5 Simple Steps for Building your Facebook Audience

A Facebook fan page is all but mandatory for a handmade business. It gives you a way to interact with those who like your products easily and show them the face of your business every day (nearly a quarter of Facebook users check Facebook 5 or more times a day). However to do this you have to build up the number of people who like your page. Here are 5 easy ways to do this, they won't immediately rocket your page to thousands of likes but they give a consistent trickle of new likes and those snowball. You might also notice that only two of these suggestion actually involve doing anything outside of your page. That's because getting people to view your page is easy, you want people to press that like button and for that your page needs to be engaging.

1) Pictures. This is a big one, share photos of your work in progress, events, people modeling your creations, funny or inspiring quotes, your own lolcats (or lolcephalopods). Make sure they are relevant to your business or what you make but have fun with them. Photos on facebook get 39% more interaction than other posts, and that includes being shared and shared photos often lead to new likes. Also on the subject of pictures, make sure you have a good cover image and profile picture that represents your business and products, that's the first thing a new visitor to your page sees.

2) Invite your friends and share your page posts on your timeline. Don't share every post you make on your page and don't invite your friends over and over, you don't want to annoy them. However they are your friends and family and they probably want to see your succeed so invite them to like your page and share your posts with their friends.

3) Get the word out about your page other places on the web. Etsy offers a way to link your facebook page to your shop so take advantage of that, include it in your email signature, invite peopel to like you in transaction or shipping notifications, post a link or button on your blog, add it to your YouTube Channel, post it on your own website, link to it on Twitter/Google+/Tumblr/Squidoo/Pinterest/DeviantArt/etc. Make it as easy for people to find as possible.

4) Post frequently, and post at all times of day. This can be difficult when you're just one person running a page but there are ways to make it easier. First take advantage of Facebook's scheduling feature to write a bunch of posts at once and schedule them to post throughout the day. You can also use an app like RSSGraffiti so automatically share new items from your Etsy shop RSS feed (or the rss feed from any other selling venue, most offer one). You can also use Networked blogs to share your new blog posts to your page as well. If you have a smart phone I really recommend getting the Facebook Pages app so you can post or reply to comments when you aren't at your computer (this is especially useful at events like craft shows so you can share photos of what's going on). What's the ideal balance between enough posts and too many? I don't know, the estimates from social media experts vary widely so you need to experiment to find the sweet spot for your own page. I will say that posting several times a day (as opposed to once) is more effective as is posting at different times of day instead of only int eh afternoon for example, because you reach people who have different patterns for when they check facebook (almost no one looks at everything that's been posted since they were last on).

5) Tone matters. Don't be overly professional and formal. You're a creative business, let that come through. Let your personality come through on your page. Let people know that they are interacting with a real person who is passionate about what they make. Some of my most successful posts ever in terms of likes and share is when I've shared the process of developing a new jewelry line including pictures of the prototypes and asked for feedback on what to use for the name.

Quick Tip #30 - Gift Wrapping

The holidays are the busiest time of year for retail, and it's pretty busy for customers too. Why not help our your customers by offering free gift wrapping? It's one of those extra touches that a small business can do so much better than a big store.

For Etsy sellers, since we don't have any way for a buyer to select gift wrapping directly, make sure you include gift wrap information in your listing along with instructions to add it in the note to seller or to send a convo. I also suggest putting that information in your shop policies and if you want your shop announcement as well. If you are using your own shopping cart and can add a checkbox or other direct way to request gift wrapping that would be the best way to do it.

For all handmade sellers online, make sure you are promoting your gift wrapping option on your blog/website and all your social media accounts. Offering gift wrapping can be a great selling point for your products but only if people know it's available.

For some other thoughts on packaging check out Making your Handmade Products Stand Out.

The Pychology of Free Shipping

Many handmade sellers are skeptical of free shipping, because free shipping isn't free for the seller. This attitude though ignores the psychological aspects of how you set your prices. Here are the two most common scenarios for free shipping:

Always Free - The seller offers free shipping all the time. In this scenario the seller has to build the cost of shipping into the price of the items.
Free as Sale - The seller occasionally offers free shipping as part of a sale or promotion. In this scenario the seller needs to have a high enough profit margin all the time to afford to run discounts*

However why offer free shipping when you still have to pay for it? For the same reason that a seller would offer 10% offer or run advertising: as a promotional tool. "Free" is a very powerful word and for online retailers an easy and affordable way to bring in extra business. In fact at least one consumer researcher has shown that shoppers will often pick free shipping over a discount even if the discount would save them more money.

