5 Simple Steps for Building your Facebook Audience

A Facebook fan page is all but mandatory for a handmade business. It gives you a way to interact with those who like your products easily and show them the face of your business every day (nearly a quarter of Facebook users check Facebook 5 or more times a day). However to do this you have to build up the number of people who like your page. Here are 5 easy ways to do this, they won't immediately rocket your page to thousands of likes but they give a consistent trickle of new likes and those snowball. You might also notice that only two of these suggestion actually involve doing anything outside of your page. That's because getting people to view your page is easy, you want people to press that like button and for that your page needs to be engaging.

1) Pictures. This is a big one, share photos of your work in progress, events, people modeling your creations, funny or inspiring quotes, your own lolcats (or lolcephalopods). Make sure they are relevant to your business or what you make but have fun with them. Photos on facebook get 39% more interaction than other posts, and that includes being shared and shared photos often lead to new likes. Also on the subject of pictures, make sure you have a good cover image and profile picture that represents your business and products, that's the first thing a new visitor to your page sees.

2) Invite your friends and share your page posts on your timeline. Don't share every post you make on your page and don't invite your friends over and over, you don't want to annoy them. However they are your friends and family and they probably want to see your succeed so invite them to like your page and share your posts with their friends.

3) Get the word out about your page other places on the web. Etsy offers a way to link your facebook page to your shop so take advantage of that, include it in your email signature, invite peopel to like you in transaction or shipping notifications, post a link or button on your blog, add it to your YouTube Channel, post it on your own website, link to it on Twitter/Google+/Tumblr/Squidoo/Pinterest/DeviantArt/etc. Make it as easy for people to find as possible.

4) Post frequently, and post at all times of day. This can be difficult when you're just one person running a page but there are ways to make it easier. First take advantage of Facebook's scheduling feature to write a bunch of posts at once and schedule them to post throughout the day. You can also use an app like RSSGraffiti so automatically share new items from your Etsy shop RSS feed (or the rss feed from any other selling venue, most offer one). You can also use Networked blogs to share your new blog posts to your page as well. If you have a smart phone I really recommend getting the Facebook Pages app so you can post or reply to comments when you aren't at your computer (this is especially useful at events like craft shows so you can share photos of what's going on). What's the ideal balance between enough posts and too many? I don't know, the estimates from social media experts vary widely so you need to experiment to find the sweet spot for your own page. I will say that posting several times a day (as opposed to once) is more effective as is posting at different times of day instead of only int eh afternoon for example, because you reach people who have different patterns for when they check facebook (almost no one looks at everything that's been posted since they were last on).

5) Tone matters. Don't be overly professional and formal. You're a creative business, let that come through. Let your personality come through on your page. Let people know that they are interacting with a real person who is passionate about what they make. Some of my most successful posts ever in terms of likes and share is when I've shared the process of developing a new jewelry line including pictures of the prototypes and asked for feedback on what to use for the name.

Change is Good

Whenever an online selling venue makes a change, or Google updates it's algorithm, or Facebook changes the layout (again), there is a flood of "woe is me" posts from business owners. Sometimes it's the very changes to exact same business owners have been clamoring for but it's not exactly the way they pictured it working so they aren't happy and want it tossed out immediately and everything back the way it was.This immediate negative reaction to a new feature that has just been released (or has only been announced and not released yet) is counterproductive.

If you are doing this, stop it, right now.  This is plain and simple fear of chance because the new feature hasn't even been giving a fair test ride yet and is being dismissed.

Stop immediately looking for what is wrong with new features and start giving them a fair chance to work for you. Look for the opportunities just as hard, or harder, than you look for the faults.

What prompted this post is Facebook Timelines for Pages. When they were announced many people hated them for a number of reasons, the big one for businesses was that you could no longer have a custom landing page to welcome people who hadn't liked your page yet and encourage them to do so (often with a coupon, free video, etc.). However now a month since Timeline became available for Pages and a few days after it became universal for Pages we have this article from TechCrunch on the impact of Timeline. Here's the key points for Pages under 1 million Likes (that's most of us):

• Rate of new Likes was virtually the same (down by 0.04% which is statistically insignificant)
• People Talking About This numbers went up by 67.4% on average
• Comments per post went up by 40% on average
• Likes per Post went up by 60.3% on average

So while Timeline isn't getting pages Likes at a faster rate than before (or more importantly the rate hasn't gone down even with the loss of custom landing pages), your existing fans are interacting with your Page far more and that is incredibly important.

