SILKFAIR Blog

Amongst the many social media sites that have become popular in the last year, Pinterest is one of the most embraced of sites for those that own small businesses. Pinterest utilizes pictures to enable an audience to see and interact with your merchandise, allowing them to not only get a glimpse of what you have to offer, but also providing a complete catalog of what your business is all about.

Picture perfect

One of the primary focuses of Pinterest is the powerful picture. While it may seem simple, what you show and how you show it can say more than a thousand words and ultimately affect how it appeals to your audience. This means you must focus on what it takes to get your audience to spend the time examining your catalog on Pinterest.

The first step is to be able to take a quality picture for your audience. Because the description relies especially on what you show, rather than what you tell, your pictures will say far more than any descriptive text you offer. Be sure that you take pictures with a quality camera. Even if you have to rely on your computer’s programs like Window’s Photo Gallery to sharpen them or adjust their features, you need to provide your audience with a picture-perfect example of what your online store has to offer.

At the same time, you don’t want to overwhelm your audience with the same photos in a repeated manner. Variety is the key to gaining attention, so to do this you must offer more than what you are showing. Present to your audience the opportunity to view something unique that only you have to offer. To do this, you must present a taste test, like many stores provide, to captivate your audience and give them the incentive to return for much more.

While posting the majority of your products gives you a wide variety to view, you also need to consider the importance of what you’re presently offering. Sales and specials should be a definite inclusion on your site, premiering unique items that will give the audience something new to examine each day or week. This will help keep your audience checking in for new or even exclusive items that they may not regularly catch if you just provided a stationary catalog.  

A variety for your audience

While most businesses might simply consider posting and placing their merchandise, you want to be able to give your audience a little more than that. Pinterest is all about appeal and purpose, so you will want to cover more than just what you have to offer. Consider adding pictures about designs you are considering and asking for feedback. Displaying the processes of your business, can be exceptionally effective for those that design their own merchandise, such as jewelry or clothing.

Because Pinterest has so many topics readily available to your audience, you’ll want to utilize as many as you can. If you have a dog or cat, show them off under the “pets” category, even if it isn’t endorsing your products. It will give your brand a broader search range so that more will be able to find you. The key is to utilize every aspect of Pinterest to your advantage.

Linking to Pinterest

Don’t forget that videos are also a big portion of Pinterest. While it isn’t the primary focus, it is vital to utilize the tools and advantages you are provided. If you have a video from your website, post it through Pinterest, affiliating that link with your site to help increase traffic throughout.

This leads to the topic of links. While Pinterest is its own individual site, it provides many opportunities to link back to other social sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, and your especially valued Silkfair website, where you can ultimately make your sales. Be sure that when you post your pictures, the link is completed to ensure effectively smooth travel from Pinterest to your website to avoid interruption.

There are so many types of social media available throughout the internet, that it can be difficult to tell which is the most effective. What every business person must always consider is what characteristics they need and compare them to what each social has to offer. Pinterest is possibly one of the most ideal social outlets for those displaying their products, so be sure that you take advantage of the tools they offer to create a successful situation for your Silkfair business.

One of the many challenges of owning an online store is that customers are something unique which you must constantly work on. Some come, some go, but finding a way to make room for all of them is a challenge on its own.

To accomplish the task of making room for more customers, you must be able to orient your entire life in a special way so that you can take advantage of each and every moment possible. Customer service is special, in that you must not only analyze what they want, but also find ways to deliver those wants as your needs.

In order to accomplish this, you must orient yourself and focus on the way of the Samurai- the art of serving others. But the outcome of serving others should result in your own happiness, and reward you with success in your life’s ambitions.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Start by increasing the excitement you experience during your work. Don’t treat it like a job. Rather, turn it into an adventure. This is perhaps the most important of all factors in a personal business, because if you don’t want to do something, then you won’t accomplish anything. So, you must find ways to enjoy what you are presently doing.

