Advertising

Now that I've got stuff in the shop, I have to think about selling it.

You can post in the Promotions forum of Etsy until your fingers fall off.. it seems to me that that's really not an effective way to advertise. Yes, people probably go in there looking for new items and deals and such, but it looks like there're far more sellers than buyers frequenting that forum, all trying to promote their product. And most of the promotion threads are firesale threads. Bah.

Really, to promote effectively, you need to first find your market. That's one of my bigger hurdles. I make jewelry..... and anything else that comes to mind. So far I've got a bunch of funny face magnets, some globber figurines (of which I will be making more. I like them.), and some random jewelry. We're talking at least two separate demographics.

So I need two different ad campaigns. One focusing on the humorous polymer clay products, and one focusing on the jewelry. And then perhaps a third "general" campaign that just elicits interest in the shop.

For each campaign, I'll need a button, square, banner, half-banner, etc etc... I think there are about seven different sizes of ads I can have. Generally, we'd want these to be static, but animation has its place - button ads, for example, can convey a lot more information if they're animated.

For the moment, I threw together a quick animated button ad. I then quickly made a LOT of bids on Project Wonderful for $0. Probably kind of cheesy, but what the heck. Most of the sites may never display it. I figured I'd try a shotgun approach and see if anything happened.

I will budget money for advertising eventually. The nice thing about project wonderful is it may not actually cost that much, and you get what you pay for. I like their "infinite auction" system. So when I have all my ads, I'll put together some campaigns and actually pay for advertising. Until then, I'm using this guy to do some free bidding and get the hang of using Project Wonderful.