Sometimes new features do flop or negatively impact your business no matter what you do. When that happens it's terrible and you may feel at a loss for what to do and it makes you fear every new change. Fearing change though makes you less flexible and adaptable which becomes a cycle where every change, even those that might have helped you, are resisted until you either pull out of the cycle or your business fails. Even big companies that have been around for decades can succumb to this, look at Kodak which used to be the premier name in photography but is now in bankruptcy because it held on to film for so long that it was too far behind when it started making digital cameras to catch up.

New Twitter Account

I'm giving the Handmade Business Blog it's own twitter account. If you follow my personal twitter account @Noadi I will still announce there new posts but I'll now be posting not just new blog posts but also business how to related stuff on the new account @HandmadeBizBlog. I hope that this does two things A: gives people more access to me about business related topics and B: keeps my personal account more focused on my personal stuff (creating jewelry, talking about skepticism, etc). Also I've given the blog a dedicated email address and am updating the links on the site to reflect that change too.

Survey Your Fans

If you have a good network of twitter followers, facebook fans, or email list subcribers you can use them to research ideas. I did this recently using SurveyMonkey to create a simple survey asking people to rate some photos of my jewelry. SurveyMonkey's basic service is free and it's very simple to use. I created my survey then posted the link to it on twitter, my facebook fan page, and my blog.

I was considering switching from the blue backdrop I've been using for over a year to white because it's often recommended to use a neutral color for the background of product photos, either white, black, or gray. Now I don't have a gray backdrop and I make some jewelry which is black so that wouldn't have enough contrast for those items so I tried white. I originally chose blue because I make sea creatures so the blue invokes water and the sea.

So I put the 4 images above in a survey and asked people in my network to take it and rate each photo on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being strongly dislike and 5 being strongly like). The results surprised me. I personally like the blue better and was hoping it would come out on top but I was surprised by how much more other people preferred it. When the two blue photos were averaged together they had a score of 4.17 while the white photos got a score of 3.87. Even more telling was that the necklace with the coral prop on blue scored 4.22 and on the display bust it only scored 4.11. Even for the white background the coral prop scored 4.0 over 3.74 for the display bust.

I'm going into detail on my results here for a reason, even though I created the survey to tell me which background color people liked best it also told me that I should be using the photos with the coral prop for my main image and not the display bust which I had been using. Sometimes you get results that tell you more than you had expected and that is the value of using these sorts of surveys. So give it a shot. Do you have 3 different banners for your shop and don't know which to use? Do you want to know if people are more interested in t-shirts for toddlers with kittens or puppies on them? If you want to entice more people to take your survey offer a coupon code for those who complete it (simply add a last page to the survey with no questions and just text that includes the coupon and a link to your shop).

Social Marketing for Handmade Business

Sister Diane from Craftypod leads a class on Social Marketing. It's almost 2 hours long so grab a cup of coffee or cocoa and sit back to watch, it's full of great information on using social media tools like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook. She explains it in pretty straightforward non-technical language.


Social Marketing for Handmade Businesses by Sister Diane from I Heart Art: Portland on Vimeo.

Note: The video is pretty high quality so run it fullscreen if you can to see the presentation screen better.

Quick Tip #5 - Send your RSS Feed to Twitter

This is a useful trick if you use Twitter. TwitterFeed will take the RSS feed from your shop and when you list new items it will send tweets through your account announcing them. Here's how it works:

1: Set up an account on TwitterFeed
2: Click Create New Feed
3: Input your Twitter username and password
4: Input the URL for your RSS Feed
5: Select update frequency. Every hour is usually good.
6: Select the maximum number of tweets it will send at once. This is important, send too many automatic tweets about your items and your followers will get annoyed. I use 3 and I wouldn't go over 5 especially if you add new items very frequently.
7: Include title and decription. Probably a good idea to leave this alone but if you want you could have only titles displayed.
8: Prefix each tweet with: Write something short and simple to go at the beginning such as "New from my shop:"
9: Click Create to start sending your feed to twitter. You should see the tweets show up the next time you list an item for sale.

