Promoting Tips & Tricks Part VI: Promoting your Blog

I could easily to a ten- or twenty-part series just on how to promote your blog, but that would be beyond the scope of this article series, and others have covered it far more comprehensively elsewhere. So I’ll just do a single post, focussing on the needs of the online shop owner.

Much like your shop, your blog will benefit by being listed in directories. I’m in several — some limited to crafty blogs, others listing blogs in general.

Our Craft Directory is small and tightly focused. The owner checks every link before posting it, so you can be sure you’re in good company. As with most directories, they’ll ask you to put a link to their directory in your blog in return.

Blog Catalog is a much larger, more general listing broken down into nested categories. Again, they check every link before posting it. BlogCatalog also has a nice little feature which you can put in your sidebar, displaying the last five BlogCatalog folks who’ve stopped by.

BlogSearch is similar to BlogCatalog though I think somewhat smaller.

Technorati is the king of blog listings — in addition to a simple listing you get statistics on who’s reading your blog, what they’re typing into search engines to find you, and who’s linking to you. They’ll also supply a searchbox for your blog if you like.

VerveEarth lists and sorts blogs by physical location — offering a map of sorts of the earth as expressed on the internet.

RingSurf gives a slightly different perspective on the blog directory — instead of simple categories it provides hosting for blog rings. These are groups of blogs on a similar topic. I’m a member of several, as you can see in the first sidebar to the right.

As with shop directories, there are a lot out there. Some are worth it and others less so. It’s just a matter of looking.

Once you’ve signed up to a directory, treat it the same way you do a shop directory listing — upload an avatar, write up a profile, post pictures if it allows you to. Use it every way you can to get the word out.

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Entering blog carnivals is another good way to get people looking at your blog — I talk more about them here, so I shan’t repeat much. Do note, though, that this is one of the advantages to doing those little personal posts from time to time — you’ll have a lot more fodder for carnivals.

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On a more personal level there’s your blogroll. This is a listing of blogs you like and read frequently. It’s useful for you — they’re all right there in one place. It’s also a way of getting those you list interested enough to take a look at your blog — and perhaps put it in their blogroll in return. Remember the unspoken contract I mentioned in my first post on blogging? This is another part of it. You list me, I’ll list you, we both benefit.

Chances are you’ll also wind up making some friends this way. I have — hi Ruthie, Mary, Jill! From a hard-headed business perspective these are all great potential customers, and from a personal perspective it’s great to have friends who understand what you’re doing because they do something similar.

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Even more personal are comments. Once people are reading your blog, they’re going to start commenting. This is great! The first comment someone leaves on your blog will feel almost as good as the first sale you make. People are reading, and they’re finding something they care enough about to take the time to comment.

Take a moment to savour the feeling. Then, reply.

Every comment left in your blog should get some sort of reply. The people who comment want to know you’ve read what they say just as much as you want to know they’re reading you. If a post gets a lot of comments it’s perfectly okay to reply to several of them in a group — but do reply.

If someone comments in your blog for the first time, thank them for reading. If they leave a link to their blog, follow it back, and if you see something there you want to comment on, do it! It’s entirely possible you’ll find a friend.

Encourage discussion between your commenters. If people start to disagree and it looks to get ugly, ask them politely to agree to disagree, or take it elsewhere. You don’t need controversy in your shop blog any more than you need a couple of people in a shouting match in your booth.

Speaking of commenting and blogrolls, check the blogs in your blogroll every once in a while. I try to do this once a week and usually fail — many people manage to do it daily. Comment anywhere you find something interesting. Check out their blogrolls to find other blogs of interest, and comment there too.

That said, don’t just comment with ‘Great post!’ and your blog address. Write something with some substance. If you’re blatantly commenting just to get people to look, it’ll backfire.

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Looks like this is about long enough for the day — in my next post I’ll continue to talk about promoting your blog, using features, interviews, and reviews.

Promoting Tips & Tricks Part III: Directories

Now that you’ve got your shop set up the way you like it, it’s time to let people know about it! There are a number of directories out there providing inexpensive or free listings. Some are specific to Etsy or DaWanda, some are general and will accept a shop regardless of where it’s hosted.