For the time being I'm only offering free shipping as an occasional discount but with the prices for my raw materials and postage going up I'll soon have to revise my prices and I'm debating whether I should build the shipping costs into my prices. Regardless of what I decide in the end, free shipping will remain a valuable promotional tool for me and other online retailers.

* In my opinion this should be all sellers. If you don't have a high enough profit margin to be able to afford to discount either for a sale or for wholesale buyers then you don't have enough profit built in to adequately reinvest in the business and pay yourself a reasonable amount for your time.

Defining Ad Terms

Etsy is launching their new search ad program but there seems to be a lot of confusion about some basics on online advertising so here are some definitions of common ad terms. Etsy's new ad program works a lot like Google's Adwords search ads so you can apply a lot of information about Adwords to Etsy Search Ads.


Impression - When your ad is seen. So 5,000 impressions means your ad is seen 5,000 times.
Click - When someone clicks on your ad. 5 clicks means 5 people have clicked on your ad and viewed the page it is linked to. Etsy uses the term view for this on your shop stats page.
CTR - This stands for Click Through Rate it's a percentage arrived by dividing the number of ad clicks by the number of impressions. If an ad is clicked 8 times and has 300 impressions it has a CTR of 2.6%. Generally a CTR of >1% is considered good.

How Search Ads Work
When someone searches using a keyword (say "silver necklace") ads using that term are displayed. The price of that ad depends on several factors: frequency it is searched and competition for the search term. So a term that is searched 500 times a day and is being bid on by 30 ads will have a higher price than a term with 1000 searches and 30 bidders. Likewise a a term that is searched 500 times with 5 bidders is going to be less than a term with 1000 searches and 50 bidders. Thus a popular term can actually be quite cheap because it searched thousands of times a day and even though it has a lot of bidders there's enough rotation for everyone.

Etsy has a list of estimated prices per 1000 impressions for keyword on this page but expect it to change once the ads go live based on demand for keywords and changes in what people are searching for.

Etsy Ads or Google Adwords
This isn't an either/or question, nor should it be. The fact is that Etsy Search Ads, Google Adwords, and Project Wonderful (another fantastic ad network) all serve different audiences and can all be part of an overall advertising plan. Adding a new advertising option may require that you shift your advertising budget around a little bit to make room for the new expense (though if you were a frequent relister on Etsy you can put some of the money you are now saving on listing fees towards advertising now that relisting isn't as useful a strategy). If you don't currently have an advertising budget you really should have one, marketing is a vital part of business and as much as I'm a fan of marketing that costs time not money (blogging, social media, etc) traditional advertising is still important.

Handstitching the Long Tail

There's recently been a lot of stress in the Etsy community over the search being switched from Recency to Relevency. I'm not stressing. Why? Because the same things that help you in the Etsy relevancy search are also the things that help you in Google searches and if you've read this blog enough you know that I think Google is what you should be focusing on.

The first page of any Etsy search is 40 items, that means that you can't be on the first page of every search that would be relevant for your items. It's impossible. What you should be striving for is a well rounded listing that isn't trying to be at the top for only one or two searches, but a listing that ranks well if not at the very top for a wide range of related searches.

There's a concept called the "long tail" that is very important whenever you are talking about search engine rankings. The idea behind the long tail is that many search terms are only search for rarely but if you rank well for enough of these little searches you will get a lot of traffic. So stop worrying that you aren't on the first page for "dress" and start making sure you are titling, tagging, and writing descriptions so you will rank well for "blue cotton seashell print dress" in either Etsy or Google.

Wish all you want but Etsy, Google, and any other search engine is never going to tell you exactly what will put you at the top. The best you can do is write as relevant and accurate listings as you can that use good keywords that describe your items (and for Google build good backlinks). Don't pull your hair out trying to rank best for one narrow term in one search engine as your main way to get traffic, a broad approach to SEO and promotion will give you more consistent results that will protect you from major changes in just one area.  I would rather have 50 small traffic streams bringing me 5 visits each than one source sending me 250 visits because if one out of fifty disappears I'm not going to be devastated, I can just roll with the changes.

