Great Shop Promo Advice from BrickHouseFabrics

I was doing some reading on the Etsy Forums the other day,  when I stumbled on this fount of great advice on promoting your Etsy shop from Barbara of BrickHouseFabrics .
Brick House Fabrics is an online fabric store that specializes in novelty home decorating fabric, and they carry fabrics that showcase a person's loves and interests, including  Braemore, Covington, Duralee, P.Kaufmann, Ralph Lauren, Robert Allen, and have Laura Ashley, Schumacher, Thibaut, and others.


Barbara was kind enough to let me blog about it, so the following is a quote from BrickHouseFabrics: 

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" BrickHouseFabrics says:
The first thing I would do is to step back.
Renewing does not work for me, and it is only good for people on etsy.  Here are my basics:

My basics for being found on the net, and places I use:

The shop title is searchable. Fill it w/ keywords about your product.

Get your announcements set for search engines: fill the first paragraph w/ keywords about what you make/sell. Move everything down below it- no one googles hello, or welcome.

Titles: the title should be what a person would google to find the item. 54-56 characters are pulled by search engines. Fill them w/ keywords. The first 2 words are the most important. Remove words like and, the, or, they lower searchability.

Reuse the keywords in the first sentence of the listing.

Give measurements in both inches and metric. I use an on-line metric convertor:
http://www.worldwidemetric.com/Measurements.html

Write the description as if there weren't a pic. Take the pics as if there weren't a description.

The thumbnail is crucial to being successful: the average buyer on the net spends 3-5 sec. before clicking or moving on. Take pics of everything about the item.

Use an photo editor: pic nik, picassa, photoscape are all free.
And use a tripod! It eliminates a lot of issues!

Artists- most people show a picture of the item very cropped. Take another one of the item on an easel- table or full sized, to give a sense of scale, and to let the buyer know exactly what they are gettting.

Make certain, if you sell internationally- to have a disclaimer that the buyer is responsible for all customs fees, duties, and import charges that are levied at the time of delivery.
I have it on every listing, and add a link to http://www.sloanefox.freeserve.co.uk/importukduty.htm

Make certain your policies are filled out, and your profile, and location.

Join twitter; even if you don't tweet- you can use twit pic to upload a keyword filled message, and link it back to the shop w/ Bitly. That message is searchable, and the link is good.

Upload items to Kaboodle.

Do a Squidoo lens about your shop:
http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-use-the-etsy-module

Then do another about your things, your craft, whatever, and link it back as well.

These are all fast, free ways to do some promoting.

Also remember- the net works off of new. Once a month change the announcement, or titles, or shop categories. If you do a lens, or publish anything on the net, make certain to tweak it, or add to it, even a RSS feed, anything to keep those bots happy and coming back for more!


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Here's another sample of just one of the gorgeous fabrics available at BrickHouseFabrics:

Wonderful advice, and all things you can do for free!  I'm a major fan of Twitter, I've found great info there, made some internet friends, and bought some lovely items from people I would probably never have know about otherwise.

Hope you've found something in this post to help you achieve the success with your Etsy shop that you're working towards!  Wishing you prosperity and the joy of creativity.