If you have multiple shops or want to include your blog as well just repeat steps 2-9 again. I would suggest that the more feeds you have the fewer max tweets you set for each feed since if you have 2 feeds set to 5 and update both with 5 or more items in an hour Twitterfeed is going to send 10 tweets to your timeline.

Why is SEO Important for my Shop?

After reading a number of conversations on the Etsy forums lately I've realized that a lot of sellers don't know what SEO is and why it's important for their shops. I'm writing this as just a quick primer on optimizing an Etsy shop for SEO (it will also work for other venues like eCrater and ArtFire). This is just an overview touching on what I think are the most important things to work on.

Definition of SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, makign your website attractive to search engines so they will rank you highly in search results. Search engines account for a tremendous amount of traffic online so if your shop isn't ranking on search engines you're missing out on a lot of visitors who may become customers. The two sides of SEO to focus on are on site and off site.

This post is just going to focus on on site optimization of your Etsy shop. Off site will have to wait for a later post.

On Site Optimization

On site optimization is creating your site's content in a way that makes it clear to the search engines what your site is about and what keywords are important so you'll show up in search results for those keywords (on Etsy tags are the Etsy search keywords). Since I'm talking about optimizing an Etsy shop the options for optimization are limited. You only have what text you can edit to use in optimization.

It is possible to optimize a site for search engines and lose customers. User friendliness and content has to come first and then SEO but the good thing is a lot of SEO changes can also help user friendliness if done right.

Keywords

Keywords are the words that people use to find your site when they use a search engine. You want to try and target keywords that you want people to find your shop using. The obvious ones are the type of product you make, subject matter, or materials, less obvious ones can often be things like occasions people would buy your product for, wider categories of products, etc. Google has a great keyword research tool that can give you suggestions based on a sample of keywords you give them.

Make a list of the keywords you would like to target to use while editing your shop. Keep these keywords on hand for Part II on off site optimization.

Titles

It's a good idea to use keywords in your title, but not at the expense of making the title informative. So something like "Blue Sparkle Earrings" is informative but few keywords "Blue Sparkle Earrings, Handmade Lampwork Glass Jewelry" is both informative and has several keywords. Keyword stuffing is loading a title with a list of keywords and while it may help your search engine ranking it will be a turn off for customers, an example would be "handmade earrings lampwork glass gift etsy blue bead crafts". You must balance SEO with user friendliness.

Descriptions

Your descriptions first and foremost must inform a potential customer about your products. The good thing about this is the more you tell your customers the more there is for the search engines to pick up on. Make sure you work in your keywords where you can. As an example I make jewelry based on cuttlefish so my descriptions all contain this paragraph after the description of the piece of jewelry:

Cuttlefish are not fish at all but are cephalopods, their closest relatives are squid and octopus. These amazing sea creatures have eight arms and two tentacles with suckers that they use to capture their prey. Some cuttlefish are brightly colored and many can change the color and the texture of their skin as camouflage, mating display, or warning.

It gives from background on cuttlefish which help customers who may not be familiar with these cool animals but it also includes many of my keywords such as: cuttlefish, fish, squid, cephalopods, tentacles, sea, etc.

Make the first few sentences of your description count the most, Etsy pulls the first 240 characters for the meta description tag. How much this tag matters anymore is debatable but some search engines pull this info for their results display. So you want to make sure it's clear in those first few words exactly what your item is.

Tags

Since tags are text on the listing page google will see them but you should be focussing them for Etsy search because that's where they will do the most good. List type of product, subject matter, materials, colors, etc. then if you have some tag spaces left over throw in some of your keywords. The tags also show up in the keywords meta tag but most search engines no longer give those much weight so Etsy search first then what might help with Google.

Shop Announcement

Your shop announcement is the only solid piece of text on your gallery page. Use it to introduce you and your products while working in your keywords. Like your item description the first 240 characters of your announcement are pulled for the meta description tag so describe your business first before any other announcements (including sales).

Also don't forget your shop title, you have about 55 characters to work with so instead of just your shop name include a little more info and keywords. As an example instead of just using "Noadi's Art" I use "Noadi's Art on Etsy, Polymer Clay Jewelry & Sculpture". It doesn't just show up in bold at the top of my shop annoucnement but is also used in the title tag, the title tag shows the title in the top of the browser (or on tabs) but search engines also factor it into your rankings.