Getting more traffic from YouTube

I'm a big fan of using video to promote your business. We humans are very visual animals, this is one reason good photos are so important when you're selling handmade products. When the photos are also moving that grabs our attention even more.

Now one of the problems with using YouTube for promotion is that usually the only place you can put a link is in your description and many users ignore the description, even more so since YouTube redesigned the video pages to hide most of the description. There is a way around this, using YouTube's Promoted Videos you can put what YouTube calls a "call to action overlay" on your video that can contain a link to your shop. This will cost a little bit of money, because it is an advertising program, but there are ways to minimize how much you spend.

Here's a video that describes how to set up a Promoted Video and use the call to action overlay. YouTube gives you very few characters to write your message so choose your words carefully and be creative.



Here's an example of one of my videos using this overlay (apparently it doesn't work on embedded videos so you'll need to go click the link to the video on youtube to see it in action). If you have ad blocking software you might need to disable it to see the overlay.

Space Cephalopod Jewelry

Tip: YouTube also gives you the option to use a 56x56pixel image. I used a .png of the cuttlefish in my logo with a transparent background. Just take any image you want, crop it square, then scale it down to 56x56, save, and upload to an image hosting site like Photobucket. You can then use it on your overlay to add just a tiny bit more branding. I recommend using your logo or a portion of it like I did.

Showing Related Etsy Items on your Wordpress Site or Blog

This trick is something I just set up on my own site and is specific to blogs and sites running self-hosted Wordpress. Unfortunately I don't have an alternative for other platforms or wordpress.com hosted blogs. However if you have wordpress installed on your own hosting read on for a very cool trick to get more people to click from your site to your etsy shop.

I've been using a widget here on this blog called LinkWithin for quite a long time, at the bottom of each post it links to related posts here on the blog. I thought that it would be great to have something like this on my website but linking to my Etsy items. I searched through a lot of related post wordpress plugins before finally finding one that will pull items from an external site. The plugin is called nrelate and it lets you pull related posts not just from your blog but from any site in your blogroll. I have the links I want displayed in a separate link list and only my Etsy shop in the blogroll. I set the plugin to show 0 posts from site and 5 from my blogroll and now I have Etsy items beneath every posts on my site.

Video Roundup: Marketing and Branding

The I ♥ Art folks in Baltimore and Portland have been producing some great videos. First up is Baltimore with a workshop on Web Marketing which is available on YouTube and embedded below.



Next is Portland with a two-part video workshop on Speed Branding. Part 1 and Part 2 are hosted on Etsy's livestream account. NOTE: Part 1 had some audio problems so sound doesn't start until about 9 minutes in but it doesn't actually affect the presentation itself.

Blog Tracking

No, this isn't a post on google analytics or any other stats program. It's about how to increase your exposure on blogs by getting organized. You will need only 3 things for this: email, spreadsheet software (excel, open office, etc), and this article from Modish on how to approach blogs. Optional tool: Google alerts.

In your spreadsheet you will need various columns to track blogs that have featured you or that you want to feature you. Here's what I have for mine:
Contacted - Yes/No
Featured - Yes/No
Blog Name - Noadi's Art Blog
URL - http://noadi.blogspot.com
Topic - Handmade
Notes - Blah blah blah
Editor Name - Sheryl
Contact - NoadiArt@gmail.com
Date Contacted - 1/1/11
Date Featured - 1/1/11
Feature URL - http://noadi.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-year-new-ideas.html

I use Google Alerts to see new mentions of my name, business, name, or URLs so I know of blog features where the blogger hasn't emailed me that I've been featured (this happens frequently).

I first input all blog that have featured me (that I know of), then add those I want to feature me. This can be a time consuming task as there are a lot of blogs on the topics I want to feature my work. This is the main point of this spreadsheet, create a big list of blogs you want to feature you then contact one or two of them every day making sure to mark that they've been contacted and the date. If you don't hear back from them or get a feature in a few months, send a reminder (and only one, if they still don't feature you they probably aren't interested).

The blogs that have featured your work can be your list of blogs to contact again in the future when you have something new and special to share like a brand new line. They already like your work so don't be afraid to contact them again.

