Are you marketing your craft business on Twitter?

You have a craft business, you have an eBay store, you have a website and you’re on Etsy. All great ways to promote your business. But are you on Twitter? Twitter is the latest social media craze, allowing you to microblog (only 140 characters at a time) from your computer, your blackberry, or even your phone! Posts are short enough that they never feel like work!

You can let others know what you’re doing, blog posts, new items you’re listing, or great sales you’re having. You can link to anywhere from twitter (just remember to put the http:// in front of your web address.) And unlike Facebook, where you are a “person” first, promoting your business on Twitter seems to be the norm.

And if you are worried that you’re URL will be too long, just go to http://tinyurl.com to shorten the web address and give an air of mystery to your link!

The idea behind Twitter is to follow those people who interest you and to have those and others follow you back. You’ll be able to see posts of people following you, you can comment or email them directly and they can be in touch with you.

Want to find your target market? Go to Twitter Search, type in keywords or phrases that you think your potential customers might be using and see who’s tweeting about what. Find someone you think might be interested in your products? Follow them. I bet they’ll follow you back and you may even get a customer out of the deal!!

Already have a Twitter account or getting ready to sign up for one? Follow me twitter.com/irisandlily
I’ll be happy to follow you back.

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

Getting Your Etsy Listings To Show Up On Google

created at wordle.net

In the Etsy forums the other day, there were a couple of posts about getting your Etsy shop visibility in the famed Google search. I thought I might condense some of the information and make it a little easier to implement what appears to be a pretty cool— and free— way to let those outside the Etsy

community know all about your fabulous work!

STEP 1:

First, there’s the way Google finds you. According to one Etsian who seemed pretty techno-savvy, while on Etsy, your tags may be your most important search tool, Google only picks up your title. I’ve noticed that a lot of Etsy shops get creative in their titles but leave out the all-important search words customers are looking for. For example, I have an album titled “Innocence” in my store. It’s a baby pic and that title provides the right sentiment. But…in the same title I have Personalized Baby Photo Album, which is what I would expect customers to search. I also have “photo album” and “baby” in my tags, because I think the important search terms bear repeating. Some Etsians try to only use search words in one place. But this isn’t eBay and you have unlimited space in your title. What can it hurt to use an important search word twice?

And I know I’ve said this before but remember to think like a customer when developing your keyword strategy. How would potential customers search for your products?

STEP 2:

There’s a tool on Google called Google Base. I’ve just gotten around to listing my items here, but wow, this is cool. You need a gmail account to access google base, and if you don’t have one of these, it’s free and there’s lots of space and it’s userfriendly and keeps the spam out. Get a gmail account and sign into it.

Then, search for Google Base in google…. or just click the underlined google base… I looked and looked but could not find the link through gmail but because I was signed in, I had instant access when I searched for it in the search engine.

Now, you need to go to a website called LetsEts.com

This is a great tool that will pull all of your Etsy listings and format them exactly the way they need to be formatted for the Google Base tool. All you need to do is a “Save As,” remember what you called it and where you saved it on your computer. The file is an XML file. Make sure when you do your “save as” you save the document as an XML file.

Next, you’re going to go on Google Base, enter the information they ask you for and upload your XML file. You don’t need to worry when they get to the formatting part. It’s already been done at LetsEts. How cool is that? You don’t need to be a techno-geek to do this!

And that’s it. Supposedly in just a couple of hours, your items will appear on Google under the keywords that are in your titles. There are great tutorials on Google too for how to do this. I’m a first-timer myself.

So I’ve uploaded my listings. They take a while to process, but I’ll definitely let you know how it went. Don’t wait for my results though to do this yourself. It’s free. And free google listings are good!

Just make sure to pump up those title keywords!!!

word image is courtesy of wordle.net

Read Full Post »

Watch Pat O’Bryan’s Internet Business Unseminar5

There are a couple of Internet marketing guys I follow because I like to learn new things and reinforce what I already know. I like Joe Vitale, Craig Perrine and Pat O’Bryan a lot.

This weekend I was hoping to be at Unseminar5, where they are all speaking, in addition to Eric Farewell and Ben Mack and others you may follow.

Much to my surprise today, thanks to Ben Mack, I found out that they are live streaming and I got to catch Joe Vitale — yay!

Later today (2 CST), they will have the final speakers: Craig Perrine included. You can watch too at portableempire.tv

It’s not quite like being there, but hey this is free! I’m sure there will be a tape of it. I plan to find that so I can see the whole weekend’s speakers eventually. I’ll pass it along when I find out

Read Full Post »

Weeding Through the Blogs and Finding a Treasure: Seth Godin

I read lots of blogs when I have the time. I wish you could get paid to read blogs. It’s so much fun and there’s so much to learn.

But sometimes, when there’s just not enough time, you have to be a little choosy. There is one blog though that I read religiously, no matter how little time I have, and that’s Seth Godin’s. He’s a marketing guru who has written a bunch of amazing books and created squidoo.com. I was fortunate enough last year to hear him speak at eBay Live and I even met him. I was star struck!

But I digress. If you have an Internet business or are planning on starting one– in any industry– you should check out Seth Godin’s blog every day. He’s brilliant. And you’ll learn stuff. Promise.

Go there now.

sethgodin.typepad.com

Read Full Post »

Submitting Your Etsy Store Or Website to Google

Reading the Etsy forums today, I came across a post from momomatic, who had some great suggestions for building buzz for your etsy store or crafty website. You can read the whole post here on the Etsy forums.

The piece that I found interesting though was a link to go submit your etsy store or website or blog to google so the searchbot can crawl your site and get you in the search engine. It’s simple and it’s free. Just make sure your site or etsy store is optimized with good search keywords so you end up in the searches that will bring you hordes of customers!

Go submit your site now! http://www.google.com/addurl/

Thanks momomatic!!

Read Full Post »

Crafting Your Way To Success Online In Today’s Economy

Today I got two almost identical marketing offers entitled “The Elephant in the Room,” and they of course were proposing a book that can help us all get “rich” in an economy that’s quickly heading toward the dreaded “R” word…recession. Now, I don’t know if we’ll land in a recession, but with gas prices and food prices rising and an unstable work environment, you could say the economy is less than desirable. On the Etsy forums, there are numerous posts from artists and artisans worrying about slow sales … “Is it just normal for sales to slow during June?” “Is the economy hurting sales?” In my selling experience (although this is my first June on Etsy), I find that things slow down some in June because kids are getting out of school, people are planning vacations and let’s face it, it’s not a huge gift season unless you know tons of people getting married.

However, I’ve also found ( having been a crafter for too many years to mention) that during the peak show season and the holidays, shows are more profitable the worse the economy gets. Yes, I’m old enough to have been through this before. It seems when purse strings tighten, people look for unique products that they feel give them the most for their money. Unique gift ideas, cute holiday decor, just a little splurge when there was no vacation this summer.

So my fellow crafters/artists/indie designers, take heart. Don’t look at a slow June as an indicator of what’s to come this year in your craft business. Take it as an opportunity.

Over the next few days, I’ll post five things to do to have a killer holiday craft season, starting with:

1. If your sales are slow now, use that time to create the next very coolest thing that everyone has to have. With more and more vendors jumping onto Etsy every day, competition is fierce. If you roll out with something unique that can be a great holiday gift, you’ll see increased sales in the coming months.

Read Full Post »