Sales & Marketing

I've been a bit busy this last week or two, reading various posts over on the Etsy forums about ways of advertising/marketing your Etsy shop. I've made a list as long as my arm of all the suggestions and various websites that are out there in internet land but so many of them are community/social sites - I just don't have the time to build relationships everywhere that might help get the word out!

So what to do? Well, I've been concentrating on blog related stuff initially - I already blog and have wondered before how to find out blogs of interest to me and how to get the word out about mine. I also knew nothing about RSS feeds. Well, that orange icon that you see everywhere these days - if you're using internet explorer, just click on the icon and it lets you subscribe to a feed. You'll find your feeds under the favourites but on their own tab. If it's in bold, there's a new post to read. No more hunting down a long list to see if someone has updated - Yay!

If you haven't visited for a while, you'll notice various widgets and clickable thingies in my side bar. I've found statcounter for a visitor count and that was the easiest I think.

Next came blogcatalog which seems to be a directory type site where you can not only list your own blog but also choose categories, then you can go looking through the directory within your category and hey presto - lots of blogs with similar interests to read. If you start adding friends and joining neighbourhoods, your blog rating goes up so eventually you end up nearer the top of the category listing and more people find you. I seem to be having a few hits from there in just 10 days so something is working :)

Then I decided to add Technorati to my list of sites to learn about. Haven't really got to grips with that one yet but it's the one most people say you should have. I've only been on there about 4 days so haven't investigated it too much yet.

Also from the Etsy forums is Stumbleupon - basically download a toolbar then wherever you go on the internet, if you like a site, click on the thumbs up icon. You can also use it to randomly surf the net - choose some categories that you like and it will randomly bring up sites within those categories. So how can we use Stumbleupon to market? Well, if we all thumbs up each others shops, when a non-etsy person goes stumbling, it increase the chances of our shops being one of the random sites.

My favourite so far though is Feedburner - you sign up (yep, another one!!) then'burn your feed' - just follow their instructions, it's not too difficult at all. So why is it my favourite? - because one of the things that feedburner does is to give you feedback on how many people out there in internet-land have subscribed to your feed - yes, I have readers :) I'm not talking to myself after all!

So what sort of photo could I add to this post to

a) break it up a bit and

b) make it pretty! LOL

Had to be some of my stock photos - PC innards for the techie bit, coffee and biscuits 'cos I've usually got a mug of coffee next to me at the keyboard and mini eggs 'cos it's Easter :) Hope you're having a good one with lots of choccy.