Shop Sections

Shop sections need to be clear to your customers what they include, but they are also text so search engines see them (also along with your user name they are pulled into the meta keywords). Instead of for example listing "Hats" be more specific and put "Fleece Women's Hats".

Off Site Optimization

Off site optimization boils down to one basic thing: backlinks. Backlinks are links on other sites that lead to your shop. You want to have links from many other sites, but not just any site. Sites with content related to your shop will have more effect than a totally unrelated site and some sites have more weight with search engines than others (google pagerank is often used a measurement of this).

NoFollow

Not every link will help your search engine rankings. The nofollow attribute tells search engines not to count a link, blog often have these on the comments and all paid links (like ads) are also supposed to be nofollow. These links might bring traffic so they aren't useless but won't help you with search engines.

Getting Started

So where to start building backlinks? If you have a blog, twitter account, flickr account, etc. add a link to your shop. Then you can start searching for free directories to add your site to, here's a big list of free directories and you definitely should get added to the Handmade Product Directory. Other things you can do are start a blog just for your shop, create Squidoo lenses for your products, email other blogs about featuring your shop, most Etsy teams have a blog that lists member shops so that's yet another great reason to join a team (among many including meeting cool fellow Etsy users). If you have great products and good promotion other people will do some of the work for you by linking to your shop themselves.

Another way to build backlinks is to use the RSS feed that every Etsy shop has. has a great list of places to submit RSS feeds.

While not directly related to the normal google results you deifnitely want to sign up for an submit your products to Google Base so they will show up in the product search. Let's Ets is a great tool for getting the bulk file to upload.

Linking to Your Shop

You can't control all links to your shop just those you create yourself. This is where your keyword list comes back out. You want to create links to your shop that use not just your shop name (you do want a number of those) but also your keywords.

If you are using images to link to your shop the best option is to also have a text link below it or near it to the same page. However you can also use the alt and title tags for images in the format <img src="http://yourlink.com/image.jpg" alt="Your shop name" title="Your shop name"> and the search engines will read that text for the image.

Hiring Out your SEO

There are many companies online that will do your SEO for you. If you find this all overwhelming you may decide to hire someone else to do it for you, however be very careful. There are some shady SEO companies out there that may want to scam you or who use unethical practices that could end up getting you punished by the search engines by being blacklisted. Always do your research before hiring anyone.

Share your Promotion Tips

I happen to love Squidoo and Twitter and there's now a Squidoo co-brand that combines the two so head over to "What's your favorite way to promote your shop" and share your favorite tips with Squidoo and Twitter. You'll need a Twitter account to participate.

Twittering for Sales

This is a condensed version of the Squidoo lens I wrote Using Twitter to Promote your Handmade Business. Please check out the full lens it's also full of links to lots of useful twitter tools.

Introduction to Twitter

Twitter.com is a micro-blogging platform and social network rolled into one. You can post short 140 character messages to your twitter from the website, 3rd party applications or your phone.

Your messages are then viewed by anyone visiting your twitter profile and more importantly people who are 'following' you. A follower subscribes to your twitter posts and can respond to them. In turn you can (and should) also follow other people.

Twitter lets you build relationships between you and the people who follow you. You can let them know more about yourself and your business and get feedback from other people who also sell their handmade goods.

Tweeting Tips

It's very easy to go a little overboard and spam about your products here are some tips for sending good tweets:

General Tweeting

1: Don't just talk about your products when they're done and listed for sale, talk about making them, new ideas you have, etc.

2: Also talk about yourself and your life some, tell a joke now and then, do you have a funny pet story or a great recipe to share. Let people learn more about who you are and what you care about.

3: Tweet your blog. Using a service like Twitterfeed or the wordpress twitter plugin link your blog to your twitter to announce new posts.

4: Interact with the people you follow and who follow you. Answer their questions, ask your own questions, if they told a funny joke let them know, etc.

5: Have fun. If you go into Twitter totally businesslike you've missed the point. It's about communicating not just pumping out advertising for your product.

Talking about your Products and Business

So what type of things about your products should you be posting?

1: Announce when new products are listed. If you've just listed one item post a direct link to it but if you are listing more than 2 or 3 items in a day wait until you're finished for the day then announce with a link to your shop.

2: Announce sales and promotions. If you're having a sale announce it once or twice during the day, not every few minutes or every hour. You don't want to flood your followers.