My Favorite Etsy Tips

A few of my 'real life' friends have joined Etsy in the last few months, and one asked me for promotion tips. I shared with her the following:


Encircle and Etsy Love
-Use the ever-loving hell out of your 'circles'. The more circles you're in, the more your name and shop and product are on the 'activity' page. Same goes for just general 'etsy lovin' - hearting items and faving shops.

Know your roots
-Search Etsy for local items and spread the love so that they (the local sellers) know you exist. Give specials to local customers and offer local pick up instead of shipping for those who are close enough.
-Attend craft fairs and farmers markets.
-Promote at the mall with free samples, and give everyone a business card.  (This was specific for my friend, who sells cookies, but would work for people with similar goods)

More items means more sales
- You probably hate hearing it as much as I do. Yeah, it's really time-consuming to make, photograph, list and promote everything by yourself, but the more you have the more 'serious' you look. I am not a good example of this.

Drown yourself in social networking
Use twitter and FB, share the love there like you would on Etsy.

Geeky Computer Nonsense
-Tagging and SEO are really important. If you think you've got your tags right, try searching for your own items with keywords that pertain to your shop. If you're on the first page, you did it right. If you're not , google some tips on Etsy tagging and SEO for Etsy to improve your ranking in Etsy search and other search engines.
-use Adwords, Analytics and Craftopolis.
-'crawl' your page on all the search engines you can- this makes it more visible in search engines. Yahoo is the only search engine that charges to add your site to it's directory.
-Blog.

I know you asked specifically for promotional tips, but I shared with you everything I do/know/ or think I should do/know.


Here's my most important nugget of advice, and I can feel your eyes rolling all the way from here but really hear me out:
Don't feel like you have to be perfect and don't obsess over not making sales fast enough. You have to really nurture an Etsy shop to get it off the ground, and sometimes even with countless hours of self-motivated hard work (the hardest kind of hard work, you know) you may have virtually nothing to show for it at the end of the day. There is no failing here, there is only learning.

Cheers,
Kacie. 

Etsy Tips from around the web:

 How arists and crafters can make more money

Running Your Etsy Business  

Getting Traffic to Your Etsy Shop: Seasonal Color Merchandising

8 Tips For Getting LOADS of Etsy Sales | Handmadeology

Etsy Shop SEO Tip of The Week – Week 2 {Etsy SEO Basics – Free PDF Download from Etsy}

 

  Etsy SEO Guide - Tips from Sellers | Handmade Marketing

The Daily Etsian: The Etsy SEO Problem

20 Ways How to Drive Traffic to your Etsy Sho

 

The Technium: 1,000 True Fans

 

Pikaland’s 9 Tips to be More Creative | The Etsy Blog

 

Seller How-To: Tag-o-rama With Descriptive Keywords | The Etsy Blog

 

Sellers Assisting Sellers

 

The Etsy Blog | Discover How-To's, Interviews With Makers, and Curated Shops
 

Using Twitter to Promote your Handmade Products

  » Etsy :: SEO optimization really pays off!! » Untangling The Web

 

Preparing an Effective Etsy Listing

Etsy Sellers: What is your favorite way to promote your shop?

Tools For Etsy - Buyers, Sellers, and Developers. Hearts, Views, Front Page Treasury Lists

The Etsy Seller Handbook: All Our How-To’s About Selling | The Etsy Blog

 » Etsy :: SEO optimization really pays off!! » Untangling The Web

On the house: Free graphics for personal and commercial use!

So I made some fun little handmade badges tonight, now available under my new "On the House" page, wich will feature the graphics that I have made, 100% free for commercial and personal use.

        

Have fun,y'all!

Reaching International Customers

Second to the U.S., the most hits I get from my etsy shop are from France. Parisians like bug jewelry, who knew? I have other hits from places like Latvia and Romania, which I could honestly not pinpoint on a map for you. (No child left behind in geography class!)  All my shitty cartography skills aside, there is a real thrill in knowing that other people in the world are viewing your products. It's so cool to know people who speak a different language and are from a completely different cultural background are interested in your hand-made American goods.

So, how do you get more international views and thus international customers?
Fish where those exotic little fishies are. 
I think my biggest draw for international views is DeviantArt. There are many excellent professional and aspiring artists on this site, ready to be supportive of you and your awesomeness! It's not hard to get people to pay attention to you on DevArt, while great artists share a bit of their portfolios, there are *many* heart-wrenchingly awful MSPAINT files uploaded to this site and called art.


How else can you connect with people overseas?

Rape and pillage your analytics. Find where your international customers are and learn more about their locale. It can't hurt.

Online art/craft communities such as Crafster, Cut out + Keep, DeviantArt, ect.

Social networks like Twitter (best bet), Facebook and Myspace (I include myspace because I hear people still use it)  - Follow/friend some people from around the world- blogger is also a great place to meet new people from different places.


SEO for overseas- try tagging your items with alternate spellings- jewelry is jewellery in the U.K.

Show some good-old-fashioned Etsy Love to 'foreign' sellers  Poland makes pretty much the best goth/metalhead clothing in the world. 

 Like what they like, make what they're making.- Decoden is JUST NOW getting some kind of popularity here in the states, and even the people wearing it have never heard the term before. Scope out trends in other countries (my favorite is Japan) to see what will be popular in a few years!

 
Good luck, y'all!