Selling Crafts Online

I’ve mentioned how writing articles is great free marketing for your crafts – enough times now so that some of you might be getting fed up with it – so I’ll keep this real short.

The thing is, it works – and here’s the proof:

That’s this blog, number one in Google, against 21,200,000 other pages – and I didn’t spend a cent on advertising. I write for the blog, I submit articles.

Now I’m not showing this to brag – I’m showing it to prove what works. How much better do you think your craft business would be doing if it was number one in Google – and it cost you nothing?

If you’re new to the blog and I haven’t had the chance to bore you to death with this yet check out a free, craft-only article site: Great Craft Articles and the best book on the subject: The Art of Article Marketing.

Google rankings change rapidly and maybe the site won’t be number one tomorrow. It’ll still be right up there – and every day in the top ten makes a huge difference to the exposure your craft business gets.

If you’ve been dropping by here for a while you’ll know I’m keen on article marketing as a means of attracting people to your online craft business. So keen in fact that I wrote a book about it

Well now I’ve gone one quite big step further – and created a whole website, designed to help you profit from it. What’s more, it’s completely free!

What I’ve done is built a craft article directory. Now, rather than have your article in amongst anything from Aardvark Food to Zipper Collectors, you’ll just be with fellow crafts people. As it grows it will become a definitive source for craft information off all kinds so your own articles will do better in the search engines and attract more visitors for your site. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.

All you need to do is register for your free account and start submitting your articles. There’s no “qualification”, no minimums, just add as many or as few as you like, when you like. Each one will help grow your craft business.

I think I’ve covered most of the things you need to know over at Great Craft Articles, so I won’t take up any more of your time here. Of course if you’ve any questions just drop me a line.

It will add valuable backlinks to your site for the search engines, draw dozens, possibly hundreds of potential customers to your craft business, and it’s free. Why wouldn’t you want to try it?

Good craft marketing can make an enormous difference to your business. To separate “marketing” from “selling”, lets call marketing the stuff you do to communicate with your potential customers. It’s not a precise description for those who are picky about these things, but it’ll do for us I think.

With the internet you have opportunity to market your crafts to a global audience, but how exactly are you going to do that? How are you going to benefit from the massive potential?

One way is by running a craft blog – and I’ll probably keep saying it until you’re sick of hearing it!

Fact is, they’re easy to start, fun to run and visitors love them. Done properly they’ll also rank very well in the search engines, often outranking craft sites that have been established much longer or those which might appear much bigger.

So particularly when you’re starting to sell your crafts online, when you’re just getting into craft marketing, a blog is a very valuable tool to have at your disposal.

Google's RSS reader page

One small, but extremely effective part of your craft blog’s armoury is RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Sadly many people don’t actually understand what this is and so fail to take advantage. That’s a shame, because RSS really is simple! Here’s how it works.

If you’re anything like me you probably visit a number of different craft blogs. It’s quite time consuming to visit each one and if there’s nothing of interest we just move on to the next. Putting them in your favorites reduces the time, but sometimes we just don’t bother to visit because we don’t have the time or inclination.

What if we could go to just one page though, where we could see a run down of the latest posts from all our favorite craft blogs? That would be quick, wouldn’t it. Then you could just visit those who actually had stuff you were interested in. Great idea!

Well that’s exactly what RSS does and that’s why it’s important to your craft marketing. People might visit your blog every so often, but if you get them to subscribe to your RSS (otherwise known as RSS feed) then they can check up on your news quickly and easily. If you want to see it in action, click on “Subscribe” over on the right under where it says “RSS Feed”.

Now it might be argued that it would be better if they came by your blog – which is true – but you have to accept that most people aren’t going to do that with any regularity. It’s also a good idea to have a newsletter so you can get in touch and market to them directly (more on that in another post).

However, good craft marketing means taking advantage of every opportunity to get your message in front of your potential customer and RSS is not only fast and easy but once set up requires no further involvement from you – it automatically sends out new post information every time you write one!