Social Marketing for Handmade Business

Sister Diane from Craftypod leads a class on Social Marketing. It's almost 2 hours long so grab a cup of coffee or cocoa and sit back to watch, it's full of great information on using social media tools like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook. She explains it in pretty straightforward non-technical language.


Social Marketing for Handmade Businesses by Sister Diane from I Heart Art: Portland on Vimeo.

Note: The video is pretty high quality so run it fullscreen if you can to see the presentation screen better.

Cute Promotion Idea

I'm getting some new business cards printed and uploaded my design to Flickr. Being my short attention span self I started browsing business cards on Flickr and came across these gorgeous bookmarks being used as business cards. I just had to share them on the blog.

My New Business Cards, originally uploaded by dollproject.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.

Video Pick - Etsy SEO Lab

Video from the Etsy Virtual Lab hosted by Rand from SEOMoz on what SEO is and how you can optimize your shop. It's full of good information.


Etsy Guide to SEO Workshop from Etsy on Vimeo.

Other SEO Posts:
Etsy SEO Changes and Guide
Why is SEO Important for my Shop?

Etsy SEO Changes and Guide

This is pretty great news so I'm going to post it now instead of waiting for Monday so you Etsy sellers have the weekend to look it over and make changes.

In case you have been out of the loop or don't frequent the Etsy forums much they had a bit of a debacle earlier this year over their SEO changes. To basically sum it up, Etsy tried to do the SEO all by themselves without really knowing enough about it to do it right, they made changes without informing sellers, and the changes were less than successful. I'm of the opinion it was not as bad as some people who flipped out over it but it was a mess. In the wake of this Etsy did the smart thing and hired SEOmoz an experienced SEO company to consult with and make changes to the site. The first round of SEOmox suggested changes rolled out this week.

Here's the article describing the changes: Tech Update: Changes for Shop and Item Page SEO 

SEOmoz also put together a great guide to SEO specifically for Etsy sellers detailing the ways you can optimize your site. Download the guide (pdf)

Some Snazzy Postcards

So here are the postcards I just had printed up. I think they turned out really great. To design them I used GIMP an open source image editor that's a lot like photoshop, I did it from scratch but you can find templates online to help you.

What are the postcards for?

• Contacting potential clients
• Sending with certain orders
• Posting as mini posters
• Used as a mini brochure
• Hand out at shows
  

I'm sure the list will get longer as I think of more uses. The postcards cost me about $0.14 a piece so it's a pretty good deal. If I had gone with customizing one of the default designs at Vistaprint and not uploaded a backside too they would have been even less.

Overall a very affordable bit of promotional material that looks great.

Designing a Postcard
Postcard templates
Sample Postcard Layouts
POSTCARD DESIGN ARTICLES & DESIGNING POSTCARDS TIPS
7 Tips for Successful Postcard Marketing

Places to Print
VistaPrint
OvernightPrints

Establishing a Theme

This week's long post isn't going to be very long. I had planned to do a book review but my books didn't arrive in time for me to be able to finish reading and absorbing the information. So instead I'm going to write a few ideas about branding.

Is there something special about your products that you want people to associate with you? This can be a tough question. For me it was pretty easy, I make jewelry of cephalopods (squid, octopus, cuttlefish) and so I would love for people to think of me when they think of an octopus.

So once you've answered that question it can be used as a starting point for your branding efforts. We'll use the example of someone who makes bags with screenprinted daisies.

White, green, and yellow are colors associated with daises, you could tailor your website, banners, business cards to have that those colors.

Design your logo to have daisies working into it.

At craft shows have vases filled with fresh cut daisies.

Shrink down some of the designs from the screenprinting and have them made into rubber stamps. Rubber stamp them on your packaging, notecards, invoices, etc.

Quick Tip #6 - Create Impressive Slideshows

Slideshows are a perfect way to show off your products. There are a number of options for creating video slideshows that you can then upload to youtube and use to promote your shop.

Tips
1. Make sure you add your website/shop url to the video description so people can click it. It should also be in the credits of your video.
2. Get good music. Some services offer music you can add and Podsafe Audio is also a great resource for music (most is under creative common licenses, with artist attribution required). Make sure any music you use is available for use in videos or you risk having your video pulled by YouTube.
3. Give your video good tags, for example etsy, handmade, jewelry/soap/clothing/etc. and put it in the appropriate category (How To & Style works for most handmade stuff)
4. Get the word out. Embed the video on your blog, add it to facebook and other social networks, add it to a Squidoo lens, etc.

