I need to mention we have had our shop up for less than a month and have only had 6 sales so we are by no means experts. This blog post is just to let you know what we have learned and maybe you can benefit from it or give us some helpful tips.
How to get a lot of traffic to your etsy shop site fast:
Tweet it. We made a twitter account. Every time we post a new item we tweet a link to it and within a minute the number of views goes up by about 10-20. Are these views from potential buyers? Who knows. But we feel that people viewing our items can't possibly be bad. Keep in mind we only have about 100 followers and even when we had much less we still would get that little burst of views.
Our twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Desert2Forest We follow everyone who follows us.
How to get traffic to your store consistantly:
One thing we have learned is the importance of good tags. Good tags will get people to find your item when they do a search. Its hard to know what to put for tags sometimes. We start to type in something like "peacock" and the drop down list of suggestions will include things like "peacock eye earrings" so we'll use that since it is most likely a common search phrase.
Very important: Use all 14 tags!
How to stay on the top of the search list:
We don't really know anything about that SEO stuff and have no e-commerce experience. In studying up on how to be good etsy sellers we've read of different things for staying on the top of the search results lists including renewing items regularly to keep them at the top of the list until they sale but that could get expensive. Our strategy is to post a new item or two to the store everyday. If we have a lot to get up there we'll do two a day otherwise just 1 item a day. We figure that will keep something from our shop toward the top of search results at all times. We also like to mix it up like putting one piece of art and one pair of earrings up each day. Since those items have different tags and will come up on different search list that will increase our chances of getting customers to find our goods.
Having merchandise for every budget:
We can have merchandise ranging from $5 to $150 because we just happen to make all sorts of things but this may not be practical for everyone. Our profits are usually very low because the items that do sale are our cheaper things but we figure at least they are selling and we are making some money. Hopefully some of our big items will occasionally sale and help us really prosper.
Tutorials:
If you do a lot of pricey fine art type things and experience slow sales something to consider is making tutorials, PDF tutorials, how to guides or videos to sell. These are very low cost to make and can be sold repeatedly. Also many people who come into your shop may be other vendors who are wondering how much to price their merchandise or are just checking out the competition. Having a tutorial up for sale might be something they are interested in buying. If something is only $5 people are more likely to buy it.
Advertising:
There are ways to advertise that cost money but we don't do those things so we really can't help you much there. You could do PPC or pay per click advertising where you only pay if people click your ads. Etsy also will promote your store for something like $7 a day. Something to consider if you think the money you make will be worth it. I guess it wouldn't hurt to try once at any rate.
Social Media Networking:
We do some of this but we really don't know how much it is helping our shop. We have a facebook page but without promoting it its sort of useless at the moment.
You can promote a facebook page through them with the PPC thing.
We also use Twitter which seems much more lively.
And of course we have this blog. We don't use myspace because its weird. Dumb excuse, I know. We really don't know what else to do for social networking and would love any tips you could provide.
I hope this is helpful. If you have any suggestions for us we would be so happy to hear them. Contact us anytime through comments or by e-mail: Desert2ForestArt at gmail dot com
Thanks for reading. Good luck!
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