craft$ellers

So how can you start getting traffic today to your craft site? What’s something that you can start doing right now to get people headed your way? The easiest way to get started is to actively participate in forums. You probably already do this in one way or another, so it isn’t much of a stretch.

But just participating isn’t enough. You need to participate in a certain way, and make sure you’re including certain critical information in your posts.

I’m going to use examples of products from someone I’m working with right now to help illustrate. She has started participating with articles and information on this site, so you may have already seen her name. Her name is Yael Bolender.

Yael makes items of her own design which fall under the categories of womens accessories and home decor. How can she (and you) make use of the forums to start bringing traffic into her site? Let’s consider four things she needs to think about in order to leverage the forums for traffic.

• Pick Relevant Topics - When considering a forum and topic, look for ones that match your products as close as possible. For example, if you sell home decor crafts, I wouldn’t go to the gardening forum as my first choice for commenting on my products. If someone started a topic there about home decor, it wouldn’t hurt you to comment, but when you’re looking for advice on grass seed, you aren’t necessarily in the mindset for home decor. However, if you go to a forum where people are asking how to redo their home with an Oriental look, and you sell Oriental style decor, that’s a fit. People are in the mindset of home decor, and for Oriental home decor. The closer the fit the better.
• Leverage Many Forums For Each Product Type - It’s likely that you can take a single product and look at it from several perspectives. In one situation it may be functional. However, aside from being functional, maybe it can also be decorative. One of Yael’s products on her site is an Oriental dressing screen. This might be functional, but certainly can be decorative as well. Look for a forum that addresses each aspect of your product. The more the better.
• Leave Links In Your Posts - Make sure that you leave links in your posts back to your website. When you’re commenting on something that’s related to a category of products on your site, link to that category if possible. For example, Yael also sells purses. If she was commenting on the subject of purses, she should leave a link to the page in her site that lists purses. And, if she’s commenting on a very specific purse, she should link to that specific product page.
• Use Relevant Text In Your Links - When you make a link from your post, if at all possible, use text in your link that describes your product or product category you’re linking to. Let’s use the purse example again. It’d be best for Yael if the text of her link was purse, or purses. It would also be best if this was in the middle of a sentence somewhere. Google and other search engines see this as favorable since it seems like you are giving additional information related to a topic. And, you are. So, it’s seen as more valuable. In some forums you can’t specify the text of the link. You just have to put the url (like http://www.somelink.com). But, if you can, you’re better off.

One question you might have out of all this is “Are there some text for my links that will be better than others”? The answer to that is “Yes”. You want to be using words and phrases that people are searching with when they go to Google, and that are related to your products. I can help you with figuring out what those are. Take a look at my page on finding search terms for your links.

Using forums in the way described above is a quick and easy way to start bring traffic to your site. There’s very little if any investment on your part other than time. The more links start showing up to your site, the more chance people will go to your site. The more people going to your site, the more likely you ‘ll start showing up in Google under search terms related to your subject.

The other day I was emailing one of the users of this site and we were talking about different ways to get traffic to your site. I’m working with her to help her get more people to see her products. I thought I should share some of those ideas since there may be others that would like to know the same thing.

While you can pay for ads and bring people in to your site that way, I’ll be focusing on things you can do to get noticed by search engines such as Google. I may address paid advertising in some future posts, but in this series, I’m going to stick with the search engines.

I’ll start by listing some of the things you can do to get traffic. Then, in future posts, give details as to how you can go about each item.

Here are some things to consider:

• Write articles and post them in article engines
• Answer questions on forums
• Start a blog
• Post regular content to your site related to your products
• Get other sites to link to you

These are just a few of the things that you can do in order to get yourself noticed by the search engines. I’ve been able to get my site listed on Google under a number of different search terms. When I say listed, I mean that I’m in the top ten results.

The first item on the list, and the last two are what I was using most when I really started to see results. I’m employing the other two items as I continue working on getting traffic.