One of the most lacking elements in the emerging stallholder business is the complete absence of any online profile outside of facebook for most stallholders.
And it is worrying that outside of fb there is not much way of connecting with repeat and referral customers.
So many sales opportunities are going astray and business growth is not a good as it could be in those critical momentum building early phases.
Experts Guide to Blog Commenting for Handmade Artisan Beginners
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| Australia's Handmade and Artisan Community is Blossoming |
Here's and excerpt from a recent article on blog commenting.
Not everyone has the desire to spend their precious crafting time in front of a screen but I would recommend blogging as a positive and motivational tool. I would also add to those worried about the technical side, you needn't worry, blogging platforms such as blogger are exceptionally user friendly and aimed at computer novices. If you come across anything you are unsure of there are masses of websites and blogs just like this one, that offer easy to understand tutorials and tips on every aspect of blogging.
What I have found is that almost NO ONE does it - so if your a handmade artisan and you blog - YOU'RE WAY AHEAD!
Here's some amazing tips from another article...
- Check that your post is search engine optimised before you publish it - read this post about getting to page one of a google search
- Take lots of time deciding on the title of the post - this is what
will be shared across networks when people use sharing icons on your
site. The blog title should be concise and descriptive of the content.
You can always add catchy text when sharing your links. Don't make it
too long, use a subtitle in the body of the post if necessary.
- Tweet your link on Twitter, don't just rely on the one auto tweet if
you have one set up from your blog - make an effort to send a few
throughout the day - and chat too so your twitter stream is not just
full of links.
- Use hashtags from relevant groups to help further extend the reach of your tweets - eg, use #cbuk and I may very well retweet your post!
- Post the link on Facebook, again try not to rely on just the autotweet. I find that when I post latest blogpost links for my own blogs and that of my clients, manual updates where I add a really engaging snippet of relevant text do best. The worst possible way of sharing is to simply paste in the link and click post. Read up on Facebook edgerank and read this post about my 'all killer, no filler' facebook strategy.
- Share the link on Google+. Getting +1's for your posts will help
your posts be seen in search engine results by friends of the +1'er -
Blogger have made it really easy to immediately share your post to G+ .
If you have so far given G+ a wide berth, take a look at this guide
from Mashable on how to use Google+.
- Post the images in the post onto photo sharing sites, including the
link and a description or snippet about the post - Flickr, Pinterest
and We Heart It for example.
- Use a social media client like hootsuite or tweetdeck to schedule
further sharing of the link over the course of the next week, change the
text for each. You can use this as an opportunity to see what sort of
language works best, punchy / humerous / longwinded? If you do the
scheduling asap after you hit publish, you wont forget and it will help
give your post further longevity.
- Schedule updates to reach various timezones. Use Google analytics to check up on the effect this has.
- Post the link on relevant Facebook groups or Facebook page walls that invite members to share links.
In an ideal world people are coming to your website through searching online in Google using keywords that relate to your product and business. So if you sell organic soap, people searching for “natural skincare” or “organic bodywash” or “soap gifts” or “handmade soaps” would come across your site in the search results. Then they would see you website and buy from you.
But what if you are not appearing in the results – or you are buried at page 42. No one knows you exist outside your existing customers. So no chance of getting a sale from browsers – and that is like 99.8% of people out there. So the sales on your website are a bit slow – or it’s just crickets. BUT we CAN do something about this!
Here’s a simple to follow workflow to get you started on blog commenting. When you have links pointing to your website, Google sees this as almost votes of popularity for your content, and gives you a lift in the rankings. Here’s how to get started building some links to your website.Read the whole article on findhandmade/blog-commenting-guide
