Starting a blog can have a huge positive impact on your craft business. A blog is a powerful marketing tool which can put potential customers directly in front of your craft shop. In this post we have a number of useful links to posts that will help you understand how to use your blog to drive traffic and customers to your craft shop. We also have a useful table showing all the ways in which a blog can work as a marketing tool for growing your craft business. (earrings by Nanfan Jewellery can be found here)
Does blogging feel like a waste of your precious time?
Many people start a blog and soon lose interest because they don’t see results (sales or increased traffic) and they feel that their blog is a waste of time. They feel like blogging doesn’t work for their business, but it’s usually because they need to reconsider their approach to writing and promoting blog posts. If you are writing a blog with a view to using it as a tool to market your craft shop, you need to focus on the goals you want to achieve with every single post you write.
Until you identify exactly what function your blog posts will play within your marketing strategy you will find your blog drifts along without a real purpose. You suddenly realise you haven’t posted for weeks and feel like you are back at square one.
When approached correctly, your blog can become the axis which everything you do online to promote your crafts, revolves around.
What do you need your blog posts to achieve?
A single blog post can work incredibly hard for you as a marketing tool if you get the recipe right and understand how a reader will find it and importantly what you want them to do once they have read it. Sometimes it’s easier to focus on one post at a time rather than thinking of your blog as a huge overwhelming task that you have on your to-do list.
A post that took you an hour to research and an hour to write could still be bringing you potential new customers every day for years to come.
Goal of the Post |
How you achieve it |
| A blog post can bring quality organic search traffic | Research what your target market is interested in reading about (see our tips here) and use this information to write answers to questions and share information they will naturally be attracted too. Write down a list of possible blog post titles. |
| A blog post is a piece of valuable original content. | Useful and interesting original content will see your posts being shared and help you find new fans and followers through social media. Create a promotional schedule for your post – where and how it will be shared to maximise the number of people who read it (see our social media tips for help with this) |
| A blog post can be used to encourage people to sign up to your newsletter or follow you on social media. | Think about where you will place a link to sign up to your newsletter or Facebook page – not just in sidebars. You can add calls to action to look at products or sign up/follow within the text. You now have a way of communicating with them more regularly and sharing your crafts with them. You could offer a discount code in your next post to new subscribers to encourage them to sign up. Read more about newsletters here |
| Blog posts make great newsletter content | A weekly or monthly newsletter can be really interesting for your customers when you fill it with links to your latest blog posts, archive posts they might enjoy, as well as news of your latest products. It can help to ensure that existing subscribers and potential customers keep coming back to your blog even if they are not ready to buy yet. It can also boost sharing of your posts from already loyal subscribers (aka brand advocates) (try Mailchimp which we use) |
| Blog posts allow you to more easily network with influencers | A blog post can be a way of virtually introducing yourself and networking with potential influential people online through featuring them on your blog or writing about a topic they are involved with. Write about them, feature their blogs and be sure to let them know about the post so they can share it. |
| Advertise your products | Use your sidebars for adverts of your own products and use images of your work in your posts where you think they will fit well. You could add a banner at the end of posts with a promotional code for your shop – don’t write posts which are just adverts as this wont be an enjoyable read. |
| Become an expert! | A good blog post which answers a question or rounds up a number of tutorials or great websites that will be useful to your customers can make you an authority on a subject and lead to lots of opportunities for networking as well as boosting organic traffic. |
| Make images and videos a priority to increase sharing and pinning of your posts. | The better the images the more likely your posts will be shared – see our photography tips for crafters here Whe you use other people’s images be sure to credit them and where you can let them know you have featured them – it’s another great way of networking – Folksy Friday’s are a great way to create beautiful posts that people will pin and share. |
Make time to promote your blog posts
If you plan to write one post per week and you think it will take an hour to write allow at least an equal amount of time for promoting the posts and getting the images right. It’s a far better use of time to write one great post and promote it properly than it is to write three and realise you haven’t got the time or energy to actively promote it.
Please share your latest blog posts in the Folksy Forums – there is always a ‘Have you blogged today’ thread and you’ll get a little flurry of traffic from Folksy forum users – a great way to network with fellow craft sellers.
Resource of Craft Blogging Tips
We’re building up a resource of tips for craft bloggers on our Craft Seller Tips area of the blog to help you learn more about how to make your blog a success. A successful craft business blog is one that ultimately brings you customers to your craft shop and leads to opportunities for networking with influential people who can help market your crafts and bring you more sales!
How to get your products in front of the right customers.
Boost your blogging confidence
How to get more blog readers and comments
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Featured Image – Earrings by Nanfan Jewellery
3 comments
This is all true and very useful advice. Thank you.
I struggle to keep up with all the social media. Just last week I went to a skill share meeting about twitter – another one which I am neglecting.
Time to make a plan :o)
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