How to Promote My Etsy Store

Personal Journey of Etsy store Promotion

Date: Sun 20 Sep 09

Ah, the time has come. Desperation has started to seep in. I now need to knuckle down and try to promote my Etsy store in attempt to check if it has life.

I have procrastinated, that is true. Only because I knew that the path for me would not be quick and fast. Given my internal quirks, I knew I would find myself enmeshed in a long route to gather information before I could attempt to do this job. Related and unrelated questions galore were sure to pop up and would demand answers.

However the harsh realities of life has intruded. My Etsy store, opened on 31 Jul 2009, has had its viewers but very few sales. So obviously it is not just going to take off just because it is there. No "Build it and They Will Come" miracle happening there. Hence I need to ask myself, will some form of promotion help my Etsy Store take off ... ok, not necessarily take off .. just get up, stand up and show some signs of life? And what kind of promotions do I need to do?

This is a personal journey of self-Etsy discovery so it will be peculiar to the specifics of what I have going on hand right now. Nonetheless, I hope this journal, which is expected to be quite long, will have use to someone else along the way.

This article/journal is published as I go so the end is not in sight till the fat lady sings. And she is not yet in sight ... so come back often and check for updates if you think this might help your own store/site promotional issues.

RSS Feed

Believe it or not, my first stop seems to be RSS Feed.

I have a number of sites - related and unrelated to each other and the Etsy store in question. Surely, one of the benefits I should be able to glean from having multiple sites of varying interest is cross-promotion. And if some sites are semi-related, how do I get some of the information from one site on the other without having to double-write.

Which brings me to ask "What is RSS Feed?", "What is Feed Syndication?" and can I use it somehow to help in this aspect?

Having fresh content should help any site's popularity (one would think). But it would be a waste of time to have to write the same article for every site I want to have that information on. If a site's popularity can go up, then if that site promotes my Etsy store, then surely more people will eye-ball the site and maybe someone will find how very great my store and prices are! :)

(oops .. a whole day has passed since my last sentence! The demands of a day ... something else needed to be attended to and one thing or another, it has taken a whole day. Sigh!

Off to research the RSS thingy ...)

Done! You can find easy to understand RSS facts and how-tos in RSS Made Simple.

Another Delay. Drupal Core Security Updates

Date: Sun 20 Sep 09

Hah .. here I thought I could continue. This morning, as I was looking into Drupal Aggregator module (I had forgotten that Drupal has something that has something to do with syndication and RSS feeds ..), I find out that there are those needed but annoying security updates for the Drupal core. Which means it is likely that this whole day I will have to be attending to that as there are multiple sites I have to do. Sigh :(

Let's just do Etsy

OK. I have abandoned my first approach (trying to be thorough and researching RSS as well as Drupal's modules for RSS related publishing). That is just going to take too long and with too many side-tracks. So I will just go directly to Etsy and see what they have to offer in terms of promotion. That might be a faster first step to take. But ...

... I still have to wait as I need to attend to some customers right now and go to the post office .... oh well ...

I am back. Have spent the last hour trying to read and where to best go on Etsy to find relevant, usable store promotions guides and tips. And I must say, it takes a lot of time and I am still as clear as mud.

Here is a quick overview review:

Resources

Not what I was looking for but may be useful at some stage. You do not have to log in to view Etsy's Resources. The Resources section contains:
* Buttons - little images (125x125px and smaller) that you can use as links on your other sites to link to your etsy shop.
* Printable Downloads
* etc..

Etsy Teams

This section is a bit confusing. There are tons of different teams. And I am still not very clear how useful joining any of the Etsy Teams is going to be for promoting one's store. It looks like it will take quite a bit of your precious time though so whether it is worth the effort, I don't really know and as I said, it is not clear.

Looked through a number of the teams. Some have requirements you must meet before you can even join. A number were closed for any more new members. And how to join was not always clear in some of the team's guidelines.

It looks like it will just take a whole lot of work just to find out what team one should/can join, if they will accept, and what they actually do. So I have to give this a miss for now.

Opinion: Seems to be too much hard work for too unclear gains or purpose.

Community

Most of the possible avenues seem to be in Etsy Community (tab). I can't say that anything else jumps up at me that says it could be useful for my purposes at the moment. The Storque looks like it might be an okay place to go to to read news and articles when one is less busy. But it will be more dissipated knowledge than what I am needing right now so I will leave etsy and goggle for promoting-store information instead.

Conclusion: Not much focused, easy-to-find help on how to promote one's Etsy store within Etsy itself.

Google Search for Tips on How to Promote Etsy Shop

Back to good ole faithful - the Google! Doing a "how to promote etsy shop" search. Here are some results.

From eHow

have a link to your shop in your email sig
have a blog about your shop and post every time you list a new item
(take this with a grain of salt if you have thousands and thousands of items! You won't have time for anything else!)
take part in Etsy Community Forums, especially their Business Forum
write about your area of interest in EzineArticles.com and link back to your Etsy shop in the bio info.
(This site has a Google rating of 6 right now so that might be quite sound advice.
Addendum 9Oct09: It has a lot of rules and regulartions for submission. It does not allow any pictures. So all the articles look kind of boring. Giving it a miss for now.)
create a Squidoo lens and link back to your shop
(Also very good advice.
Addendum 9Oct09: have started my Squidoo and written up about the basics of Squidoo. I like it but Squidoo eats a lot of download consumption.)

Other Useful Pages on Promoting Etsy Shop

Tools for Etsy Sellers - a Squidoo page with lots of good advice. I still have to read it fully but it sure looks worthwhile to check out.

I am going to break from my old habit (which is to research obsessively and then leave very little time to actually DO) so I will meander off (after having to cook dinner and relax! So maybe I won't get back here till tomorrow ..) and put some of these good advice into action. Will chat back later.

Squidoo

This is the first I am going to give attention to. I have already come across this before and spent some time reading about it but didn't have time to do anything. It did look interesting so I am off to pay more attention and attempt to actually do somthing there.

You can come join me and do a quick learn on how to be a Squid on Squidoo.