How to Increase Sales of Your Handmade Goods
Handmade website owners must learn SEO techniques and the power of back link building with other handmade gift items promoters or chance never being successful online ever.
I am aware that SEO and most other fields of self promotion take second place in the hearts of most handmade website owners first place always being given over to the love of creating the handmade product itself, but in order to do well on line we hand crafters must research things often foreign to the essences of our fundamental selves such as the vagaries of SEO and Google page rank.
Handmade bloggers must learn the secrets of Google page rank
Many hand crafters are of the opinion “if we make it they will come”, well I’m afraid that’s just not true, if what we sell or write about on our handmade blog doesn’t rank well or rank at all in Google then people won’t come as they don’t know we even exist, it’s very similar to living at the end of a dead end street and having a garage sale or party but not telling people about it or advertising it anywhere, and just hoping that passersby will show an interest.
I would like to say, and believe, all you have to do is provide great content, but I know that is not the case, great content of course is paramount but on its own I’m afraid it’s not enough. So what must handmade gifts web masters and small business owners do, to learn to sell their products more effectively on line.
Well the first rule of thumb appears to be to create a blog to support your product, as a blog is a constantly changing and growing web presence where as a website once composed is a still lifeless frame work with no interactive capacity it just provides information, Google prizes new content and change so it values at least for the moment active constantly updated blogs over static web site pages.
So rule number one if you have your own handmade product you sell on its own website or if you have an online store on Etsy, Artfire ,Ebay etc create a companion blog for your handmade gifts items and keep it updated with content relevant in some respect to the product you are marketing, linking to your website or online product pages where ever relevant ,remember I said where ever relevant not where ever possible , you don’t want to make your blog into a vehicle that does nothing but advertise your own product you won’t get readers or build a community if you are continually trying to push your product down their throats
Rule number 2 on the handmade blog post valuable interesting unique content
By only posting quality unique content we not only gather readers we also gather inbound links in a natural or organic way the kind of links that Google likes the best or at least right now it does, the kind that boosts your page rank . The cheapest and probably safest approach is to build these kind of inbound links is posting valuable content, content so good that others in similar and relevant handmade niches will voluntarily link to, as it enriches and adds content to their own blog post.
Even for handmade blogs Learning Google strategies to gain a higher page rank shouldn’t be as baffling as they first seem, Whilst borrowing here the words of Darren Rowse of Problogger
“To put it most simply – every link to your site is seen by the search engines as being “a vote of confidence in your site “
Ideally Speaking – The best inbound links have three main qualities about them:
1. They are wherever possible from higher ranked sites than your own
2. They are relevant to the topic you are writing about example if your theme is sentimental gift you should be seeking links from sites selling romantic gifts ,keepsake gifts etc not electronic gadgets.
3. They link to you using your anchor text (relevant keywords to your page)
Whilst you may not have complete control over who links to you as of course some webmasters will link to you spontaneously but these are the types of links that you should be actively seeking.
Despite all the articles on all the SEO Guru blogs and the business help forums there’s not one single place that tells you honestly and in simple terms exactly what would help you the most , even though that’s the very thing they’re all claiming to do, the only one that comes out and up front and states with any real clarity is the famous Grizzly of “how to make money online” fame but he’s hardly a handcrafter but some of the stuff he suggests is highly applicable to blogs and webpage’s of all kinds including those attempting to sell handmade gifts he suggests that bloggers in a similar or related niches should band together and actively seek to promote one another where ever possible
A quote from Grizzly’s site
“Find others with related niches and exchange quality keyword optimized links with each other. All links should be contained in a related post or on the site wide sidebar”.
In other words send a link from your handmade blog A and receive one to your Scrap booking Blog B. If this isn’t always possible, doesn’t worry a straight exchange will still work, but according to Griz and the rest of the guru’s these type of tit for tat links are not quite as good as a non reciprocal link.
If the blogs that may seek links from your site are not of suitable quality or relevance just be polite and decline the exchange
But creating an on line presence even a little one for my handmade blog is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be I realize I’ve chosen the worst time to launch an online business in the middle of an economic depression, but if I can manage to be successful now I should have much greater success when times improve, but I find it tough going a lot of the time struggling with concepts that quite frankly are of little interest to me, and I’ve had to learn about such things as page rank, SEO ,keywords, meta tags, and back links from the ground up and I am still learning. But like everything perseverance is usually the key so I shall keep on linking and commenting I just wish that there were more handmade craft bloggers out there that realize the potential of back linking strategies so that I had a bigger group in which to trade links with.