While a self-owned business is complicated, incorporating management, business analysis, and even bookkeeping, you have the choice of looking at each challenge in a positive light. See your problems as a challenge, rather than a hindrance.

When it comes to customer services, this is perhaps the most opportune moment to enjoy yourself. Here, you get a chance to talk, discuss, and learn from your target client. This isn’t a challenge, unless you make it into one. Politeness and the eagerness to hear and learn from those who are involved in your business are crucial to your success. Be sure you listen with an open mind and always treat your customers as a precious commodity.

Magnify your message

Find ways to excel in the distribution of your message. There are plenty of social media available that are effective and inexpensive, use them to your advantage in order to distribute your message faster. While many of us surf the web and social mediums in search of conversation as a leisure activity, it is often an essential task for a personal business owner to accomplish the handling of this project. Be sure that you speak as a person with authority in your field in order to capture the attention of your audience.

This means that educating yourself in what you do is essential. While many small business owners jump into their business opportunities without consideration, educating yourself on what is essential to providing an organized operation is crucial to your success. Educate yourself on what you need to know right now, and especially on what you’ll need to know for the future. Business trends change regularly, more often than they stay still. In order to catch the attention of a broad audience, you have to be able to offer skills and products that are ahead of the curve. This gives you an advantage of capturing the attention of a larger customer range, because you will always have what they want and need.

Minimize the insignificant

Your online store is something that shouldn’t be treated as a task. Treat it as a treat and indulge what you get out of this experience. When you enjoy online marketing, you can spend more effective time on that which matters most: your customers.

Small issues in life often distract us from what we’re doing. This is why it’s vital to minimize that which would hinder our ability to move forward. Thoughts of blame or even failure aren’t something that you should dwell on. Failures are actually opportunities to learn from. They are stepping stones on the path to success. If we stumble upon a block, we must get up and get over the hurdle. Blame is a terrible issue to focus on, because it stops us from seeing what is ahead. Refute blame, whether it’s for others or ourselves, and instead, focus on how to move forward.

Success is derived from our ability to cooperate with our customers. Increasing customer count is important, but this also involves keeping the customers we come in contact with. To accomplish this, we must always stay focused on what is important in our lives. Success and the future are what we have to look forward to, so maintain a mindset that keeps a positive outlook on life and business to enforce these ideals. When you think you can, you can.

Pinterest is the latest addition to the social media network and is becoming more popular amongst individuals as well as businesses because of its eye-appealing nature. Pinterest has created a new network in which people can easily use its media to gain interest and speak out loud and still keep things simple. Rather than develop social networks through people, it builds connections between interests and shares it with others.

A new social network

Through this social network, you can follow others, and others can follow you, somewhat similar to Twitter, allowing you to create a more expansive circle in which you converse and share. But unlike other social media, it focuses primarily on visual appeal, pins of videos and pictures being the primary eye catcher. This means that you’ll need to ensure that pictures and videos you pin have a unique, attractive quality that others will want to stop and look at.

Pinterest is simple and easy to use, allowing anyone to basically create a message board with ideas, comments, and links. It allows you to pin different links and comments to different boards. These boards offer any of 32 different topics that allow users to socially engage depending on current interests. These are primarily focused around recipes, arts, and creative ideas, but with a little creativity of your own, you can find a topic in which your store or its products apply to. For instance, if you’re starting a project for some new designs in jewelry, you can pin your current interests to seek out ideas and publicity, particularly designs that interest you and others. Pinterest doesn’t have to be about selling directly. You can utilize it to gain traffic to your store as well.

This intriguing idea is just like the bulletin board at school. Teachers pin up important information, students pin up awards. Regardless of what you’re interest is, people can actively use this new medium to communicate ideas to one another without the hassle of networking directly. Videos and pictures are amongst the most popular of “pins” with comments available along with each pin. Once you’ve pinned your pictures to your board, the link back to your site allows for a direct traffic flow to your online store. This window can help increase your store and website’s traffic dramatically. It helps to keep your board neat and organized rather than cluttered to ensure a professional image for your store. Pinterest is designed around simplicity, so stick with the idea. Use the quality of your “pins” and comments to do the attention grabbing.

