Do you want to learn the best way to promote your Etsy shop for free? Do you want to get more sales, but you don't want to use paid ads to do it? 

Then this blog post will help you to increase your Etsy sales by promoting your shop for free.

Social Media - TIP ONE:

Make sure that you are using a social media platform where your target market actually hangs out.

You don’t want to be using TikTok if your audience is older and they're on Facebook. You don't want to use Instagram if your products do not photograph well, or you have to explain what your product is.

For the first year of your business, you do not want to be going into all the different social media networks and trying to master them, because you will not do it. You'll spread yourself thin, and you'll end up with three or four really quite terrible social media profiles.

Focus on one social media platform, and master that one first.

Social Media - TIP TWO:

Make sure to post relevant and engaging content on your chosen social media platform.

Many Etsy sellers post content that they *think* their target market would like to see and engage with, but they actually don't. You really need to obsessively know who your target market is before you even post any content.

Before you post any content, ask yourself the question, am I posting this because I have to, or am I posting it because my target market is going to love it?

That was a question that really pivoted the whole social media game for me.

I felt as if I had to post something every day, whereas I really wanted to be posting content because my target market would love it.

Even if that means posting two or three times a week, you need to just be making sure that every one of your posts is getting really good engagement from your target market.

If it's not, you need to monitor that. Take note of what is working and what's not working, and change, depending on what the results of that are.

Social Media - TIP THREE:

Only post your items for sale on social media less than 40% of the time.

Remember, it's more important to build a long-term brand than it is to get a quick sale. I'm going to say that again because it's really important. It's more valuable for you to build a long-lasting brand that your audience trusts than making a quick sale.

It's the difference between you posting six sales posts to Instagram this week to get two sales, versus building trust, authority in your niche, and a really, really great brand, I would choose the brand any day of the week.

But what else can you post on social media that isn't your products? Well that leads me nicely onto my next tip...

Social Media - TIP FOUR:

Create content buckets. What this means is that you pull a piece of content from each bucket every single week to post on social media.

So for example, you make yourself a schedule and you have four content buckets. You have:

• reviews
• memes
• questions
• products.

I would be going in there and adding different pieces of content to those different buckets every single month, so that I know that I always have content to schedule out.

Screenshot your reviews for your review bucket, and make them into a nice graphic (in your brand colours) on Canva. Save memes or FAQs that have cropped up over the last few weeks, and build a 'stock' ready to schedule and share.  

Also, make sure not to forget that if you've got a content bucket like 'behind the scenes', make sure to snap a picture of what you're doing. Don't just let it go to waste.

If your desk is messy and filled with orders, take a picture of it. People want to see behind the scenes. If you're about to unwrap a new parcel of materials that you're going to make, take a video or take a picture of it, and share it to your social media platform.

You've really got to make sure to document your journey because people are going to love that! They're going to lap it up, and it's going to build trust with you. So make sure to always have your phone with you and snap a picture if you can.

Social Media - TIP FIVE:

Use a scheduling tool like Later. Later is amazing! I use it. It's free. What more could you ask for as a busy handmade business owner?

You literally click and drag your posts onto the timeline, write your caption, and it's done.

Schedule in your social media posts a month or two in advance to make sure that if anything crops up and you can't post anything on that day, you have something going out.

Social Media - TIP SIX:

Monitor your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which is just a fancy way of saying monitor your stats.

Keep an eye on your social media platform, and monitor what's getting engagement, what's working, and what's not.

Then you know what content to create more of, and what content you can hold off of.

Blogging

The next way to promote your Etsy shop for free is with blogging. Now, hear me out, don't run off just yet. I have something to tell you...

Most people don't care about what you have to sell. That's a really hard truth, and it sounds really heartless. I know as handmade business owners, we are super emotionally connected to our product, and it's understandable, but other people just aren't.

People don't care about what you have to sell until they NEED to care. People don't care that you have an organic cotton baby romper until they have a child and they have to care about its well-being and its skin.

Blogging - TIP ONE:

So how do we make them care? We need to really look at the customer and say, this is your problem, this is how bad it is, but don't worry, here's my product to solve it for you.

That is the basics behind all copywriting, including when you write an Etsy description, a social media post, a blog post, or an email. You need to draw their attention to their problem. Because Boss, sometimes people don't know they have a problem, you have to highlight it for them

Blogging - TIP TWO:

You can absolutely set up a blog on your own website. You can also use a free website like Squarespace or Blogger if you're not ready for your own website yet.

You can use your own domain name for that blog so that if eventually, you do set up your own website, it can be pointed back to your own website as opposed to a standalone blog. 

