Sell Your Handmade Jewelry Online: The Blog

Etsy: 7 Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Etsy Shop

thepsychicside — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:00:16 +0000

7 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Etsy Shop

Any online venture lives or dies because of traffic. Traffic is the online equivalent of the old phrase, “carriage trade,” the people who come by and window shop.

You can have the best products in the world in your shop, but if no one knows you’re there, you won’t make a dime.

Make Youtube Videos and a Myspace Page

Make a slideshow of your products and post it on Youtube. You could even make a little skit or commercial for one of your products.

If you make art, make videos of you painting or drawing. If you make jewelry, make a video of you making the jewelry and talk about how you do it. Make them interesting, and keep them under four minutes to make sure they don’t get dull. Put a link to your shop in the sidebar.

Myspace is one of the premier social networking sites on the Internet: Be Social. Take a picture of your product use your computer’s photo editor to write, “Thanks for adding me!” and “You’re Awesome!” on them with a nice font and a color that pops off the background. Now you can advertise your product while saying something nice on your friends’ pages!

Postcards

At Overnightprints.com, you can get 100 postcards with a picture of your product and your Etsy shop address on them for $19. You know the kind of people who buy your products and where they can be found: place stacks of your postcards at the “brick and mortar” places where your customers buy books, groceries or the other necessities – with the permission of the store owner, who might be your customer one day.

Samples

At www.thelittleblackboxes.com, you can give samples of your product to be placed in little black boxes, which people can purchase, and they receive a box full of samples. This is becoming very popular and is a big traffic booster.

Blog

Blog about your product, write about your product, then blog about your product some more, or write just about your products. Blog about what you’re creating and blog about how it’s coming along and then blog about what’s inspiring you. Or write a blog just about you, and feature your items in it. Comment on other’s blogs, and leave a link to your Etsy shop, then blog about your product some more.

Ask other bloggers to take a look at your shop and make a post about your products in exchange for free samples.

Business Cards

If you can’t afford the postcards, you can get business cards cheaply at vistaprint.com. Put a picture of your product on them, and put your Etsy shop address on them. Now leave stacks of them at the bookstore, library, college campuses, etc.

Build a List

Make a list of the names, addresses and email addresses of all the people who have bought from you. You can send them free samples and coupons throughout the year to get them to come back and buy more. Make sure and get permission from them first!

Collaborate

There’s strength in numbers. Work with other Etsy shops to promote each other’s items. If one of you does photography and the other sells jewelry, have the photographer take a photo that includes a piece of your jewelry, but is also a beautiful photo in itself that is sellable. The photographer can include a link to the jewelry in his shop, and the jewelry-seller can include a link to the photograph in her shop.

You can also send samples of each other’s work out with your orders. If you sell prints of cats and the other Etsian sells prints of birds, send each other samples of your work. When the bird print seller ships an order, he can include one of your cat prints, and when you ship a cat print order, you can include a bird print.

4 Ways to Jump-Start Your Etsy.com Shop Sales

thepsychicside — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:00:05 +0000

Four Unique, Original and Fun Ideas that will Get You

Clicks and Customers in Your Etsy.com Shop

by Anna Marshall (indiegeek.etsy.com)

Did you ever wonder just how you were going to turn your crafts into a business?

You thought you might go flea marketing, but the cost of a table was out of sight. And a booth? For that price, you could fund the budget of a small African nation, with money to spare.

You’ve thought about the Internet, but dismissed the idea out of hand because you couldn’t figure out how to bring customers into your “shop.”

Or could you?

The Internet has changed the way customers buy and shop and, using proven techniques to bring your clientele into your Web Site, you could have a bit of that multi-billion dollar pie for yourself.

The first thing any customer sees is the entrance to the shop or, in this case, the home page of the Web Site. This means that the first of the Four Crafty Ways is:

How to Give Your Etsy Shop a Standout, Memorable Tagline

You probably already have a shop if you’re reading this and you can’t change your shop name, but I’m going to show you how to give your shop a great tagline.

Bad Name: KatesGems – Affordable, Beautiful, Jewelry

Good Name: KatesGems – Dainty Bangles and Baubles for Enchanting Fairies

What’s wrong with the first one?

Women don’t want to feel like they’re wearing something affordable. They want to wear something elegant, that makes them feel stunning.

What’s good about the second one?

People buy based on how a product makes them imagine they’ll feel. Women want to feel like enchanting fairies. The alliteration of bangles and baubles, the colorful language, makes them sound interesting.

People buy based on emotion, and they back it up with logic. When they see your jewelry and imagine the attention and compliments they’ll get, they’ll back it up with the fact that the jewelry is cheap or it’s on sale or they can’t get anything like it anywhere else.

Write Descriptions that Get Your Etsy Customers in a Buying Mood

The most important tip I can offer here is this: Make sure you get your customer IMAGINING her life with your product in it.

If you’re selling prints, talk about how cute your print would look above a crib in a nursery. Frame your prints, and take a picture of them hanging in a nice room. Make the customer think, “That would look great in baby Sophie’s room.” When they already have a spot picked out for it, you’re going to make a sale.

Make sure your description doesn’t have huge blocks of text:

Break it down as much as you can.
Use numbers or bullets.
People find it easier to read this way.

Write a little story regarding your item. If you’re selling prints, make a really short, two or three sentence story about the characters in your prints, or the setting of the print. Then your item becomes a beautiful idea as well as a beautiful piece of art.

Write Great Tags

Tags are the directional signs on the Internet. Customers are always complaining that they can’t find what they’re looking for on Etsy, and half the items I look at are only using two or three tags, and I’m pretty sure those two problems are related. USE ALL YOUR TAGS!

Put the type of product it is in your tags (print, jewelry, painting).

Put all the colors of your product in your tags. Try to be specific about colors! Teal is better than blue, and lime green is better than green. You stand a much better chance of being found with less generic color tags, because you won’t be buried as quickly.

Use synonyms. If your print has a cat in it, use these tags: cat, kitty, kitten, animal.

Write Eye-Catching Titles

Make sure your title is interesting, inspires curiosity, but also explains what your product is.

Here are two examples, using a print of a girl under an apple tree:

Good Title: I’ll be waiting for you in my father’s orchard, under our tree. 5×7 print.
Bad Title: Print of a Girl Under An Apple Tree.

The good title tells a story, an idea. You want to find out more. The bad title makes the print sound dreadfully boring and lifeless.

Once again, you’re selling a beautiful idea as well as a piece of art, and you can’t go wrong with that.