Tips for Selling Crafts Online

These tips for selling crafts online will help you to promote your craft business web site

Web site traffic promotion is, unfortunately, highly overlooked by many professional craft artists. There are actually many cost effective ways to promote your website.

People may discover your site through a search engine, a link from another site, printed media or word of mouth. Promoting your website is crucial to the growth of your online business, but unfortunately too many professional craft artists build an attractive website, and then fail to commit to effective web site traffic promotion strategies.

The most cost effective way to reach customers is through search engines. Ideally you will want to ensure your site and many of its pages rank at least in the top 20 or 30 search results (because people don't look beyond that) for major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask.

One of the Best Tips for Selling Crafts Online:

Assuming your company is not a well known brand, your potential customers will not be searching for your company name. Instead, they will be searching using descriptive keywords such as "handmade felt purse" or "sock puppet pattern." Knowing what keywords your customers are using will help you to promote your website effectively.

Typically customers will search using a keyword phrase, like "handmade felt purse" and not a single word, like "purse." This is good news for you, because it means you can target a niche in your market instead of taking on highly competitive keywords.

For example, a Google search for the word jewelry produces over 300 million results. Instead to trying to accomplish the incredible task of getting to the top of that list (if you make jewelry), you can target more focused keyword phrases that describe your product, have less online competition and bring targeted traffic to your site (i.e. people who were searching for exactly the type of jewelry you sell).

Wordtracker is a good tool for discovering what words and phrases people are searching for. It can help you to determine which keywords to target on your site.

Know How Search Engines Rank Your Site

The subject of ranking well with the major search engines is quite broad. In general, search engines look at many things to rank your site including:

• Alt tags
  
• Body Text
  
• Outgoing links
  
• Incoming links (check out Value Exchange and
  Make Your Links Work to learn more about incoming links)
  
• Titles
  
• Keywords
  
• Meta tags

This subject actually encompasses a lot of information, and is beyond the scope of a single article.

To learn in detail about web site traffic promotion strategies, I'd recommend downloading a copy of the excellent (and free) e-book Make Your Site Sell.

Although it is not specific to the craft industry, the information can easily be applied to an online craft business. It is full of exceptional tips for selling crafts online. The content is clear and easy to understand even for a beginner, and it provides you with plenty of practical, cost effective ways to promote your site.