Rush Christmas Orders!

Hey there, everyone. I got some last minute orders from my shops and distributor. It will take me a few days to get them out. I am going to have to step away for a few days. In the meantime there are plenty of archives to check out or just use the tag cloud to find articles on what you are looking for. I will check back in soon!

Targeting Your Market

Some people believe that it is better to target a huge market to get noticed. I disagree. I believe the more you narrow down your market the easier it is to get to them. With Christmas here it is now time to start thinking about how you plan to improve your sales for 2012.

It all starts with defining your product. In the course of defining you should think about who would buy your product. Get very specific. How old is he/she? What kind of income bracket do they fall into? What kind of job do they have? How do they spend their weekends? Why do they want to buy your product?

Create the perfect model of who buys your product and market to them. Both Google AdWords and Facebook advertising make it easy to advertise to the model you just created. You can even target them by what time they are on the Internet.

Just like in the dartboard above, the main target is a small one with plenty of room around it. As long as you are always aiming for a bulls-eye you are going to hit something outside of it, even if it is the wall the target is hanging on. Aim for your ideal customer and concentrate on talking to them.

Linking To Your Etsy Shop

Yesterday we talked about some ways to get links back to your Etsy shop to help increase your Google Pagerank. What I didn't mention is that your Pagerank is not really all that important and that a few good quality links mean more than hundreds or thousands of poor links.

What I mean by that is if you have a link from sites that bring you customers it is better than having links from sites that bring you nothing. There are link farms that will put up a link to anything. They don't have any categories or subjects, just links to your site. These things can actually hurt your Pagerank and can even potentially get your site blocked from Google all together just because of your association with them.

If you see ads for "Get 1000 Links Now" or "1000's Of Social Network Links For Only $19.95" stay away from them. These do NOT help your SEO. If you want more traffic faster than building it organically then buy some adspace on a website that relates to your medium of art. Better yet, buy some Google Ads or Facebook Ads and target your market.

The very best ways to get links to your site is to ask for them, talk about your shop on Facebook and Twitter, and just plain old word of mouth. Comment on blogs. Write an article about your shop and submit it to online news media.

That is it for today. Check back next week for more tips for marketing your shop.

Add Links To Your Shop

I woke up to an email from a frustrated shop owner that wants to know how to get relative links to her shop without paying tons of money or being spammy. Here is a copy of the e-mail:

"I was told by someone on etsy that I need to have my links placed all over the internet for SEO purposes and they have to be relevant to the category I’m selling in (jewelry). Other than blogs and such they suggested directories and sites where you add your url in with thousands of others. I tried this today and about walked away in tears because each site (including the .org ones) wanted a boat load of money to list my url. My question for you is: can you give me any ideas n where to find free (and relevant, not spammy) places to add my url to? I am getting so frustrated with seo. I’m so thankful to have your help, but it just gets so overwhelming. It is no wonder people pay webmasters large quantities of money to manage websites for them."  -A Frustrated Shop Owner


Well, Frustrated Shop Owner, yes, incoming URLs to your shop help with pagerank and SEO. "Pagerank" is a term that means "the importance of your page." Pagerank is on a scale from 0 - 10, with 10 being the very highest. Google has a Pagerank of 10. Most peoples page has a rank of 0. The higher the number the more important the page is. Aim for a 3 or better, but don't expect much very fast.

Commenting on Blogs is a quick and easy way to get links to your shop but it only goes so far. You should try and find relevant blogs to comment on because those links carry more weight. Your own blog will carry more weight because you know your product best. Posting in relevant forums with a link to your shop in the signature provides relevant links. Asking relevant sites to place a link to your shop is also good.

As far as directories go, there is one that is above all others: The Open Directory Project or DMOZ.ORG is the largest human-edited directory on the Internet. That means that every submission is reviewed for relevancy before going live. It does take a few months to be listed so get on it. Squidoo is a site where you can create Wiki like articles about subjects you know. These links are relevant because you write the story. Speaking of you can even start a Wikipedia entry about your company, too!

There are a lot of places that you can create relevant links to your shop. I point a lot of links over to my main company website and link back over to my shop page. It is easier to get links to your website because you can reciprocate. Believe it or not but ArtFire is a great way to build links to your Etsy shop or website. Every item page has links to my Etsy shop and my website.

Tomorrow I will add some more free ways to get links to your shop. I hope this helps. Be sure to keep the questions coming, either as comments or through MarketMyShop@gmail.com