of all. Frankly, building a pretty looking site is the easy bit, attracting people to it is a far bigger issue and managing it is the biggest issue of all. We all know that Leatherworker.net already has a constant stream of visitors so why re-invent the wheel when you can simply grease the axle to make it go faster.

I don't say there isn't room for more private enterprise in the world of online-leatherworking, I just feel that a runner with 'form' is a very much safer bet. I have complete confidence in Johanna's ability to make a fine job of setting up an online marketplace that will benefit the community (and not any particular individual) and I will support her wholeheartedly.

I suspect all it will take is a little patience before we see things starting to move and that excites me. Keep up the good work Johanna and team!

[Mattmatt]

Wow what a bunch of differences on this topic. I am new to this board so my opinion doesn't count much compared to most of you that have been around for a long time. I can say that in trying to find this forum I did have a difficult time. Maybe it is just my search strings in google but it took 10 or 12 searches before I found this site and even then it was not on the first page and I am a google junky. This other person ColMS I found his site on my first search. The name of the site The Leather Craftsman was on the first page of my first search. Actually if you search on saddles and several other things with the word leather he is on page 1 2 or 3. seams like he at-least has the google search thing going. Maybe nothing else? doesn't matter to me.

Well makes me no diff I just want to find info. By the way he must have just turned up a forum because there is one there but only a couple of users.

[CollinsMS]

Well after receiving many emails and PM's on the board I have thought about what almost every person has said. Johanna you have a space for people to sell items and if I have a place were people can sell they just doubled their chances of selling an item. It doesn't mean they have to walk away from the leatherworker.net it just means they doubled their chance of connecting with a consumer. So for the board members that think I am trying to destroy your environment I'm not and it is your choice what you want to use or if you want to avoid me all together. The members that want to increase their sales potential can post on a second site, I only see this as helping people not hurting them. That is all I ever wanted to do was help out the person trying to make a living.

I have been asked what my business plan is. There is none, my web site is a skill building environment I use to keep up my knowledge of web design and how to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL find my web site. That is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization), if I were to guess this site has cost me $3,000.00 over the last year. I probably have 400 or more hours in the last year in development time. All of that is free to you if you want it.

If your interested the new catalog address is http://www.theleathercraftsman.com/catalog.html

Johanna what I have put together is just one concept. If you want to use the idea or parts of it please do so, I think it would work out well and blend into what you have built.

[crissy]

Johanna,

is it possible to add a page called "market place" for hand made, specialty, one of a kind, or production items? I have bought many things here and I see as you do the potential for a nice slice of the market covering things not even imagined at this point.

think evolution

I do

tip of my hat

[JohnBarton]

Little SEO info;

LeatherWorker.net isn't likely to come up on the first page for super popular search terms like "Leather handbags" but it is absolutely PERFECT for what people call the long tail of marketing which is when people put in obscure terms like "leather blackberry case that fits on a saddle" - Maybe LW doesn't come up on the first page but maybe page two or three and suddenly someone is browsing through LW and finds a few websites they want to look at for custom leather goods.

Ecommerce on the web is ALL ABOUT page one in google. However there are a lot of businesses that are benefiting from the "long tail" just by virtue of the sheer amount of content that is on the site and cataloged by google.

I personally find the idea of a virtual leather emporium to be great. I think that there is plenty of space online for two of them. I think that if they both link to each other it will give them both a little link-juice and help them in the rankings (although some folks feel that cross-linking cancels out the link love - fine, link to me in the middle then :-)

Link Juice is the bit of "authority" that Google says defines a site when another site thinks it's worth linking to. So in theory if 100 sites link to one then that one must be important. Of course like everything else in this world it has been abused so that links from low ranked sites or "link-farms" carry little to no Link Juice.

I am totally down for seeing my product on some high visibility sites. If you have a Page Rank 5 or better site and you want to show off my product for a percentage of sales then tell me what to do. I'd really like to get some link love too.

Going to fill out my profile now. :-)

[Kustom]

Little SEO info;

LeatherWorker.net isn't likely to come up on the first page for super popular search terms like "Leather handbags" but it is absolutely PERFECT for what people call the long tail of marketing which is when people put in obscure terms like "leather blackberry case that fits on a saddle" - Maybe LW doesn't come up on the first page but maybe page two or three and suddenly someone is browsing through LW and finds a few websites they want to look at for custom leather goods.

Ecommerce on the web is ALL ABOUT page one in google. However there are a lot of businesses that are benefiting from the "long tail" just by virtue of the sheer amount of content that is on the site and cataloged by google.

