The last few posts we’ve had a look at getting your crafts blog or website better noticed – by getting some link love going, submitting to search engines and giving 
yourself a better chance of ranking quickly at Google with their webmaster tools.
Now lets take a look at other ways of getting some love for your site – all of which is going to help get the people in. If you want to sell crafts online, you’ve got to get those lovely people in!
You’ll hear of lots of different ways to get people to visit your craft site but it boils down to two methods – what I call on-site and off-site. Making sure your content appeals to people is on-site, submitting to Google etc., is off-site.
So off-site is getting the link love I talked about here. If you take part in a forum related to your craft you can almost certainly have a link to your csite at the bottom of each post you make – it’s a link back in the eyes of the search engines and if you’re helpful and genuine (an absolute must at forums or you’ll get kicked out) then people will follow that link back too.
If you look down my central navigation bar you’ll see little logos for Technorati, Blogtopsites and Blogcatalog. These are directories where you can register your site and the hope is that people visiting these popular sites will be attracted to visit yours. Some of these are more effective than others so you need to keep an eye on your web stats to see where your visitors are coming from. If they’re not producing results there’s no room on your craft blog for them. It can be used more effectively for something else.
Off-site would also cover things like Twitter or Facebook. If you’re into those things then make sure your craft site is linked from them, mentioned in them, etc. My personal view is that they’re great for getting a group of like-minded people together but I’m not sure about what they actually bring to your business. I could be wrong. If you disagree, do let me know!
If you’re blogging – and you should be – then as your blog gets more popular you may get asked to guest blog for others – another great source of incoming links and incoming eyeballs!
On-site is perhaps more straight-forward but no less important. The search engines want to send their visitors to the most appropriate site. If your blog or site waffles on about this that and the other, you might find it personally satisfying but the search engines won’t! Sorry, but your craft business needs to focus.
The language can still be friendly – indeed it should be – and encouraging people to become involved with what you’re doing is a great idea, just make sure you’re on subject. Blog Power Posting was designed and written to give you precisely the right information to achieve this quickly and easily and if you’ve got a couple of bucks to spare it’s definitely worth the investment.
At first, thinking about your craft blog content in terms of search engines and incoming links feels a bit odd. It’s a commercial attitude that a lot of us aren’t used to because we tend to think just about our crafts.
Actually, if all you concentrate on is your crafts, you won’t go far wrong because your site will always be tightly focused. The rest of this stuff you’ll get more and more used to every time you do a bit.
As I’ve said before, it’s not the overnight secret to instant craft success. It’s something that improves your site each time you do it. Soon it becomes second nature.
Is it worth it? Well this blog currently has just 14 posts and I started working on it on 1st September. If you search Google for “selling crafts online”, which is obviously my target market, today I was at number six. That’s 6 out of over 21 million and above many sites that have been there for years!
Now that can vary – Google shifts people about almost daily – but it’s still pretty good for a month old blog! I never spend money on advertising, I just do what I’m suggesting here, added to article marketing which I’ve mentioned before.
So is it worth it? Well how good do you think it would be for your craft business to be in the top ten at Google?
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