As we've established in prior posts, getting a shop up and running on Etsy takes more work than simply making the items you want to sell. It's downright hard work.
Part of what you need to be willing to do, is promoting your shop on your own. There are a lot of ways to do this. Some are easy, and others take perseverance and patience.
First up, the most common way: Social Media.
Social Media is free. That's the easy part. The hard part? Finding where to promote your shop. Obviously, you can share your shop on Facebook, and you'll probably get some hits from your family and friends, but they won't want to be bombarded with posts daily.
Facebook: Find some groups. First and foremost, find some Etsy specific groups. These are good mainly for help when you need it, but they also are a good way to promote your items to each other. Your shop may not see a lot of sales, but the traffic will go up, and that is a big help. You will also find a lot of help by way of Shop Critiques. What's that? It's where perfect strangers come in and tell you what you can/should do to change your shop and make it more appealing to shoppers.
My favorite groups on Facebook:
- Helping Etsiansv - This groups is helpful in giving tips, answering questions, and it does allow you to post links to your shop twice a day. With over 12,000 members, you are sure to find some interest, and get your questions answered.
- Amazing Etsians - This group is small, with under 1,000 members. However, I have found that despite it's size, it's been helpful in getting promoting done. The members are encouraged (ie: not required, but strongly encouraged) to go through and favorite, pin, and tweet several listings a day from each other. This helps get your shop out there to new groups of people. If you join, please make sure you can take the time to promote each other.
Another type of group to find are the ones with people who will buy your stuff. Sounds ideal, right? But it's the truth. Say you sell wedding favors. Who would you want to sell to? Brides to be, right? Well, you'd want to look up groups on Facebook that are geared towards women planning their weddings.
Be forewarned- not all groups allow advertising, so make sure you read the rules of the group before you jump in.
Twitter: On Twitter, it's not like there are groups of people who can go directly to a page and see what you posted. They only see what you post if it's relevant to a hashtag they clicked. So for Twitter, you need to find the most relevant hashtags to your items, and learn how to post so that your item link is in it, the item name is in it, and relevant hashtags.
Some examples of popular Etsy Hashtags:
#shopetsy
#shophandmade
#etsy
#etsyshop
There are also Twitter parties. What are these? They are a set day and time where people log into twitter, and share their Etsy items, all using a specific hashtag. During the parties, you should also visit the links others post, and retweet them. This will ensure you are well received. People who log in just to spam their own link and not interact will not see much of a return from Twitter parties.
You can find Twitter parties by doing a web search for "Etsy Twitter Party". Several Facebook groups promote their own parties.
Bestie.com: Bestie is Twitter & Facebook meshed for products. You can only promote products, abd it's a big mashup of people. Etsy itself promotes on the site, and I've had the fortune to have them post some of my items. You share items, "save" other items from other people, and hope they do the same for you. You can also friend people on there, which allows a further reach.
StumbleUpon!: Stumble is a way to rank a website or page on the internet, share it with the page, and hope it goes viral. This site is good for immediate views, but within about 5 minutes, the views are gone. The site really works best for funny websites, not products, but it is a free way to promote.
Pinterest: Who hasn't heard of Pinterest yet? They call it White Girl Porn. It's really a fun site, but it can be a giant time suck. That said, it's a great way to promote for free, so whose to look that gift horse in the mouth? Pinning your etsy items is EASY.
Simply go to your listing on Etsy, and click the PIN IT button, right under the price tag. As long as you are logged into Pinterest already, it will bring up a window, ask you to choose your board, and allow you to pin it. It takes about 15 seconds to do. It's worth your time. I have, on average, 30 views a day generated from Pinterest.
Now for the slightly harder page that will change your game entirely.
To break it down- Aroundio costs $10 a month, which is a subscription that can be cancelled at any time. It's paid out through Paypal. You MUST have an Etsy account for Aroundio. There is a free 7 day trial to see if it works for you, though. I encourage you to use it, since you do not sign up for any payment information until your trial is done.
With Aroundio, you can pre-schedule posts to:
Tumblr
You can schedule as many or as few as you want. I currently have it set up to post twice daily to 14 different Etsy groups on Facebook, 4x daily to my Facebook shop page, 6x daily to Twitter, and 9x daily to Pinterest.
The best part? It will generate all the posts for you. You just have to schedule them. It will set a random time, chose the groups, and the posts. For Twitter, it even does quotes so that you are drawing additional people to your Twitter page from the #quote hashtag.
It's been a huge boost for me. I get more comments on my automated posts in groups, and I see more traffic to Etsy. I'm not sure if it helps with sales, but today is March 3rd, and I have 13 sales already, and I'm over $100 in revenue. From Feb 1-3rd, I had 2 sales, and $16 revenue. I had 481 shop views Feb 1-3, and 66 Favorites. I had 780 shop views from March 1-3, and 83 Favorites. All around, those are great jumps in numbers.
Even if you decide it's not for you, it's WORTH the trial run.
Don't forget to check out my other articles about how to make Etsy shops work for you!
Promoting On Etsy: The Lowdown
10 Tips For Selling on Etsy
Etsy: Setting Goals
4 comments:
Etsy stores require a bit of setting up, to make sure that everything is in order. It’s not something that you can just leave on its own after the initial registration and a bit of tinkering. Pretty much like a physical store, you've got to oversee it, keep watch, and create publicity. But since it is online, you have a lot of ways to make it easier for you and your potential clients, and you have far more reach compared to traditional shops and stores.
Cory Phil @ Front Burner Marketing
I hope Social media is a high power among all. Where we can get more visitors, if your product is more attractive means they will surely come forward to buy it.
Very helpful article but I would like to suggest SocialPilot (http://socialpilot.co/product-promotion/etsy)for promoting your Etsy products on Social media. It saves your lots of time and efforts of promoting each product on social media. It also allows advanced scheduling and higher queue limits so you can easily plan your monthly product promotions by investing just 30 minutes. It has three plan but the starter plan is free for life time so it’s really budget-friendly for Etsy seller.
Thank you so much for posting this information.
I have been on Etsy for yikes, 8 years. Did not have the time to promote my shop prior to this. I am very aware that I used to get many more views, before Easy went public, before Etsy changed their business model.
Will get to work on SEO, and follow up with your other suggestions. If you have any new information, looking forward to it!
Rachel
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