Online Slideshow Makers
I'm only linking to online slideshow makers since they should work on any operating system. There are a number available online for download and you can also use most video editing software to make them too.

• Animoto
• One True Media
• Slide.com

Promo Packs

So I recently read this post on Etsy Marketing about Promo Packs but also this thread about them on the Etsy forums. People definitely seem divided on whether they're a good idea. With this controversy over promo packs you should really think about whether or not it fits your business. Also keep in mind that if your shipping very light or thin items a promo pack may increase your shipping costs some depending on the type of shipping your using.

Personally I like the idea, it's a simple little extra to include in your orders, cheap marketing, and I like getting free stuff. However keep in mind that your packs should have balance, I don't think anyone likes just getting a bunch of business cards in a zip bag. So If you decide to do a promo pack swap make sure you are getting not just business cards but also samples or other freebies like stickers, bookmarks, etc.

I've said it before and I'm going to keep repeating it: packaging matters. Make your promo packs look like a gift. One idea would be to get some little cello bags or colored cellophane (the crisp kind for gifts not the soft stuff for saving leftovers) and tie it off with a little ribbon and a tag.

Link Round Up

Here's a bunch of great links I've come across lately.

Timothy Adam Designs - Article on increasing your Etsy traffic (many of the tips will also work for other selling venues as well).
Etsy Marketing - You Can Sell More, Here's How. Site all about marketing your Etsy shop. Some really great articles here.
Allover Art: Tuesday Tip - $100 Facebook Ad Credit Try out facebook ads for free, $100 gives you plenty of time to play with the ad service. This is legit, I gave it a try.

Why is SEO Important for my Shop?

After reading a number of conversations on the Etsy forums lately I've realized that a lot of sellers don't know what SEO is and why it's important for their shops. I'm writing this as just a quick primer on optimizing an Etsy shop for SEO (it will also work for other venues like eCrater and ArtFire). This is just an overview touching on what I think are the most important things to work on.

Definition of SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, makign your website attractive to search engines so they will rank you highly in search results. Search engines account for a tremendous amount of traffic online so if your shop isn't ranking on search engines you're missing out on a lot of visitors who may become customers. The two sides of SEO to focus on are on site and off site.

This post is just going to focus on on site optimization of your Etsy shop. Off site will have to wait for a later post.

On Site Optimization

On site optimization is creating your site's content in a way that makes it clear to the search engines what your site is about and what keywords are important so you'll show up in search results for those keywords (on Etsy tags are the Etsy search keywords). Since I'm talking about optimizing an Etsy shop the options for optimization are limited. You only have what text you can edit to use in optimization.

It is possible to optimize a site for search engines and lose customers. User friendliness and content has to come first and then SEO but the good thing is a lot of SEO changes can also help user friendliness if done right.

Keywords

Keywords are the words that people use to find your site when they use a search engine. You want to try and target keywords that you want people to find your shop using. The obvious ones are the type of product you make, subject matter, or materials, less obvious ones can often be things like occasions people would buy your product for, wider categories of products, etc. Google has a great keyword research tool that can give you suggestions based on a sample of keywords you give them.

Make a list of the keywords you would like to target to use while editing your shop. Keep these keywords on hand for Part II on off site optimization.

Titles

It's a good idea to use keywords in your title, but not at the expense of making the title informative. So something like "Blue Sparkle Earrings" is informative but few keywords "Blue Sparkle Earrings, Handmade Lampwork Glass Jewelry" is both informative and has several keywords. Keyword stuffing is loading a title with a list of keywords and while it may help your search engine ranking it will be a turn off for customers, an example would be "handmade earrings lampwork glass gift etsy blue bead crafts". You must balance SEO with user friendliness.

Descriptions

Your descriptions first and foremost must inform a potential customer about your products. The good thing about this is the more you tell your customers the more there is for the search engines to pick up on. Make sure you work in your keywords where you can. As an example I make jewelry based on cuttlefish so my descriptions all contain this paragraph after the description of the piece of jewelry:

Cuttlefish are not fish at all but are cephalopods, their closest relatives are squid and octopus. These amazing sea creatures have eight arms and two tentacles with suckers that they use to capture their prey. Some cuttlefish are brightly colored and many can change the color and the texture of their skin as camouflage, mating display, or warning.

