Is it worth paying for advertising?

I've not written a businessy-type blog post for ages. I guess that's because the rate at which I'm learning things (and therefore have new things to share) is slowing down now my business is more established. I've been thinking about advertising again recently though, so thought I'd share my thoughts.

If you run a small business or sell your handmade products this is probably a question you've asked yourself at some point - is it worth paying for advertising? Or, more precisely, is it worth paying for this particular bit of advertising that I'm considering?

Until you have tried a particular channel of advertising it is very hard to know if it will bring you any additional sales. This is something that I have learnt to accept. Sometimes you just have to spend a little bit of money to try things out, and then change track if it's not working. But I like to at least be able to evaluate an advertising opportunity and see if I think it might be worth it financially.

So I thought I'd share how I consider a paid advertising channel. This is just really from a financial perspective - of course you will also need to think about whether the advertising will reach your target customer and is in line with your brand.

I hope that's helpful. Sometimes this helps me see that I should definitely pay for a piece of advertising, and other times it helps me realise that I would never make my money back. A very tempting advertising offer can suddenly seem not so appealing when you work out how many items you would have to sell to make it worth while!

You can use this method for free advertising too, by converting your time into a financial cost. If it will take you an hour a week to maintain a certain advertising channel, change this into a monetary cost by using the hourly wage you want to be paid. Then you can use the above calculation to see if it's worth the time investment.

The Best of British Handmade

Have you seen The Best of British Handmade - a new site promoting products that have been handmade in the UK? It was launched in late July 2012 and is "dedicated to supporting and promoting UK based, designers and makers".

I was lucky enough to be featured in their August and September showcases and am loving the site so far. So I thought I'd have a chat to Jenny who set up The Best of British Handmade to find out a bit more. I'll let Jenny introduce herself:

"I am married to Paul and am Mum to 3 Boys and 1 Little Girl. Currently I am a stay at home mum, but I have plenty to keep me busy. I have also just started to learn about working with Metal Art Clay."

Say it music notebooks featured on the home page

I asked Jenny if she could tell us about why she set up The Best of British Handmade and what her hopes for it are. She says:

"The idea for The Best Of British Handmade came about because of my passion for handmade. I think that there are so many talented people who produce such a wide range of hand crafted items, I wanted to set up a website that could promote and advertise individual designers, whilst showing the variety of items that are available. There are a few sites out there but often the high fees associated with advertising are too much for the smallest businesses.

I wanted the site to be available to everyone, from those that have trained in their crafts to the smallest, self taught designer, I wanted to be able to treat everyone the same. There are only a few of "rules" for people that want to be involved with us. 1. They must be in the UK. 2. Their website or shop must comply with the Distance selling Regulations. 3. We are looking for a factor that makes their work stand out from the crowd, that could be that they only use sustainable materials or their unique designs, traditional craftsmanship. That "factor" will be different for everyone."

There are a number of different ways that you can get involved with The Best of British Handmade. You can get your website or shop listed in the directory for FREE. There are categories for different types of crafts, as well as supplies, courses and events. You can even get your craft blog listed. Then for a small fee you can apply to be in their monthly handmade showcase or be one of five featured designers, with a photo of one of your items on the front page. Jenny works hard to promote you if you sign up, with plenty of tweets and facebook posts linking to your website sent out to her growing number of followers.

September showcase at The Best of British Handmade

You can also get involved with the Best of British Handmade blog. Jenny is currently looking for sponsors for the site who will get their button displayed on the blog, and for bloggers who would like to write a guest post about some of their new products, craft tutorials or a special event.

Is it worth getting involved? I was curious to find out how much interest Jenny has had in the site so far.

"I launched the site in late July 2012, and so far it has grown massively. We had over 1500 visitors in August and we have already matched that for september. We have added over 100 sites to the directory so far and we get new applications every day. I would like The Best Of British Handmade to develop as a community, everyone working together to promote British Handmade."

I would say that's pretty good for a site that's only two months old! For August and September The Best of British Handmade was my 8th best referral site for the say it folksy shop, only being beaten by sites that I use to actively promote my shop such as twitter and facebook. I'd definitely recommend getting involved and supporting The Best of British Handmade.

Many thanks to Jenny for taking the time to share more about her new venture. I'm looking forward to watching the community grow.

Website - http://www.thebestofbritishhandmade.co.uk/
Blog - http://www.thebestofbritishhandmade.co.uk/the-best-of-british-handmade-blog.html
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/TBOBHandmade
Twitter - http://twitter.com/tbobhandmade


Looking for more interesting blog reading? Why not hop over to Handmade Monday - Wendy's got some news about giveaways today!

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!

Advertising my handmade shop

How do people know I'm here? How do they find my shop? I know that people will only purchase my handmade items if they somehow find their way into my little tiny section on Folksy. A few people may stumble across it by accident or come through the Folksy search function, but on the whole people won't know about my shop unless I tell them.

So I've spent the last month researching advertising. I've emailed people, joined up to new sites and been uploading pictures. And I thought you may be interested in the types of advertising I've found. Warning: I discovered lots of interesting sites, so this is quite a long post!

Social Networking
Everyone talks about Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Stumbleupon etc etc. so I'll not say much, but it's definitely worth using at least one of these - just make sure you include good links to your shop. Facebook is one of my biggest sources of traffic.

Blogging
Blogs are a great way of being able to say more about what you do. I like the freedom of being able to write about whatever I want. Make sure you add a followers button and/or an option to sign up to follow by email, so that people are notified when you write a new post. And include a big fat visible link to your shop.
Also, commenting on other people's blogs is a great way of networking. I've found they often come over and take a peek at my blog just to see who it is who's left a comment. I have a new rule that I'm not allowed to read three blog posts without commenting on at least one of them. And as a blogger, it's so encouraging to know that someone stopped by to read what you write.