The host-specific ones first:

DaWanda Shop Directory Links is a comprehensive listing of DaWanda shops by category. In addition to a place in their listing, by signing up you’ll also get featured in a blog post.

Buried Treasury is for all those who feel buried under all the things you find on Etsy — it’s a directory which features your Etsy Mini. Buried Treasury breaks its listings down into categories to make finding things easier as well.

And now the rest:

Shoparama Marketplace is a huge directory of shops all over the web — again, divided into categories for easier shopping. It also allows users to rank shops, so you get a better idea of what other people liked and didn’t.

The Hand Made Product Directory, in addition to the directory itself, also provides lots of advertising opportunities — but more about the advertising later. :)

For those concerned about the environment, Green Shopping gives a list of green and green-related sites to shop at.

Another Handcrafted Shopping Network here. Again, you can rank the shops.

I’m also in the Naturally Boulder directory — this only applies to those in my local area but if you check around you may find something similar where you live.

I know there are more out there — these are only the ones I’ve found. Simply typing ‘craft directory’ into Google will get you a lot, though you have to sort through them yourself to find out which are really worth it. Any more you’ve found useful?

I’ll note (to continue the descriptions discussion from my last post) that writing the little blurb to go with the link to your shop is very important. Most directories only allow a line or two (and you don’t want it longer than that anyway) so you’ve got to get a lot of punch into a little space. Again, I can’t offer a lot of advice on how to do that — I’m still working on it myself! So any tips you have on how to do that would be welcome.

Next up, blogs and mailing lists.

Shopping Sites

Trying to find just the right thing for someone? Too much to choose from? I know the feeling — it’s hard to dig through all the choices to find something perfect, especially when half the sites that show up in the standard search engines turn out to be spam sites.

There are a number of places on the Web that seek to solve this problem, or at least make it easier — sites where every link is checked before it’s posted, sites that link to (if I may say so) only the best. Some are directories, some are blogs, all of them are places where you can find truly wonderful things.

If you’re in the Boulder area you may wish to check out Naturally Boulder. Their goal, in their words: “To create a thriving natural products business community able to support business interests along the product chain.” They hold a number of natural-themed events each year (one recent one was a dinner: “In Praise of Slowness”), they do press releases promoting natural living, and they have a directory of local vendors selling a wide variety of natural products.

Gemma Wild of Our Craft Directory has this to say about her site: “A human edited web directory of craft related web sites. All the links listed in this particular directory have been manually checked, so you will not find any inappropriate or junk web sites.” She’s very selective about who will and won’t be listed in her directory — it took two weeks for my application to be accepted — and thus it’s small, but very high-quality. She breaks sites down into categories such as Food & Cakes, Knitting & Needle, and Blogs to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

Buried Treasury is another site like Our Craft Directory but organized as a blog. Tim at BT focuses on Etsy sellers and has this to say about his site: “[T]here are so many great items on Etsy that are buried under thousands of items……lets dig up these Etsy treasures and display them in a different and unique way. These Minis are active and can change when shop owners change their items.”

An Etsy Mini is a customizable widget which displays what’s for sale in your shop — it’ll change as you add new items, too. As an example here’s a link to my entry at Buried Treasury. Thus, in addition to breaking things down into a number of easily-searchable categories, Buried Treasury also allows you to see what you’re looking at.

Another blog is Indie Gals Vintage & Indie Clothing, Accessories and Jewelry Finds. A long title but it does tell you what they do. Every couple of weeks they’ll make a long post with any of a number of things — interviews, features, ‘Items that Should Be in a Treasury’, complete with pictures, links, and a whole bunch of other information. They’ll also post sales if you send them their way — you can see mine on the right side of the blog right now!

Shoparama Marketplace gets back to the directory style of shopping. As its proprietress puts it, “We hope to create a simple and stress free shopping experience for all of your shopping & gift giving needs. We will bring these specialized stores & boutiques to you!” Shoparama Marketplace consists of a long, sorted listing of diverse online shops, plus a number of featured sites at the bottom. Best of all, you can rank the shops you find there, so it’s easy to tell the real deals!

There are a lot more such sites around the web — if you know of any good ones, comment here; I know y’all want to know the good places to look!