It gives from background on cuttlefish which help customers who may not be familiar with these cool animals but it also includes many of my keywords such as: cuttlefish, fish, squid, cephalopods, tentacles, sea, etc.

Make the first few sentences of your description count the most, Etsy pulls the first 240 characters for the meta description tag. How much this tag matters anymore is debatable but some search engines pull this info for their results display. So you want to make sure it's clear in those first few words exactly what your item is.

Tags

Since tags are text on the listing page google will see them but you should be focussing them for Etsy search because that's where they will do the most good. List type of product, subject matter, materials, colors, etc. then if you have some tag spaces left over throw in some of your keywords. The tags also show up in the keywords meta tag but most search engines no longer give those much weight so Etsy search first then what might help with Google.

Shop Announcement

Your shop announcement is the only solid piece of text on your gallery page. Use it to introduce you and your products while working in your keywords. Like your item description the first 240 characters of your announcement are pulled for the meta description tag so describe your business first before any other announcements (including sales).

Also don't forget your shop title, you have about 55 characters to work with so instead of just your shop name include a little more info and keywords. As an example instead of just using "Noadi's Art" I use "Noadi's Art on Etsy, Polymer Clay Jewelry & Sculpture". It doesn't just show up in bold at the top of my shop annoucnement but is also used in the title tag, the title tag shows the title in the top of the browser (or on tabs) but search engines also factor it into your rankings.

Shop Sections

Shop sections need to be clear to your customers what they include, but they are also text so search engines see them (also along with your user name they are pulled into the meta keywords). Instead of for example listing "Hats" be more specific and put "Fleece Women's Hats".

Off Site Optimization

Off site optimization boils down to one basic thing: backlinks. Backlinks are links on other sites that lead to your shop. You want to have links from many other sites, but not just any site. Sites with content related to your shop will have more effect than a totally unrelated site and some sites have more weight with search engines than others (google pagerank is often used a measurement of this).

NoFollow

Not every link will help your search engine rankings. The nofollow attribute tells search engines not to count a link, blog often have these on the comments and all paid links (like ads) are also supposed to be nofollow. These links might bring traffic so they aren't useless but won't help you with search engines.

Getting Started

So where to start building backlinks? If you have a blog, twitter account, flickr account, etc. add a link to your shop. Then you can start searching for free directories to add your site to, here's a big list of free directories and you definitely should get added to the Handmade Product Directory. Other things you can do are start a blog just for your shop, create Squidoo lenses for your products, email other blogs about featuring your shop, most Etsy teams have a blog that lists member shops so that's yet another great reason to join a team (among many including meeting cool fellow Etsy users). If you have great products and good promotion other people will do some of the work for you by linking to your shop themselves.

Another way to build backlinks is to use the RSS feed that every Etsy shop has. has a great list of places to submit RSS feeds.

While not directly related to the normal google results you deifnitely want to sign up for an submit your products to Google Base so they will show up in the product search. Let's Ets is a great tool for getting the bulk file to upload.

Linking to Your Shop

You can't control all links to your shop just those you create yourself. This is where your keyword list comes back out. You want to create links to your shop that use not just your shop name (you do want a number of those) but also your keywords.

If you are using images to link to your shop the best option is to also have a text link below it or near it to the same page. However you can also use the alt and title tags for images in the format <img src="http://yourlink.com/image.jpg" alt="Your shop name" title="Your shop name"> and the search engines will read that text for the image.

Hiring Out your SEO

There are many companies online that will do your SEO for you. If you find this all overwhelming you may decide to hire someone else to do it for you, however be very careful. There are some shady SEO companies out there that may want to scam you or who use unethical practices that could end up getting you punished by the search engines by being blacklisted. Always do your research before hiring anyone.

Share your Promotion Tips

I happen to love Squidoo and Twitter and there's now a Squidoo co-brand that combines the two so head over to "What's your favorite way to promote your shop" and share your favorite tips with Squidoo and Twitter. You'll need a Twitter account to participate.