In case you haven’t come across it yet, Etsy.com is one of many great options for crafters to sell their hand-crafted items online without the need of a full-fledged website. Many Etsians (those crafters who are members of Etsy) know that they have to promote their Etsy shop just like any other website.
Let me say that again for anyone who didn’t already know that, Etsy shop owners need to promote their shops like any other webpage. That means getting backlinks, blog mentions and all of the other tactics used to promote websites.
What most Etsians fail to include in their promotional activities is the inside of their shops…
Etsy shops have multiple pages divided by categories. Most Etsians are only promoting their “homepage” of their Etsy shop and failing to promote their category pages. Don’t get me wrong, the homepages have to be promoted continuously; but, doing some additional promotion of the interior/category pages can pay off in a big way.
Etsy Shops are Spidered & Indexed
I looked at the Etsy shop for someone who has been an Etsian for some time. Both her homepage and at least one of her category pages has been awarded some page rank by Google. What that means is that Google does index, list and rank these interior pages.
Consider the Etsian I picked at random. She sells leather goods and has 9 standard categories. One of her product categories is “Belts”. Assuming this artisan has a blog or is active in one or more forums, it would help her to work on getting links directly into her Belts page.
Help Customers Find Your Etsy Shop
This all goes back to how people shop on the Internet. There’s the Amazon’s, Fire Mountain’s, Micheals’ and other big players that people know by name; and then there’s the rest of us. How do potential customers find the rest of us? By topic, of course.
People who would be interested in purchasing a hand-tooled, custom, leather belt are probably not going to have heard of either Etsy or my artisan. If they go to Yahoo!, Google, MSN, or any of the other search engines; how many Etsy shops do you see coming up in the top of the searches? Not many or none. Why? Because shop owners are failing to fully promote their Etsy shops.
So, next time you write a blog entry, why not include a few links (with keyword link text) to your category pages? And, don’t forget that Crafty Tips allows each website owner up to 3 listings to 3 different pages of their site – a great way to jump start promoting those interior category pages!
p.s.
The Esty shop I found was Sunny Rising Leather, do check out her work – it’s beautiful.
p.p.s.
If you want more information on promoting Etsy shops and to learn a great way to help your search engine optimization efforts, there’s more information on the tips for selling crafts online section of Crafty Tips Arts & Crafts Directory.
9 Responses to Promoting All of Your Etsy Shop