Forums
I'm not a forum person. I don't think I ever commented on a Forum in my life before I set up say it. I don't mind reading them, but I never really thought about contributing. Now I post in Forums almost every day. The first obvious one is the forum for the site you sell through (Folksy forums are great, so friendly). Then have a look out for other handmade / craft websites that have a community of sellers - UK Handmade and Creative Connections are good places to start.

Craftjuice
Add a link to an item in your shop then get others to vote for you. If you get to five votes, they post your item on their facebook page. But don't stop voting - the top voted items in the month get featured in a monthly email. It's really easy to use and is a simple bit of extra free advertising. Can I encourage you to sign up to Craftjuice and get started. Then visit the 'craft talk' thread in the Folksy forums and add your item to the Craftjuice topic - we all vote for each other :-)

Craft Directories
There are several sites / blogs that include a directory of makers, designers, handmade shops and crafty blogs. Many of these will add you for free. So far I have discovered The Crafty Network, Handmade Crafts Directory, Crafty Bitz, and UK Craft Blog, but there are probably many more. If it's free you may as well get yourself listed, it only takes a few minutes.

Non-craft advertising sites
It's good sometimes to venture outside our safe craft bubble, because most of our customers will probably be out there in the world and may not know to look on specific sites for handmade goodies. This is a little bit trial and error, but I have found that Freeads is quite good and brings a little bit of traffic to my shop. It also gives you quite good google search ratings. It takes a while to upload photos, but you get a free advert so can't really complain!

Virtual shop fronts / interactive advertising
The latest additions to my advertising are sites that offer you a shop front, but that link through to your existing shop (on Folksy or wherever) if someone wants to buy something. See my sale is a new site that's only just opened, but looks promising. It's not just for handmade crafts, so again helps to branch out and reach different people. Stallholder looks like another valuable site. I've only just signed up and I'm still figuring out how it works, but essentially it looks like a shop front that links to your own site when someone clicks 'buy now'. And if you have a spare fiver, Craftfest is an online craft fair event (the next one runs for a week in June) - sign up and get your own virtual table which you can add your products to.

Get yourself featured
There are lots of bloggers out there who regularly do interviews with designer-makers. Sometimes they have a form to register your interest in being featured, sometimes they do a shout out on facebook asking for volunteers, and sometimes you just have to be brave and get in touch (the worst that can happen is that they say no!). It takes a little while to write thought through answers to the questions, but it may be time well spent. Check out the interviews on Handmade Harbour, The Crafty Network and Heart Handmade (and look out for say it featuring soon on at least one of these!).

Join a blog ring / link party
I had no idea what a blog ring was until a few weeks ago. Apparently they used to be popular 'back in the day'. The lovely Sarah from Merry Berry and the Little Panda has just set one up - find out more here.
You can also join in with link parties, where you leave a link to your blog and check out the other blogs that have been linked. It's a good way to both find new blogs to read yourself and get a few new visitors to your blog. I like Handmade Monday, but there are many to choose from.

And if you have a little money to spend...
I'm just beginning to think about spending some money on advertising. I had a trial with google adwords and whilst it brought lots of visitors I didn't get one sale from it, so have put that on hold. It's very expensive too - I had £55 to try out and it lasted about six weeks with two different ads running. For cheaper options try a Made it Flaunt it showcase (£5 per item per monthly showcase), UK Handmade showcase (£10 per showcase) or The Handmade Gift Guide (£2.95 per item for six weeks).
And if you have a local magazine or village newsletter it's worth contacting them to see how expensive their advertising is. My local one is pretty expensive, but my mum's one does small ads for 20p per word so I might give that a go.

Phew, I think that's everything! I can't guarantee that any of these will bring you visitors or sales. I'm monitoring google analytics closely to see which ones work for me - and maybe I'll write another post in a couple of months letting you know which ones brought the most traffic. EDIT - follow up post is here.

I'm sure this is only the tip of the iceberg and there are probably loads of great ways of advertising that I've not discovered yet. Feel free to comment if there are any you know of.

I'm linking this post to Handmade Monday. Hello to any readers who have popped in from there - I hope this was a useful post for you. If, having finished this post, you're in search of more interesting crafty blogs to read, why not pop over to Handmade Monday and see what else is linked.

Made it flaunt it

I've discovered a fantastic site that's helping to support handmade. Made it flaunt it run monthly showcases to promote the work of UK makers, crafters and designers.

It's well worth a look, whether you're a maker looking to 'flaunt' your work, or a buyer looking to find superb handmade items. The April showcase has just gone live. See if you can spot a couple of say it items amongst the gorgeous work featured this month. 

Handmade Monday

Firstly, a big welcome to any Handmade Monday readers - thank you very much for stopping by my blog.

So, what's 'Handmade Monday' you might be wondering? Well, I came across a lovely blog last week run by Wendy from 1st Unique Gifts. She's set up a weekly link swap, especially for bloggers who write about/make handmade items. The idea is that you leave a link to your blog on the Handmade Monday post, and it builds up a wonderful collection of new blogs to browse.

And it's Monday again, so I thought I'd let you know about this super opportunity. If you're looking for some new blogs with interesting content pop over to Handmade Monday. Today you can read about handmade notebooks, crocheted Easter chicks, rainbow mice, a tutorial for making a shopping bag, extreme crochet and themed handbags. And you could always leave a link back to your own blog if you'd like a few new visitors (they just ask that you put a link back to Handmade Monday on your own blog, only polite!).