The Business edge

Fortunately, this gives businesses an edge for approaching customers with their ideas. As an individual store owner, this opportunity is extremely valuable. Between these 32 topics, you can find variable areas where you can highlight different aspects of your store. But, it is recommended that you refrain from only promoting or “pinning” products for sale. Perhaps you create your own clothing and are interested in what is popular - so post some ideas that you think are great, even if you don’t offer them directly, and see what the world thinks about them. This wide environment allows you to talk to anyone with similar interests. But if your board seems too self-serving, you may close windows to those who are just browsing for quality boards to follow.

Of course, the uses of Pinterest don’t stop on their network. You can also allow others to “pin” your blogs, articles, products, and store onto their boards with “Pin it” buttons for websites. This allows you to expand your online store’s advertising with ease. Buttons can be created and even customized to allow for use on particular items throughout your online store. Each person that “pins” a video or picture of your product expands your audience in an affordable way that is great for businesses. This is definitely a great reason to make sure that you’re creating unique videos of your own for your online store. By setting up “pin” buttons on your sites, you allow anyone to utilize Pinterest in your favor. Pinterest is definitely proving its value as the newest way to expand your online store’s image, so make sure you don’t overlook this.

A good idea to take into consideration is to follow the “big hitters” on Pinterest. This technique does raise awareness of your store and help promote you through familiarization. The same goes for anyone who is pinning your products as well. Follow them and it’s likely they’ll follow you right back. And don’t be afraid to utilize other social media to point other networks toward Pinterest to gain interest.
Currently, Pinterest is still basically available by invite only (go to the website and request an invite that should be emailed to you), but be prepared to make your business’ debut on this new social network. Pinterest is becoming more popular each day, so if you aren’t already pinning your store to the board, make a move to take advantage of this new opportunity.

As more businesses begin to expand themselves across the internet, we must change and adapt to succeed with our online stores. Because of this, we can’t afford to ignore localized internet marketing. With all the other businesses out there in the world, it can be difficult to compete with everyone, so we must include ourselves in our own general area.

Localized marketing for an online store might seem a little strange, specifically since your online presence would be your local area. But, consider localized searches for a moment. When someone is seeking a product, search engines take into consideration where they are searching from. This can make a big difference when it comes down to finding your online store. Don’t overlook your local market potential.

An effective site

As a reminder, when it comes to online marketing, don’t rely exclusively on word of mouth to market your store. Indeed, it is a powerful tool, but you need to empower customers who do not know you to be able to find you. This requires that you place your store in as many locations across the web as you possibly can.

First of all, it’s important to plan your website effectively. This applies to your online store as well. Don’t just “toss” one up just to have a store or site for customers. Most businesses won’t just put up some boards around a desk and shelf to open their store, so you shouldn’t either. For your online store, make quality use of your keywords to optimize searches across the internet. If you’re going to make a website, make sure that its architecture and structure are quality and easy for users to navigate. Make sure that your site can be localized to be searched through local SEO’s as well in order to increase your online presence.

Other social outlets

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons we neglect local marketing is that social media focuses on a broad and very extensive range throughout the world. Don’t just rely on just Facebook and Twitter for social encounters and business practices. There are many other different methods out there to put to effective use. Facebook and Twitter are wide-coverage social media, allowing you to talk and discuss with anyone, anywhere in the world. But, sites such as LinkedIn provide many useful tools for local businesses. You can easily sign up, enter your businesses data and get far more internet coverage in the process. LinkedIn will bring your online store up and increase your coverage in localized marketing. Here, you can also organize a professional portfolio for online reference.

The Local SEO

Perhaps one of the key points is to ensure that you utilize several search engines for your site. Take into account that even though Google is a prime search engine, there are many others out there where your sites can be found by- specifically local SEO. This is where knowing and understanding your audience will help you to understand what you need to do, especially for local marketing. Analyze and choose what subjects your customers are likely to search and find the best keys that they’ll be using when looking for you. But be wary of over emphasizing your keywords, as it can counteract your searches and potentially push customers away.

