Marketing 101

The very wise Neil of WoodJewellery said something today that made me smile: "There are a great many way to sell. the hardest and least successful one is to sit and wait for sales to come to you."


Necklace from WoodJewellery

So true!

Right now on folksy there are a gazillion forum threads from sellers trying to work out how to improve their sales.

Clare of ClaresCreations
put me on the spot and asked me: "where else do you advertise?"


Clare's fishbowl

Here's an edited version of my answer:

Clare, I don’t often “advertise” in a direct way, but I do spread myself about!

I chat on twitter and facebook, I have a website (address is on my business cards) which is pretty much just an address book so people can find my various links and I blog several times a week. Oh and I hang around etsy and folksy forums.

Right now I’ve sent a couple of meerkats around the world visiting members of my etsy team, and each one is blogging about it and reporting back to their facebook page



baby meerkat from folksy
baby meerkat from etsy

This in turn has given me something to tell the local paper, so they featured me a couple of times and put a video interview on the paper website.

I've even been interviewed on the radio!

I go to local twitter network meetings (next lunch is on Friday!)

I’ve entered harry hill’s K factor knitting competition

So – you might not call much of that “advertising” but in my opinion it all works much much better than going on twitter and saying “I’ve made this, buy it!”

I'm currently working on a blog post about "real" advertising, in particular Project Wonderful (you may have noticed the two advertising slots that have appeared on the right >>>) but it seemed appropriate, in the light of today's threads, to address these other methods today. Please leave a comment with other forms of advertising you find useful.