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!