Blogging For Business

There are so many ways to showcase your crafts online, from using services where you set up a "store" for a fee or commission on your sales, to selling your crafts with online auctions, to creating a blog, to starting your own fully-fledged website. Today we're going to look at blogging, and how it can help your craft sales.

Setting up a blog is quick, easy, and best of all, free! Like anything on the net, traffic is the key to making sales, but the nice thing about a blog is that all the tech stuff is taken care of for you. You simply choose a template and a name, then start posting.

What to post? Well, that all depends on what your target is. If you simply want a place to showcase your work for your existing or new customers, and an internet address that you can print on your business cards or flyers, then you could create, for example, a post for each of your products. You would of course include a photo of the item, and you could create a lovely description of it. An online catalog, if you will, which is cheaper than a printed catalog, and easy for your customers to access anytime, anywhere.

If you want to go online to sell your crafts from a website or a blog, then your scope for creating posts is much wider. You could (and should) still create a catalog of sorts, but you could also build up a good base of repeat visitors by writing articles about you, your work, your products, your industry, and so much more. Online and off, it's much easier to sell to existing customers than it is to find new ones, so by writing interesting articles which will bring visitors back time and again, you'll find that when you introduce new products, you'll sell more of them to those customers, who will become more loyal over time. They, in turn, also tell their friends about your products and pass on the address of your blog - the power of word-of-mouth is huge.

Now, how do you get that traffic?! With hard work, and patience. The great thing about blogs is that they "ping" or notify a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog's popularity.

You can also submit your blog yourself to the search engines (for example, blogsearch.google.com), to internet directories, and to specialized blog directories. You can also exchange links with other, non-competing blogs. Traffic generating techniques for blogs are much the same as for a "normal" website, and the more you work at it, the better your results will be.

Creating new posts all the time is essential to a blog's life and development, because the more you ping, the more your traffic grows. Not everyone has something to post about every day, so what I try to do a couple of times a month is plan my posts in advance. I write them up in my text editor and save them, then each day I simply copy and paste to my blog, then post and ping!

The two most popular free blogging services are Blogger and Wordpress. Check them out, take their "tours", compare their features, and decide which one suits you best, then start blogging!

What are the downsides of creating a blog as compared to building a "normal" website? Well, there are a few limitations in terms of customization and features, but it's a great way to get started on the net, and a lot of bloggers eventually "graduate" to a "normal" website for more flexibility once they have some experience. The advantage of this, is that you've already built up free, targeted traffic, so you're not starting all over again, and you can even keep the blog going and growing, driving more new traffic to your new website.

Happy Blogging! :-)

Arts & Crafts Contest

We're going to carry July's contest through to August, because there haven't been enough entries to make a fair choice for the top 3 this month. I'm guessing everyone's enjoying summer vacation? :-)

So if you were thinking of entering, you now have a few more weeks in which to do so - c'mon, show us your gorgeous work!

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