Though we often do get a break that brings us customers and traffic, we can’t rely on luck to do our work for us. When it comes to localized marketing, there are various ways you can potentially increase your web coverage by signing up with certain sites to boost your ratings on local search engines. Google Places is a big winner when it comes to localized searches. Yahoo! Local, City Searches, and Local.Com are also other sites that will increase your search engine awareness and make your online store available to everyone, especially those around you.

Your online store is one location on the internet in a world of many other businesses that also competes for face-time through customer searches. While it may seem difficult to compete with everyone else in the business world, by keeping up with research and practicing a few techniques, your localized marketing methods can help expand your store by ensuring that you cover all of your bases when it comes to marketing your online store effectively.

Your online business depends on your ability to constantly be proactive with your business. Ensuring that you take advantage of all of Silkfair’s resources is necessary to do this. Utilizing the proper tag lines, keeping fresh images and descriptions available on your site, and even taking advantage of video to make descriptions even more in-depth are all benefits that are readily available to you through Silkfair’s services.

Besides the basic online shop, you can also upgrade to a custom shop, allowing for an even more personalized store where you can create your own style. These custom shops offer all the amenities of a basic store plus more.

Keeping your items up-to-date

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and when it comes to making a sale they can hold their own value. But pictures do get old, or maybe they aren’t flashy enough. Make sure that you keep your photos updated, particularly for seasonal or promotional reasons. Give your items the feel for the time and environment they’re in.

Even descriptions should be updated periodically. Perhaps there’s a catchy way you can say things to help your items sell. Since SEOs constantly search for new images and data, keeping your descriptions and photos fresh can help bring your store and its items to the top of the list.

Be sure that your tags are catchy- SEO style

This brings us to the assistance that SEOs provide. Silkfair provides Google based product submission, so you need to make sure that your tittle tags and meta tags will ensure that your items will catch the attention of Google. This is why it’s important to keep your information fresh, since Google likes to draw upon fresh information. Besides just posting a meta tag for your shop, Silkfair also allows you to add meta tags to your items as well. This is a great opportunity to utilize popular items to draw in an audience.

Make use of your video descriptions

Perhaps one of the most interesting additions to Silkfair is their video marketing ability. Besides a photo and a brief description, you can make your own sales video to describe your items. This gives your store a personalized feel, and you’re able to completely describe and show off your items to your audience. Nothing makes a sale more personal than being able to hear and see what they are buying just like they’re in a hometown store. Just make sure that you follow Silkfair’s guidelines for videos.

Have your say

Another bonus that Silkfair offers is the opportunity to post your own blogs and discuss in-personalized forums. This gives you a chance to start conversations with your own words. The articles you write aren’t just for you to talk out loud, but are there to grab the attention of your audience. Because fresh information is what people are interested in, it is important that you constantly update blogs with new material. Although it can be difficult to say different things about what your store does, keep in mind that this is your shop, so don’t be afraid to get a little creative with the material. Make use of the season, sales, and stories that you’ve experienced with your store. If you have a forum, make sure that you continuously keep up with what’s going on there. Keep up with what others are talking about, and keep fresh information posted as well.

Silkfair helps you advertise

While there are various things you can do within Silkfair’s site, you can expand its abilities onto your own or other exterior sites with a Silkfairbadge. This static advertising is easily used, and allows a direct channel from a separate site to your online store at Silkfair.

The Mini Store Widget is another advertising item that allows for you to advertise your site through other sites. It is a link between social media, websites, and other online opportunities that will allow a direct window for your audience to see and visit your store. Conveniently, the widget can be picked up by friends and associates to be posted on their own sites to give your store more face time.
Silkfair is your online opportunity to make the most of your online store. All of these benefits are just waiting for you to take advantage of them. Make sure that you keep your information fresh, pictures and videos up-to-date, and your name out there and visible!