Handmade, it's a battlefield It's all Fun and Games, Until Someone Tries to Profit

Good advertising and Bad Advertising

I hear a lot of advertising ideas thrown around on Etsy and other business forums, so I wanted to outline some of the best and worst forms of advertising I've seen thrown around, and some ideas about them

Etsy renewing:

Etsy renewing is when you go to the expired listing page on Etsy and check renew, this costs 20 cents per item. This will bring your item back up the top of any category it's in, thus making it number one on the Etsy searches, until of-course someone else renews or lists an item in that category. This is the most basic and common type of advertising on Etsy, it can be highly effective, but only if your tagging is set up right. But if you don't utilize your tags properly, or your trying to target fast moving categories, you might be wasting those 20 cents!

Gift guides:

gift guides are a free type of adverting, they are picked by Etsy staff to feature, when an item makes the gift guide they have the chance of being on the front page, and also in the gift guides section http://www.etsy.com/gift-guides/

again, it's free, so in that sense it's really great. But it's not something you can really try for, there is also a great debate over favoritism in the gift guides, in my experience some people do seem to live in the gift guides.

showcase:

an Etsy show case is paid adverting, it cost 15 dollars for the main showcase, which is accessed from a rather drab looking link on the homepage of Etsy, and the sub showcases are 7 dollars and are accessed from a drop down on the main showcase page. Both showcases only last a day. I have bought a few of them, and I never found them effective at all, especially if you consider that for 15 dollars you can renew 75 items, which I think is much more effective.

The front page of Etsy:

front pages on Etsy are treasuries, selected by Etsy users, that are selected by admin to make the front page. This is also free, and is very effective, When an item is on the front page it's there for about 30 minutes, this is great advertising, but is also unreliable since it's selected by other people and admin. When on the front page an item can get between 100 and 1000 views depending on time of day and how well the item stands out.

There is a lot of talk about favoritism on the front page, but I think that the front page of Etsy is more a case of synchronicity than favoritism. Let's say an item is on the front page, people will see it and maybe not buy it, but hart it or favorite it. So then when they go to make their treasury's they will go through their harts, and possibly select that item that was already on the front page, and then it happens over and over again.

A few tips to get on the front page:

have a lot of Etsy friends, they make the treasuries, and if your in more treasuries, your more likely to be on the front pages.

Make treasuries yourself, if a treasury you make is on the front page, your shop's name will be on the front page, this can be decent advertising.

Be on a Etsy team: Etsy team members will often select other team members for their treasuries

A little trick:

If you are an alternate on the front page, you can knock an item off the front page by buying it, I one time was in line to be on the front page and saw there was a cheap bar of soap on the front page, so I bought it, paid for it, and got on the front page, but if you “buy an item” and don't pay for it to get on the front page, you are the worst kind of person.

One important note:

All the above types of advertising, are only advertising to Etsy users, so they are only so effective, the following types of advertising speak to people outside of the Etsy community.

Advertising on a blog:

Review blogs:

These blogs work like this, the blogger contacts you and offers to write a review on there blog about your product, all you have to do is mail them the product for free. There are also some blog that will give the item away as a giveaway, which can increase the items profile, or will pay for it but at a discount, maybe they'll pay 50 percent. It's also important to note, not all of the reviews on these blogs are favorable, so that could hurt you!

Paid ads:

paid ads are another great way to get advertising, but you need to make sure that the blog is the right fit for you and targets your market well, for instance a blog about body building might be a bad fit for a maker of baby hats, but a new mother blog might be a better fit! Just use some common sense!

A note on blogs:

They can actually be a great deal, or a complete waste. A well made and well promoted blog is the only kind of blog worth dealing with. If the blog doesn't get any traffic, doesn't have credibility or is poorly written, it won't be able to properly promote your brand. It can be hard to assess the credibility of a blog, but some good indications are the regularity and consistency of posts, and also the amount of comments from unique visitors. Sometimes blog owners will comment their own blogs more than other people, look out for that, if a post says it has 20 comments, but 15 of them are from the blog owner, it really only has 5 comments.

A funny story:

I once had a younger girl contact me, she wanted me to mail her a 2000 dollar diamond ring, and she would wear it on her my-space, and she had a few hundred friends on my-space, and they all liked her a lot, so she was sure I'd get tons of sales from her friends, since all of their parents had a lot of money (most of her friends where about 15) I humbly declined. But I gave her an A for effort!

There are plenty of other types of advertising, if you know one, post it in comments!