An Easy Marketing Plan For Crafters Who Work From Home

By Author: Robin Cook
Total Articles: 12
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There are many online sites that allow crafters an excellent opportunity to work from home. These steps will help you display your inventory and sell product.

Step 1: Develop your USP

USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition. It basically tells the customer why he should look twice at your product. For example, let’s say you sell handcrafted doll furniture. If you stop there you might sell a few pieces, but you’ll never distinguish yourself. Putting together a useful content strategy will also be a nightmare without a solid USP. Instead, you must create a narrow focus that creates interest.

Having a unique selling proposition will then help you create specialized content instead of general content. For example, the crafter with the “contemporary doll furniture” USP could write about bringing elements of interior design into dollhouses.

Step 2: Keyword Research

There’s really no getting around keyword research if you want to get found. The Google Keyword Research Tool is free, and will give you additional suggestions. You can use these as search tags for Step 3. You ...
... can also create marketing pieces that are based around each keyword. Focus on “long tail”, descriptive keywords as much as possible. So for example, instead of trying to win over high-volume keywords like “doll furniture”, start with something more direct and consequently attainable like “custom doll furniture online” or “buy handmade doll furniture California”.

Step 3: Create Mini-Sites

Mini-sites are an excellent way to provide content without spending a lot of time or money. It’s usually very easy to make them attractive and you don’t necessarily need to pay for web hosting either. You can put together a Squidoo lens or Hubpage hub in about 15 minutes, once you get the hang of it. These are wonderful forums for adding content. The sites themselves are social, and they provide easy linking to social media sites like Twitter. Use your keyword list to generate page ideas and set goals. Creating 3-5 mini-sites per week is a great way to expand your web presence as well as hone your skills of the web world.

Each of these sites should contain at least one link back to your web store. They should also serve as valuable, interesting sources of information in their own right.

Step 4: Use Twitter

Next, it’s time to create a Twitter account for your business. Use your keyword list to find and follow people who have the kinds of interests that your crafting business serves. More importantly, be active! There’s nothing worse than a barren twitter account. Your customers (or potential customers) need to know that you’re not afraid to represent your business and your work on a very public and social forum.
Step 5: Look for Blogs

Do a search for related but non-competing blogs in your niche. If you sell doll furniture, for example, you might look for bloggers who cover doll houses, doll clothes, or the dolls themselves. Your goal is to find 2-3 of these blogs that you really enjoy. Ideally, you want blogs that inspire you to join the conversation. Read each news post. Comment when you have something valuable and genuine to say. This means you raise questions, offer new resources, answer questions, offer insights or raise polite counterpoints. Never spam your store link. Most comment forms ask for your website anyway, and that’s the appropriate place to put it.

Step 6: Be Patient and Consistent

You won’t build your traffic in a single day. If you follow this plan faithfully each week, however, you should start to see real results. Focusing on quality and providing value to others while continuing to create and offer outstanding crafts will help you build a successful business in the long run.

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