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!
