Timothy Adam Webinar On Driving Traffic to Your Etsy Shop

So Tuesday night, October 13th at 9PM EDT, I attended Timothy Adam's webinar that covered topics involving driving more traffic to your Etsy shop (although it could apply to any online selling site). The material was awesome! Tim and his colleague Andy Drish began with the premise that there were over 1.5 million items listed on Etsy per month. Given that staggering number, it is necessary to develop new marketing strategies to drive traffic to your Etsy Shop. That is not to say that the tried-and-true strategies are no longer effective such as renewing items in your Etsy shop every day; this is just no longer enough to get seen due to the proliferation of items available for sale. As a matter of fact, Tim stated that renewing certain or all of your items (depending on the amount of items you have in your shop) gives buyers the impression of a fresh shop that is open for business each and every day.

In addition to the renew strategy, Tim also mentioned what we all know is important--the photos of our products. Without buyers being able to feel or touch our products, we have five pictures to convince them that this is the item they want to buy. I know for myself, I have a bunch of photos that need replacing because they don't show how beautiful the item really is!

Pricing was also discussed and Tim pointed us in the direction of the Etsy calculator tool that helps you determine the right pricing for your items. Andy explained the phrase "price framing" to us which simply put means that people like to regress to the mean when purchasing products. This bit of psychology can be very helpful for those of us who struggle with pricing!

Offline marketing efforts were also mentioned such as art shows, fairs, and utilizing business cards to get the word out there about your online selling shop.

But the meat of the webinar was about tapping into social networking sites and blogging as an effective means to not only develop a customer base but to create a community-based network within the handmade industry. Some of the highlights of information and advice he gave to us included:

• Use your blog as your home base and then send out to Facebook and Twitter sending them back to your blog in order to enhance the amount of traffic to your selling site
• Facebook is the fasting growing viral network out there and has the ability to show your network not only text but pictures to promote your work and the work of fellow artisans
  
• Utilize the Facebook Fan Page Insights to track your demographic information and see exactly where your fans are coming from
• Go out and find followers on Twitter by using directories like We Follow or follow who follows Tim on his Twitter channels so that you have a base of people who are truly interested in your industry and work
• Sign up for HootSuite which is an application that helps you manage your Twitter channels and actually has the capability of scheduling tweets for later so you can have steady timed tweets even if you are not able to be at your desk to tweet them!

The remaining part of the webinar was devoted to one of Tim's latest projects: Handmadeology University (HMU). This is a subscription based site that gives you all the benefits of Tim's knowledge and expertise plus the feeling of community amongst all other members of HMU. Here are some of the benefits you receive by being a part of HMU:

• Valuable ebooks about Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Time Management, and Google Analytics
• 8 hours of recorded personal coaching calls
• Fabulous forums
• Tim's Product Launch Formula regarding building a solid email list
• A free webinar per month
  

And much, much more! Contact Tim Adam at one of his many places on the web for more information on how to become a member!
Here's an earlier post about resources for marketing and promoting your indie artisan business, in case you missed it!