Monday 12 August 2013

The Etsy Community







One of Etsy's strengths is the community feel - make use of it! There are a few different ways I think you can both enjoy your time on Etsy more and also increase your views and hopefully sales...
 

Teams:

The team set up on Etsy is great. There are so many types of team you can use the search function to essentially find one for everything. The type of team that is probably in greatest abundance is promotion teams. They will often have threads where you can post new listings, ask people to heart you in return for hearting them etc. I have used these a lot, however to be perfectly honest, other than adding hearts for your store and items, I'm not actually sold on the value of these. The person hearting you is generally speaking just doing so to get your heart in return for their own store and is unlikely to be that interested in what they are looking at. That being said I can't be a hypocrite and I do use them anyway. The one I use most often is probably this one:

https://www.etsy.com/uk/teams/11908/promoters-playground

A type of team I am sold on the use of is the abundance of teams out their in existence to give advice on people's shops, answer questions etc. You can often get short site critiques for free from other members, ask people to see what they think of your tagging as well as being to help others in return with your own thoughts and advice. My faves of this kind of team are:

https://www.etsy.com/uk/teams/10713/etsy-relevancy-seo-and-stats

https://www.etsy.com/uk/teams/7332/etsys-uk-ireland-seller-support-team

Every team, from promotion to site advice often have a 'introduce yourself' or 'chat' threads. These are great to get to know other Etsians, but to increase exposure at the same time. By building a relationship with someone that isn't sales focused they are actually quite likely to tale a real look at your store. Unlike a thread focused purely on swapping hearts. Many chat threads can actually be used to promote new items, as long as it is done sparingly and you are participating in the general conversation. Again, this kind of promotion, whilst on a smaller scale, is much more likely to produce a genuine view. A good example of this kind of thread is:

https://www.etsy.com/teams/5151/craftbritannia/discuss/12776256/

My favourite team doesn't really call in to any of the mentioned types:

https://www.etsy.com/uk/teams/7565/handmademovement

I have already discussed them at length here:

http://fredericadixonjewelry.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/slight-deviation.html

But their aim is to help other newly starting out stores.

Treasuries:
 

I love making treasuries. But aside from enjoying making them and checking back to see if others have 'admired' my lists, making treasuries has other values too. In the comments I always try to remember to link back to my site as whilst you should never feature your own items in treasuries, other Etsians will often take a peak at the curators shop so it can still be good exposure. I don't find I get a great amount of views from this but definitely some. What I do find I get from treasuries is followers. These Etsians will see in their activity feed anything I favourite, any treasury lists I make but also any new items I list which is definitely great exposure and I am pretty sure a lot of my hearts on brand new items come from my followers. Aside from this you help out other stores by featuring them in treasuries and help others boost their own views. I always send each of the owners of my treasured items a little message with the treasury link hoping they like it. I never ask them to heart, comment or otherwise promote but I often find people naturally want to promote treasury lists they are featured in. The benefit is obvious for them but this will mean you get additional people promoting a treasury you have created and getting exposure for you aside from what you are doing yourself.

Getting your treasury on the front page or even the popular treasuries page will maximise all of the above. When I have featured on the popular treasuries I have seen a huge spike in views. I have never been on the front page but Eureka guides sells a how to here:

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/77208354/how-to-get-on-etsy-front-page-instant


And this team always has the months trends which is what the Etsy guys are looking for when they pick treasuries for the front page.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/teams/5127/european-street-team-est

There is so much to say on treasuries I will probably do a single blog post on it at a later date, reiterating the above but going into more detail.

Hearting

I am a self professed hearter! I love hearting great items and also finding new inspiration from beads etc. for my jewelry. But again, with hearting comes added benefits. The more interesting and selective your hearting, the more interesting you will be to follow, the more followers you will accrue, the more exposure you will get. But also when you heart others, they can see who has hearted them and will often heart you back. 1. This is a good feeling 2. This is more hearts for your store 3. There is a theory that the more hearts your items have, the more likely they are to appear higher up in the Etsy search listings. However, this is not solidified so don't put all your eggs in this basket so to speak.

To be honest this is probably only a short list of the great things about the Etsy community and what doors it opens. Very open to hearing other ideas too :-)

Frederica

http://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/FredericaDixon

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