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How many of you haven’t heard „Oh, my God! That’s so cute. You should sell it!” when other people (friends, family or just simple acquaintances) have seen your crafts? And you took their advice, worked your butt off to create original pieces, went to craft fairs, set up online shops and ....the results were not as you expected them. Time passed and sales seem not to reflect your devotion and heart put in every little piece of work. Naturally, you start questioning yourself what you’re doing wrong?, what we’re doing wrong?, where is everybody screwing up?
The thing is that no one is doing anything wrong, but you must take advantage of the traffic and potential customers that visit your shops everyday. We’re bringing them here, you must make them stay, buy and return or at least speak about what they bought from you. That is advertising, that turns your shop into a viral.
Now let’s get over all the specific marketing terminology and get to clean tips and suggestions on a budget, suggestions you can choose to stick to and improve your online stores.
Basically, it’s all down to DETAILS.
1. List new items. Often. Let’s suppose you finished 3 new items, nobody asks you to list them immediately. Today, tomorrow, in a week, listings are free and are meant to give you time to showcase each object. Show everybody that each item is important (so each needs some time to be in the flashlight before another one takes its place)
2. Develop the niche you’re good at and showcase your shop accordingly. If you try your hand in different crafts and areas, it may be better to have a new shop for each interest, rather than mixing paper crafts, with jewelry and vintage items with prints. Mixing different things only gives a feeling of discomfort and suggests you don’t really know what you’re selling; you may send wrong signals. If you’re not sure on your items, why should I buy them?
3. Be active in the forums, use the free blog as a way to advertise your items (I know several of you are already doing this, but this article is meant to tip suggestions to each seller in SilkFair). Posting raises the number of people that see your name, thus the number of people visiting your store. Keep in mind that other SF sellers are also potential customers.
4. Market you store! (Yes, we’re always going to emphasize the marketing thing, this is the way all businesses in the world develop). You know you should be doing this - but are you?
a). Join forums and put your SilkFair store URL/ widget in your signature, if the forum rules allow it.
b). Find people to link to your SilkFair store, and do the same for them in return. Advertise in free bulletin boards. List your stores in specific directories:
http://www.myspace.com/
http://www.cracker.com.au
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
http://froogle.google.com/
http://www.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
http://www.arts-crafts.com/market/
http://www.ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/
http://www.made-in-new-york.com/
http://seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html
http://www.blogger.com/start
http://www.freecraftfair.com/link_exchange.html
http://www.freecraftfair.com/categories.html
http://www.bust.com/girlweb/index.html
http://www.clipfire.com/
c). Put your SILKFAIR URL in your e-mail signature
d). Join communities and stick to other sellers in SF. Create groups, network, share skills, and promote your products and shops all together. Start groups based on shared location, craft interests, similar business medium or any other thing you may have in mind.
http://www.stumbleupon.com
http://groups.xanga.com
http://www.stylehive.com
http://www.kaboodle.com
http://www.thisnext.com
And a couple for moms:
http://babble.com/
http://www.momblognetwork.com/
e). Do business card exchange with other sellers. You can use Vistaprint.com – (they have a free business card feature) and give them away like crazy. Send samples or cards to people attending craft fairs in other cities. Send your items to the Sampler (homeofthesampler.com) for gaining more exposure both online and to subscribers.
f). Use the video feature, people! The future of all business is in the interactive media. We’re offering you showcase with videos, why don’t you take advantage of that? Create short advertising videos for your items or your whole shop. You have tons of imagination to create beautiful, unique things; you must be able to create videos, too. Upload them on YouTube (if really creative) or just showcase them in SF (I know I’d like to see the backstage of your business, we all appreciate hard work so why not share a little piece of the process)
Not everything is going to work, but keep mark of what it does and stick to that!
5. Be accurate and objective when pricing your items. Calculate the costs based on your work, time spent and market relevancy. Try to have a couple of “less than 10$” items in your store, as statistics say that people are more likely to buy cheaper things.
P.S. Stay tune for the photo tutorial to come.
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Blog info
Title:
SILKFAIR Blog
Updated on: Feb 28, 2008
Viewed 5028 times
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