I personally find the idea of a virtual leather emporium to be great. I think that there is plenty of space online for two of them. I think that if they both link to each other it will give them both a little link-juice and help them in the rankings (although some folks feel that cross-linking cancels out the link love - fine, link to me in the middle then :-)

Link Juice is the bit of "authority" that Google says defines a site when another site thinks it's worth linking to. So in theory if 100 sites link to one then that one must be important. Of course like everything else in this world it has been abused so that links from low ranked sites or "link-farms" carry little to no Link Juice.

I am totally down for seeing my product on some high visibility sites. If you have a Page Rank 5 or better site and you want to show off my product for a percentage of sales then tell me what to do. I'd really like to get some link love too.

Going to fill out my profile now. :-)

John,

I have been doing SEO/web marketing since 2001. A lot of people get caught up on back link building and page rank when in fact they need to optimize their site for the proper search terms. I checked http://www.jbcases.com/ for you and that is without a doubt why you're not getting the traffic you want.

Hope this helps,

Steve

[JohnBarton]

John,

I have been doing SEO/web marketing since 2001. A lot of people get caught up on back link building and page rank when in fact they need to optimize their site for the proper search terms. I checked http://www.jbcases.com/ for you and that is without a doubt why you're not getting the traffic you want.

Hope this helps,

Steve

Thanks. I don't actually know how much traffic I get on www.jbcases.com. I haven't tried to optimize that site at outside of the site itself. Judging by the amount of inquiries I get for custom cases 1-2 a day with conversion of about 1-2 a week I'd guess that it's getting decent traffic. I have checked my placement from time to time on certain keywords that are important to me and we are coming up on page one or two for most of them so that works.

I am not sure what terms you think I could be better optimized for on my site but I am open to suggestion. I see a couple generic ones where I should change my text a little bit to have a better shot at those. I agree with you that I should do a lot more on JB Cases to optimize it but I really have done what amounts to the barest amount of SEO a person could do short of just putting up a blank page.

Most of my customers come from AZ Billiards where I do most of my marketing.

My comments about SEO weren't supposed to indicate that I am an SEO expert. I am not. I did a lot of studying of the subject a year and a half ago and regularly read the blogs to stay somewhat abreast of the topic. This was in preparation for trying to get an office together here to help my employer get his websites better optimized. But I found that the Chinese website developers have very little understanding of SEO and the ones that do have some are way into blackhat stuff that I couldn't allow any of our top ranked websites to be involved in lest they be sand boxed.

To me SEO is somewhat of a black art anyway. I feel that one could truly do it with a certain amount of success if one were able to constantly run experiments to see what is working and what is not.

For JB Cases I need to definitely do some work on it but for now I am letting it develop naturally and just build some history.

I'd definitely recommend to everyone here that you form some sort of a co-op - perhaps under Johanna's umbrella and pay someone to do some serious SEO on an online marketplace. Get that page on top for all the best leather goods related keywords and you all will see some real revenue rolling in. I would take a small share of that since my particular goods are very specialized.

Again, thanks for looking at Jb Cases. If you freelance send me your rates to jb@jbideas.com - I might have some other business for you working on some of our other existing websites and our upcoming projects.

John

[rdb]

I don't claim to be an SEO expert either, but there are a couple of things I have learned....(and have not applied to my own website either, John...lol). I have, however applied it to many of my past sites, and worked extremely well.

It used to be keywords were THE thing to do, but the Google's searchbot algorithims (sp?),have been redesigned to not count them so much. They do, however want to find CONTENT. Can't stress that enough!!!!

First: CONTENT

No matter what keywords, method, etc, if there isn't a lot of content, the search bots, just don't care. Not only the content, but ever changing content. Bots don't like static sites. Keep adding stuff, and the bots make like bears to honey.

LW comes right up there within searches, because of the vast, and everchanging content.

Second: SPREAD THE WEALTH AROUND.

Like UKRAy does. He's got blogs, sites, ebay...everything relates to the other. See one, get the other.

SteveB impresses me...His is up there, with his social network sites, youtube, flickr...you name it, but it works. Do a search for handcrafted leather, and quickly his sites come up.

I always like these kinds of topics. It doesn't matter how they got started, but soon valuable info appears! Everyone can jump in, and add their observations...pretty soon, there's a ton to learn from. Hope this one continues, or branches out...

[Johanna]

Kate and I are ahead of you guys. We are installing a link manager to LW, and you will get more details as soon as we have all the kinks ironed out.

If anyone needs help with their web site, please PM me or Kate.

Johanna