At the end of the day one of the most important factors that is going to drive your sales is traffic, whether they are online customers or physical ones to your home-based craft store. There are ways of getting traffic to your website, or to your craft listing on other e-commence websites like eBay and Etsy.com Lets discuss traffic sources for your craft business is a little more detail.
Ebay Traffic
There are two types of traffic you can have for your eBay listing. It’s own traffic coming from people who visit eBay either directly or through search engines, and extra traffic that you send to your listing from your own sources.
Ebay generates a lot of traffic from its own visitors. People either land directly on eBay and search for items, or they find the items listed on eBay through major search engines. Ebay is search engine friendly and indexes it really well. So if you have written good tittles and descriptions, you can expect buyers to find your ebay listing directly from search engines as well.
Your headline and product product title plays a very important part in people finding you through searches. So understand a few things about who to write it. What buyers are you targeting? What are they searching for? What are the keywords for your craft? Include a few keywords in your title. But do not cram it so that it no longer makes sense. Basically try to give out as much pertinent information as possible in the title of your listing.
The free targeted traffic that eBay sends to your listing is one of the reasons how they justify their relatively higher listing fee and charges. Amongst all the auction websites eBay gets the most traffic by far. For this reason alone you must try eBay first before you start experimenting with any other auctions website.
You can pay a little extra for a premium listing and have your products show on top of a page. Figure out if you can justify the extra expense with more sales or higher bids on your auctions.
Typically, the more traffic you auctions get the higher the bids will go.
This kind of free traffic can be had on other popular e-commerce websites as well. If you list your craft on Etsy.com you will see a lot of people finding your craft and your shop as long as you are selling something interesting and that something people are looking for.
So what can you do to ensure more people find your craft listing?
You can generate this traffic yourself.
These are ways of generating extra traffic to your website or product listing. Paid search engine campaigns.
Google is the largest provider of search engine traffic. It is also the largest provider of paid search engine traffic. You can pay to have your advertisement shown when buyers search for a particular keyword.
When the buyer clicks on your ad you can have them sent to your eBay listing or to your own website. You can also choose another call to action take place such as phone call query. At the time of writing this, only Google ads offer ‘phone calls’ actions for their paid ads. You will be charged each time a buyer makes a call to action you have described in your ad.
Finding keywords that convert something you will need to do. There is a learning curve involved here and also an extra budget that you can experiment with before you start getting results. Both Google Adwords and Bing Ads have a keyword research tool that can give you plenty of information like number of searches for a particular keyword, how much you can expect to pay per click etc.
The idea behind paid search engine traffic is to match the cost with the revenue. If you pay $.30 per click, get hundred visitors to visit your auction or website, the revenue from these visitors must be at least $30 to break even with the cost.
Which brings us to the next question, how do you measure the value of an online visitor? If you get hundred visitors through paid search traffic not all of them will buy. Maybe one person will buy or maybe 10.
So are the rest of the 90 visitors useless.? Not necessarily. This is where you need to learn about capturing leads, measuring the value of each visitor and tracking conversions. Read this article.
Email Lists
This is the process of collecting email addresses on your website from interested prospects and then emailing them with offers in the future. You can either have them come back to your website or visit your craft listing on eBay and Etsy. For the easiest, most cost-effective and best looking emails start with GetResponse.
Social Media Traffic
You can send people from your social media accounts like Facebook and Pinterest. You can grow a list of fans and followers who will see your information in their News feed every time you post something new.
The best way to get Facebook fans is either to encourage your website traffic to join your page or with paid ads within Facebook itself. Do not send traffic from paid search engines to your Facebook page as that usually does not produce very good results.
You can also expect to get organic traffic to your Facebook page from search engines if you post good content and regular content.
You can hope to get a healthy amount of traffic from Pinterest if you learn the proper way to use it, although working with Pinterest involves extra work. You need to make ‘pinnable’ images that get people’s attention and get ‘re-pinned’ several times.
You can create a board for your business and ‘pin’ these images yourself or you can include them with articles on your website and make your articles ‘pin-friendly’.
We suggest reading of few books on Pinterest such as this one.
SEO/organic searches.
You can garner a lot of free organic traffic from search engines by posting great and regular content on your blog. Pay special attention to your titles.
If you have a WordPress blog, download a plug-in called SEO by Yoast. It is a free plug-in and will teach you effective basics of search engine optimisation which in turn will allow you to rank better with search engines and get more free organic traffic.
