Blog About Crafts

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…

As a rule, I like some noise in the background when I’m working. The radio is on almost all day. When I do heavy duty writing for a client, there’s typically a classical CD softly playing (no words to sing to that way). I bring all that up because it was a spot for a radio station’s own advertising program that inspired this post.

Most business owners spend a great deal of time and money searching for places to advertise and often give little thought on what to advertise. I’ve seen this with my writing clients. People know they want to advertise but do not do their homework on what to advertise.

Seems like a fairly obvious thing. Ask most business owners what they advertise and they will respond with a question, “I advertise my business. What else would I be advertising?”

What else, indeed.

I was looking at someone’s blog today and noticed a conversation on how to advertise a crafting business on the cheap. One of the things mentioned was to ask bloggers if they would be willing to interview artists or review their sites.

I’ve toyed with the idea to review each of the sites submitted and accepted to Crafty Tips Arts & Crafts Directory but my concern was trying to be fair and impartial. I mean, let’s face it not all sites are created equal. Some directory sites have started adding blog entries for sites being submitted but it would seem that could become a real black hole of time and frustration.

In the past, I’ve offered free profiles on several forums. I did ask for a link to this site or one of my other craft-related sites and was disappointed when only two artists took me up on that offer. My thought was that since my blog is not on the fast lane that it was simply a matter of not being popular enough to attract interested folks. The blog I was reading happened to have a comment from one of the editor’s in the jewelry section of a very popular crafting site. She too lamented that she could not find folks who wanted to participate and receive free reviews and profile pieces.

So, rather than try another round in the forums, I thought I would make the offer again here on the site where the profile would reside. Do take heed, that this is free advertising for your business and I take that very seriously. Your site or shop must offer something of value for sale or offer information and project tutorials that would be of interest to crafters.

Participants might also receive a bit of free business consulting advice along the way and when combined with a bit of free advertising both will hopefully bring a some new visitors/customers to your site.

Just let me know if you are interested. The profiles/reviews are free.

There have been numerous studies that claim a website has only a scant few seconds to grab the surfer’s attention and keep them on your site. I have unfortunately noticed a trend with many crafting websites that use shop software to run the site - the sites take forever, I mean like 5 minutes or more to load.

I ran into this once again the other day. You know when you use a digital camera and the photographs are like 1100 pixels wide? Well this site owner used those original pictures on her site! No wonder it took around 8 minutes for her site to load on my stupid dial-up connection (yes, there are some of us still using those things).

I have brought this issue up on crafting forums and have even emailed some website owners when they have submitted to Crafty Tips and have made this mistake.

I think I finally have come up with an analogy for this…

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.