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.