Networking Saturday; Link Your Shop or Blog 7

It seems very odd to me that often I will see shops that are not utilizing social networking to promote themselves but they will complain that they have been on ____ (artfire, etsy, ebay; fill in the blank) for ___ months with no sales. 

Are you one of those who think that your product should stand on its own?  If you are, I propose to you this question:  How do your potential buyers know you are there?  When they search "handmade bibs" 1000+ sites pop up in google offering varieties of handmade bibs.  Are you the 1st thing to pop up...No, are you 10th in the search line up?.... No, Can you even find your shop name in this ocean of shops?...No!  If you do not promote your shop well how will anyone know you even exist?  It is like having a brick and mortar store without a sign in front, no address and no phone number. 

So I have convinced you that maybe you need to connect with some people via social networking, now what?  There are many social networks to chose from and some are excellent at drawing people to your shop and some are not.  Over the next few posts I will point out some useful information about several I use personally and some tools that are available to make managing you sites easier and more effective.




One of my favorites is Twitter.  Believe it our not several shops do not use Twitter but I have found that 1 tweet will give me 20+ Times more visits to specific items in my shops.  So what that means is that it works and it is a good investment of my time.

Without Tweeting:

With Tweeting:

 Big difference, right?

A few great tools that are available to use with your twitter account:
Using The Round Team you can create a group of people that use a common # (hashtag) which signal bots to automatically retweet those tweets that use that  hashtag within the post.  You do need to take care that you don't over do it because they are very sensitive to spam.
https://roundteam.freshdesk.com/support/home

Using # HashTags are very important especially when using your post to draw an audience to your shop item.  # holidays if there is an upcoming holiday, # interests (ie #collectible, #antique, #handmade,) # popular trends that fit within your description and of course # to signal to a bot.  The following are some examples but they change frequently so doing  a google search periodically for the most popular is suggested.
#PleaseRetweet
#HandmadeBot
#EtsyBot
#EtsyBot2

There are many apps out there that will automatically follow people back, show you who is following you back, and bulk manage your Tweets and followers.
One such app is HootSuite
Love this guy, he makes scheduling tweets a piece of cake.  You can link in multiple accounts and tweet them all at once.



Group tweets are a beautiful thing.  On The Twitter Tree you are able to pool your resources with many others that may have as many followers or more followers than you.  I myself have well over a thousand, but some of the participants are over 10,000 followers so just imagine the impact of joining in this group effort.  You post 2 tweets in the comments section and in return you tweet everyone else's.  By doing that everyone else will tweet your 2 to created a post that could reach potentially 10,000 - 50,000 twitter accounts.

With The Twitter Tree

But when it is all said and done; your tweets are only good as the amount of followers you can reach.  So you should be building those followers consistently.

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If you have any great networking opportunities you would like me to feature please contact me directly at ButterflyInTheAttic at yahoo dot com or post the information in the comments section.  I will add it to next week's post. 

So now a little homework; think about how the changes in  Google's Algorithm are going to affect you. And how do you feel about connecting your site to Google + My homework:  more research on how we can really work Hummingbird to our advantage as a group and individuals.  Also to make sure nothing else sneaks past me.

Now lets have some Networking Fun!!!

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Post any of your family friendly sites (blogs, shops, FB, etc.)  What ever sites you would like to share. 

Please help promote this post using your social networks.  Here is an easy one:
Tweet
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