10 Ways to Promote Your Handmade Crafts & Products Online

Lots of people, myself included, enjoy making things, whether it is handmade jewellery, paper crafts, cards, pottery, paintings, sewing or something else. The difficultly comes when they try to sell their products online. Just having nice products isn't enough. A nice photo to go with it helps, but unless your product is really unusual it will get lost in the crowd.

In this article, I look at some of the ways you can promote your handmade craft creations online, so that hopefully you will sell a few things. I'm assuming as a starting point you are selling your products online through Etsy, or another online craft marketplace.

1. Get yourself a website. You don't have to sell your products directly on the website, but it is useful for promotion purposes. You can either put general information about yourself and your products online, or put your product portfolio up and link to Etsy or whichever online marketplace you are using.
2. Start blogging. Blog about new products, give tips for using your products, or how you make your products. Write about other people's products too, you may get reciprocal mention on their blog.
3. Get a Twitter account to promote your products. Even if you just use it to tweet whenever you add a new product.
4. Get a Facebook Page. You can create a Facebook page for free. Add pictures and details of each product and try to build up followers. Everyone that 'likes' your product will get your updates in their news feeds, and all of their friends will see that they like it. You can also link Facebook and Twitter so they both automatically post a link to the other when it has an update (i.e. tweet something and it will appear on your facebook page).
5. Use Pinterest. Start 'pinning' pictures of your products. Have a board (or several boards) for your products and keep adding new pins, even if it is just alternate views of the same product.
6. Try out Craftjuice.com. It is a social sharing site specifically for handmade products. Mainly used by crafters, but often a lot of the sales of hand crafted products go to fellow crafters.
7. Write 'how to' craft articles on web sites like Hubpages, as well as on your website or blog if you have one. This helps you pick up organic search traffic, as well as getting yourself out there on different websites.
8. Take part in any crafting discussion forums and any promotional activities that arise from them. Many sites have a Crafty Friday (or other day) where crafters tell their followers about another product of someone else's that they like, on their blog, website etc.
9. Try getting your products on to other sites, both other marketplaces and if you can, other people's shops. Search for small online stores which your products are a good fit for (but don't directly compete with), and get in contact. You will probably have to sell them at a reduced, more wholesale price, but as long as you earn a reasonable profit on your products it will be worth it as you will likely sell multiple products rather than just one or two.
10. Run some competitions and promotions. This works well often if you promote the competition by Facebook, Twitter or other Social media. Offer one or more of your products as prizes, therefore there won't be much financial outlay (just the materials is costs to make the product and your time).

If you've got any more ideas for promoting your crafts online, then let me know in the comments. If they're good, I'll add them to the list (and change the title of the article accordingly - 11 Ways, 12 Ways...). Tell us what worked or didn't work for you!