Marketing Your Crafts - Part 1

Marketing your Crafts

Whether you have a new website or an existing one, you can always benefit
with more marketing idea's and tips to draw in more traffic with potential
customers to your website.

Here we'll cover several ways I've found to be very successful in increasing
exposure to your website, increasing traffic and building repeat customers.

Mailing Lists:

Mailing lists are an invaluable tool to gaining and keeping customers. You
may already have a mailing list and right now may be thinking why am I
mentioning even mentioning this as it's not a new concept to you. Well,
while many people have mailing lists only some of them know how to use them
to their full benefit. Let's start by the task of getting people to sign up
for your mailing list. Try some of the following techniques and announce
them on your website:

-Offer discounts exclusively to mailing list subscribers

-Offer a free product with orders from members who are on your mailing list

-Offer contests exclusively to your mailing list members

-Offer preview sales to your mailing list members so they can see your
product before it goes on your website.

-Offer online "Yard Sales" exclusively to those on your mailing list. This
is where you can host pictures of items either on a page on your site known
only to your mailing list members with yard sale priced items for them to
purchase. You can also host a yard sale on many of the free picture hosting
sites and simply send that link to your mailing list when your sale begins.

-Insert tips, links to articles, links to other freebies, etc on your
mailing list



Next lets talk about building your mailing list subscribership. There are
several ways to do this and these are what I've found to be the most
successful:

-Exchange links or banners with other business's mailing lists. This is
great additional exposure for both of you. Say you have 800 members and the
other business has 800 members, you just doubled your exposure. Do this with
as many business's you can that are willing to exchange with you. Be sure
and sign up for that business's mailing list so you can make sure your link
or banner is correct. You can agree to exchange for any time period you
would like ie; 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, etc.

-If you have a Blog, insert a mailing list sign up form on it

-Post on your favorite message boards telling members about any specials
you'll be offering to those that sign up for your mailing list

-Post on your favorite message boards asking if anyone would like to
exchange mailing list links or banners.

Kelle Arvay
Patternmart