Gold Mine: Ice.com Blogs the Bling

(Direct) Many marketers are treading gingerly around the notion of adding a blog to their Web site. Some are worried about the time and effort required to keep the blog active, while others are uncertain that consumers will show sufficient interest in the feature to make it useful either for hawking their wares or for spidering by the search engines.

But don’t count online jewelry retailer Ice.com among the pussyfooters. The Montreal-based e-commerce site has not one but three blogs up and running and linked to its Web pages.

“I noticed that some people in our company always want to express themselves,” says Pinny Gniwisch, Ice’s executive vice president of marketing. “And I decided to put that to use for us in a controlled way with blogging.”

Last March, Gniwisch and staffers launched their first trio of blogs. One, JustAskLeslie.com, offers advice on choosing and caring for diamonds, precious stones and gold. Blog.Ice.com relays some of the substantial press coverage that Ice receives and tells “some of the stories about people here at work that don’t fit into our Web site,” he says. And the third, SparkleLiketheStars.com, takes the almost-genius approach of posting articles and celebrity gossip about the jewelry seen at Hollywood hot spots. That’s virtually a guarantee that the thousands who search daily for famous names like “Drew Barrymore” and “Angelina Jolie” will find Ice.com’s blog popping up in their organic search results.

Right away the blogs began attracting traffic. “We saw from tracking the blogs that people were coming to read them,” Gniwisch says. “Not only that, they were posting comments.” And the bloggers among them also were trackbacking to his blogs—letting him know they were referring to and maybe commenting on his content.

Those links and trackbacks are important because they’re part of what the search engines, and particularly Google, look at when deciding how valuable a Web page is. The more relevant, authoritative links it has, the better that page ranks in an appropriate keyword search. In turn, the sites linked to that page may get a rankings boost too, because the engines assume that a quality page will have quality links. And finally, search engines like blogs in general when their content is refreshed and updated often.

So Gniwisch made sure to feature links to Ice.com on all three blogs. The result has been dramatic improvement in the site’s natural rankings on the big search engines.

Gniwisch says Ice solved the problems of content creation and editorial voice by hiring an individual to manage and edit all three blogs. If someone in the company wants to write a post, they send it to the blog editor; she edits the entry and adds graphics where appropriate, and then places the copy in the blog. The graphics function for SparkleLiketheStars.com alone is worth the extra salary, he says, since many of the celebrity photos used have to be checked for permissions and copyrights.

Gniwisch—one of Ice’s founders along with his brothers the CEO and the Webmaster—says he’d been “screaming” about the importance of getting valuable content onto the sites for a long time

“[My brothers] are very focused on sell, sell, sell, and I’m constantly trying to prove to them that content not only makes the customer stick to our site but also sells.” SparkleLiketheStars has been particularly good at doing that, since after discussing the items sported by the celebs, the blog often shows and promotes something very similar that’s available on Ice.com.

Ice employs special tags that can detect when shoppers on its site have seen one of the blogs. “We had very strong sales come through the Sparkle blog this past Christmas,” Gniwisch says.

He has some advice for online merchants who think they might like to create a blog or two…or three:

• Add a substantial post to the blog at least once a week. Nothing kills off customer interest—and therefore search engine interest—like a dead blog. Give people a reason to check the blog site regularly.

• Design the blog to boost search rankings. “Google and the rest are actively looking for relevant, popular content, so help them find you,” Gniwisch says. In Ice’s case, this means using keywords and phrases that the retailer wants to be associated with: “pearl necklace,” “diamond earrings” and so on. It also means adding topical menus that let blog readers navigate directly to articles they might be interested in. Conveniently, these are prominent search engine keywords, such as “diamonds” and “gems.”

Merchant blogging will only grow, but it’s still early in the game. So bloggers should be prepared to attract PR attention simply because they offer a blog.

“We’ve gotten a lot of press interest from the blogs, especially from SparkleLiketheStars.com,” he says. “The Village Voice mention essentially told people to save the $4.95 they’d spend on a copy of In Style magazine and just go to SparkleLiketheStars to see what the famous are wearing.”

If readers are permitted to post comments, bloggers should beware of “comment spam,” in which unscrupulous Web operators try to hike their own natural rankings by entering comments that include their URL, whether it’s relevant or not. Gniwisch says early instances of comment spam got the blogs removed from the search engines until they instituted protective measures and proved their good intentions.

Ice actually operates a fourth blog, Icediscounts.com, a central location for special offers. And the company is exploring other potential blog subjects that can loop back to jewelry, including weddings and etiquette.

But much of Gniwisch’s attention right now is going to another potential marketing coup: Webcasting. Ice is spending more than $25,000 to build a video studio and will record direct selling messages using a couple of employees who have previous home-shopping and direct response TV experience. Viewers will be able to call or click on a link and purchase the pieces being shown. The Webcasts will be promoted in advance via banner ads and e-mail to Ice’s database of 1.6 million registered customers, and then archived at Ice.com for later viewing.

Gniwisch—the self-described “content man”—says trying new ways to make the connection to customers is all part of the e-commerce game.

“If you want to grow online, then you’ve got to test new things,” he says. “If you don’t have the moxie to do that, then get out of the business. We’ve succeeded and failed a lot over the past five years. But the beauty of it is that we’ve succeeded more than we’ve failed.”