How To Add A List of Participating Etsy Shops in Your Sidebar - Why It's Important

Adding shop/weblinks in your sidebar to participating members of a group will help create a network around the internet through which all members of the group can be located more easily and more often by people searching for items you have to offer potential buyers.

If you have not done this yet you should  do this as soon as possible and update it periodically as the numbers of members change + or - and you will find that if everybody has this in their blog it will result in more traffic to everyone in the group.

It works much like a webring sending traffic around to look at the various shops. This way everyone gets more exposure, and there will be many places where potential customers can hear about you, go take a look, and hopefully buy!

Each of us has followers. Some of them might be the same ones, but some of them are different, which means that is another person who sees your link and may decide to go looking to see what you might have for them.

There are also people looking at your blog who do not comment and might not follow, but rest assured they are reading! One of those just might go to your Etsy shop and buy something from you! They may or may not tell you that's how they found you.

Don't underestimate the power of links in your blog and in all the blogs that mention you and your work.

Leaving out this step creates a weakness in the chain which hurts your chances of being seen by the right buyers and hurts the chances for other group members as well.

Just because you have outgoing links in your blog don't assume this is going to send traffic elsewhere and it will not come back the other way. If everyone in  the group does this people will come to look at yours from other blogs as well, so it balances out!

OK, now that we understand Why building this infrastructure is vital here is how you do it if you are not familiar with blogspot's process;

To add shop links in your sidebar;

*First go to your dashboard and click on "Design"

*Then select a blank page element (one of the rectangles on the side that says add gadget") and open it

*When it opens select "Link List"

*Then Label the Title something like "Promotional Frenzy"

*Below that type in or copy and paste the URL from each shop one at a time

*If you don't want the whole URL shown you can paste into the line below also and take out the http:// and .etsy.com in that line that says "New Site Name".

*Then save, and these should show up when you view your blog.

And Voila! It's done!

Remember to blog and leave comments in other members' blogs regularly and make references to the group often. This will help remind the search engines crawling your site to bring these back up!

90 Features in 90 Days-Press Release

Get your art or fine craft featured 90 times in 90 days! Want to know how? Here’s the deal; post on Etsy’s messageboard on this thread; http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5276160&page=1 (if you don’t have an account you can easily open a free buyer or seller account at http://etsy.com in order to post there), and agree to swap features with me and however many others also post on that thread there as you want. If you have either a blog or a website that you can use to post pictures and 1-2 paragraphs complete with link to that person’s online store on each feature you swap, you can do this! If not, and you would like to participate, you can easily start a simple and user-friendly blog by going to; https://www.blogger.com/start and set one up in a matter of just a few minutes. I was well into my 40’s before I ever knew what a blog was and I picked it up very quickly.

For those readers who don’t know me, my name is Pippit Carlington, owner and jewelry artist of Giftbearer, and Street Team Leader of The Art Jewelry Collective, a group of jewelry artists from Etsy who collaborate in our marketing efforts with the goal of educating the public about the value of art jewelry, supporting a living wage for jewelry artists, and upholding standards of high quality and innovation in the jewelry industry.

The 90 Features in 90 Days Challenge came about as a way to increase sales in my own business, but it occurred to me that the group and even others outside the AJC could utilize the same method to increase their number of sales, based on the law of averages. Just imagine being front page news every day until Christmas, the biggest gift-buying time of the year!

I figured if I could swap features with 90 people and do one feature per day between the time I get 90 participants and Christmas, that should create a large enough internet splash to have a noticeable impact on number of sales. The results of many blogs reciprocating, when combined, would be like advertising in a much bigger venue. The impact of such a marketing challenge will make whichever sellers do this extremely visible all over the web; the more people you swap with, the more visible both you and they are. You can also increase this exposure two-fold by linking to your feature stories.

The end result should eventually be increased sales because you have reached a larger number of potential buyers of your work, and because not all the participants are working in the same medium, there is great potential for cross-promotion, such as handbags with jewelry, or clothing with jewelry, and with only about 10 minutes a day invested in posting your features. So this holiday season not only raise a glass, why not raise your odds, and maybe even… your income!