Selling Tips

There are many wonderful crafters and artists who submit to Crafty Tips. The busiest category (and the one with the most listings) showcases the works of Jewelry Makers from all over the world. As you can imagine, I’ve seen a variety of photography styles and techniques. Some do a wonderful job of showing each piece to its full beauty, some are almost there and sometimes the photo is lovely but still fails to explain the piece.

One of the problems is that many pieces are hard to imagine in action. In action? Yep. Think about the action of jewelry - earrings and pendents hang and dangle and necklaces and bracelets drape. Pins are often designed with a specific top and bottom. While some jewelry is designed to wear a variety of ways; many jewelry artisans fail to make it clear how they envisioned or designed the item to be worn.

When selling jewelry online, you can never forget that your customers can not touch the piece and most will not take the time to email you to ask, “So, how do you wear this piece anyway?”

Off all the pieces of jewelry I look at when reviewing jewelry websites, artisans often make mistakes when selling pendents…

In my last post, I talked about actively reacting to what other people are saying about our businesses and websites. Actively Reacting As A Marketing Strategy can be a time consuming task but there is one great way to make the task much easier.

In order to actively react to blog entries, forum posts and other conversations that relate to your website or business you first have to find those conversations. For small websites and businesses, it might be as easy as conducting a few Google searches for their company name. But, there’s an even better way to find out who’s talking about your site(s) and go directly to the page where the conversation is taking place.

Many of us spend a great deal of time seeking ways to advertise our websites and businesses to stand out from the crowd.

How much time is spent actively reacting to what others are saying about us?

Some time ago I was subcontracted to do some marketing research for a company. Their products sold in the $100k+ range and they wanted to know what their primary competitor was doing online. The results surprised me and are something we could all learn from…

I recently happened upon one jewelry maker’s blog where she was discussing a recent email she received from another crafter. The email helpfully suggested her current backgrounds for her jewelry pictures were detracting from her pieces. It was nice to see that the blog owner took this constructive criticism and was rethinking all of her photos as well as creating a conversation among her blog visitors.

From all of the websites that I’ve seen that sell jewelry, it doesn’t take fancy stands or expensive props to make jewelry pictures attractive. There are many ways to show the drape and beauty of jewelry without having fake body parts (can often be creepy), showing someone wearing the finished item (can often be yucky, particularly when earrings are involved) or taking a picture on wrinkled sheets or some other unattractive background. In case you haven’t seen it before, do check out my earlier post on this topic On Wrinkled Sheets - A Photography No No for Crafters.

I thought I might offer some suggestions of backgrounds that other crafters have made work quite well. Hopefully, someone will take them and run with them and create some of their own cheap jewelry stands for photography.

One of the most frustrating, exciting, and frightening aspects of launching a new company, website or product is coming up with a name. Several of the forums I frequent quite often have people in a quandary over what to call themselves and asking the other forum members for help.

Let’s face it, if you are running a business, you will at some time or another want to/need to get a website. Building a website is fairly straightforward. Where the challenge arises is in coming up with that great name and actually finding the domain name available. For the most part, the easy names are already taken. Sometimes you can still get lucky but you are going to have to put some effort into it.