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Friday 27 July 2012

Advertising your handmade items - 10 weeks on

At the end of April I wrote a post about some research I had done on promoting your handmade crafts. You can see the post here. It was a summary of lots of different things you can do to advertise your shop or website, including social media, forums and directories. I was amazed by the number of different ways there are to get your products seen by potential customers.

As promised, I'm back to let you know which of these many ideas have been most successful. For the last 10 weeks I've been monitoring how much traffic each method of promotion has brought to my blog and / or shop.

Here's a summary of the figures:

Folksy shop

Site Average no. of views /week Average time spent on the site
Facebook 14.3 04:48
My blog 10.8 07:06
Other people's blogs
- leaving comments or being featured
3.4 08:48
Folksy Forums 35 03:48
Craft Juice 7.2 06:24
The Crafty Network 1.5 05:03
Handmade Crafts Directory 1 05:42
Heart Handmade 2.4 14:31
Free Ads 0.1 02:56
Stall Holder 0.25 02:16
CraftFest / Creative Connections 2.1 16:30
Made it Flaunt it
- during month of showcase
2.5 00:20


Blog

Site Average no. of views /week Average time spent on the site
Facebook 11.2 02:36
Other people's blogs
- leaving comments or being featured
0.8 02:06
Folksy Forums 38.9 01:16
The Crafty Network 0.83 02:01
Heart Handmade 1.1 03:51
UK Craft Blog 1.7 00:30
CraftFest / Creative Connections 3.25 06:19
Blog Rings 4.8 01:40
Link Parties 3.1 04:12



Number one tip for advertising: Use the forums for the selling site you use. As you can see, the Folksy forums bring the most visitors to both my shop and my blog, by quite a long way.

Number two: Get in on the social media action. Facebook comes second for both the shop and the blog. I believe that Twitter and Pinterest are also very good at bringing traffic, but I have only just started using these so I've not included them as it's not a fair comparison.

Number three: Start a blog and update it regularly. My blog gets quite a lot of traffic, and from the numbers above I can see that some of it makes its way across to my shop. These people are already interested in what I do, and tend to spend quite a while browsing my shop.

Number four: Sign up to Craftjuice. It's free promotion and it works.

Number five: Link your blog up to some link parties or blog rings. It generates a bit of extra traffic. I've only used one link party and one blog ring, but if you were to sign up to four or five you could potentially bring in a lot more visitors than the figures above suggest.

Number six: Network. Join other forums. Leave comments on blogs you follow. Interact with people on Facebook and Twitter. Swap blog buttons. Look out for bloggers who do regular features of handmade makers and put yourself forward. As they say, it's often about who you know.

Number seven: If you have time sign up to craft directories and blog directories. These tend to bring quite a bit of traffic to begin with, especially if the latest additions to the directory are at the top, but it trails off over time. It's not going to bring you the most visitors, but who wouldn't say no to an extra one or two for free.

Please note that this research was only done over a 10 week period, and I wasn't consistently putting the same effort into all the above. It's probably fairly obvious, but it looks like you get the rewards where you put the work in. And this wasn't a comprehensive search, so I've probably missed some excellent advertising sites. Please let me know your favourites in the comments!

9 comments:

  1. I guess it's different for all shops as i have just decided to no longer take part in the daily listing forum on Folksy since it takes up a lot of my time and i get very little views in return. Although i have not done any research as such like you, i do keep an eye on my views and most of mine are from stumbleupon with craftjuice being 2nd and facebook 3rd.

    http://knitting-topia.blogspot.co.uk/
    Carol x

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    Replies
    1. I agree that the Daily Listing Forum takes a lot of time. I'm thinking about joining the new weekly one. And there's always the 'what did you list today' one! I've not ventured into stumbleupon yet, so perhaps I should check it out, thanks :-)

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  2. Good post, I started networking and promoting as soon as I signed up to twitter which was about 6 months ago now. I too have noticed how much traffic it all brings in. I heard about Craft Juice on the Folksy forums and it's brilliant, I've had a rise in views - which I like to think will some day result in sales!!

    I haven't considered Blog parties/rings - to be honest I'm not even sure what they are.. or how you do that. It's something I will look into.

    Thanks!

    The Mucky Pup.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Craftjuice is great isn't it :-)

      If you're looking for a blog link party to try, pop over to handmade monday (on a monday!) - it's hosted at handmade harbour http://handmadeharbour.blogspot.co.uk/ You just add a link to your blog, and visit some of the others who have linked up. There are more details here http://handmadeharbour.blogspot.co.uk/p/handmade-monday.html They're a very friendly bunch :-)

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    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete
  5. Hello. Thanks for stopping by to take a look at my blog. Glad it's a helpful post for you :-)

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  6. Discovered your post through the Folksy forums (another notch up to them!) - thanks for the useful info. I'd never really heard of Craft Juice but anything that drives views/sales has got to be good, so I've just requested an invitation. I'm still building up to trying Facebook & Twitter as they are not something I use for my personal social networking & therefore not the easiest tools for me to use; but given that so many other people use them, it would be foolish not to try to reach some of those people, so I'm working on that...

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for popping over to my blog, and I'm pleased this post was helpful for you. Craftjuice is really easy to use so I hope it brings you some extra views. Don't forget to post in the Folksy forum craftjuice thread, then we all vote for each other!

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Thanks for your comments, I always love reading them.

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