There are a number of different ways that you can promote your work and we thought we would highlight a few to help those people new to selling their work on Folksy (and which will also hopefully act as a reminder to those who have been selling for some time).

(image from Hole in My Pocket)

1. Offline is still a good lead generator

If you’ve sold an item as a gift the person receiving the gift could then be a future customer. Give them something to pique their interest in more of your work. Gift tags can work as business cards and if done well can serve to delight people into looking at more of your work. Moo do a great selection of business / promotional cards with a range of designs to choose from, or you can use your own designs (they integrate with flickr really nicely).

2. Link to your work consistently

Add a link to your folksy shop from your blog or website. It’s obvious but pointing to your work on Folksy enables people to find your work. A blog is a good ‘hub’ from which to aggregate other activity too.

• Folksy blog post on Practical Tips for Getting More Blog Comments
• grab Folksy Blog Badges to promote your work from your own website

3. Give people a reason to talk about you

Social curation sites are all the rage. Register with Svpply or Pinterest and register some of your own items. Create curated lists of things you like from around the web and not just your own work (as people are more likely to follow your lists and share them if they are seen to be varied). It can help to pick themes which are topical too; people follow trends. Beware though, social curation can be a huge time sink!

See our introductory blog post on Pinterest.

4. Post links to items through Twitter and Facebook

Folksy prompts you to do this after you list, but it’s useful to do this sporadically at other times too. Many people make the mistake of seeing Twitter as a channel just for promotion but it’s a social space and people will only take an interest in you and your work if you use it to say interesting things about what you’re doing too.
Facebook is a huge referrer to Folksy and a key way to promote your talent. Talk about what you’re making, how you’re making it and get known for your craft and not just the end product. People tend to be interested as much in the craft and how you practice the craft as the item itself.
See:
1. Growing your (organic) SEO.
2. 10 super useful Twitter tips

5. Post photos

Craft is a very visual practice and photos are good ‘social objects‘. People like to browse images of craft.

It’s worth using services like Instagram and Flickr to share your work and your craft. Flickr has a series of groups (for example the brilliant CRAFT group and Craft Blog UK and even a We Love Folksy group – which is not managed by us) you can join and post your images to, whereas Instagram is more akin to Twitter – it’s all about the now. Both are useful to grow your network and promote your work and build your network.