If you don't want your own website yet, I would still recommend blogging. You can blog about your journey, your products, as well educating your customers as to what their problem is, and how big of a problem it really is. 

Blogging - TIP THREE:

Blog about common questions or issues that your target market has. You might be thinking "but Steph, how do we find what problems our target market have?". Well I'll tell you!

A great free website is answerthepublic.com, but you can also use Google and a Google Chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere (not free, but super cheap and amazing for finding keywords, I would highly recommend it).

But if you want to start with the basics for now, head over to answerthepublic.com, and type in what you sell. You will get questions that people are asking, and you can go through and create blog posts to answer those questions.

I think the first one to two searches a day is free, and then anything after that you have to pay, but one or two is ample.

Be sure to research 5 to 10 keywords for that blog post topic (this is where Keywords Everywhere comes in handy!). Sprinkle them in your blog content as this will help your blog to be ranked on Google.

The more that your website gains traction, and more people are reading your blog, the more chance that your blog will be shown in search results when someone Googles that exact same question.

So it really is a win-win. Not only are you educating your target market, but you are also putting your product in there as the solution for their problem.

Blogging - TIP FOUR:

In every blog post, make sure to naturally lead back to one of your products and link to it.

So let's say for example that you make organic baby rompers and you've been to answerthepublic.com and found that a lot of your target audience want to know how organic cotton is made.

You can then make a blog post that answers how organic cotton is made, but then you can go on to say, 'talking of organic cotton, this is one of the top sellers that I use organic cotton for', and you naturally link back to your product on Etsy (or your website). 

This way, you're educating your target market which is what they've come to your blog post for, but the bonus is the romper (or your product). They'll want to see it and learn about how you made it, and how it solves their problem!

They'll have more questions (which you can answer in other blog posts), and they'll want to know 'am I buying the wrong rompers? This blog post is kind of telling me so, and I want to be a super parent, so I want to go and get this organic, all singing, all dancing romper'.

 

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Emails

So the next way to promote your Etsy shop for free is by email marketing. Your number one priority, apart from getting revenue in through the door, should be to get people on your email list. So your priority list should be like this:

1. Getting revenue, getting sales
2. Your email list
3. Social media

Your top two priorities are getting sales, and getting people on your email list. I can't stress enough how important it is, but you want to be starting an email list if you haven't.

*TOP TIP: I recommend using Mailchimp. It is free up to 2000 contacts, and is really easy to use.

It has been studied and proven that email converts into sales better than social media posts and blog posts combined.

If you are not doing emails, you're missing out and you're leaving sales on the table.

Email - TIP ONE:

So If you have done everything else right and you know your target market, getting people on your email list should not be a difficult thing.

You can get people onto your email list through incentives like discounts, freebies, and sneak peeks. You want to separate them from their email address, and so the thing that you give them in exchange for that has got to be of immense value.

If you want to test the waters for now, just offer them a 10% discount and see how it goes.

Email - TIP TWO:

Once they are on your email list, you want to 'onboard' them. This basically means you want to warm them up and welcome them with a targeted and optimised email welcome sequence.

An email sequence automatically happens without you having to physically send them a welcome email. Make sure to create three to five emails that warm the customer up about your brand, who you are, their problem, and the product that you have to solve it.

Email - TIP THREE:

Within the welcome sequence, I would recommend also adding value.

So, not only are you educating your customer about you and your brand, but you are also adding value, and this could be through sharing one or two of your best blog posts. It could be inviting them to a Facebook group. It could be just literally creating a blog post or a shorter blog post within the email itself.

You've really got to add value for that customer, so what you end up having is a raving customer who's hungry to buy, and then they go on off to your Etsy shop and actually purchase something from you, and all this happens automatically.

I've written thousands of emails, and I can tell you that as long as you know who your target customer is, you will be fine and you will know exactly what to say, how to say it, and add value in a way that makes that customer hungry to buy it. 

Email - TIP FOUR:

When you launch a product, you have to make sure to add hype to the launch.

Let's say that you have a product launch happening on the 1st of December. Work back two or three months, let's say October, and you start to say 'hey, something new is coming', and you get them all excited about it.

There's many ways to build hype around a product launch, including:

• You can get them to answer a survey about which colour they'd prefer the product to be
• You can have a competition on your social media to win a sneak peek at one of the items
• You share behind the scenes of you making the collection

If you welcome them correctly using your welcome email sequence, add value through the initial emails, and then you build hype for your new collection, you build urgency within those launch emails, and you say, "Hey guys, this is a limited collection, you want to go and get this now, do not wait", well, you can only imagine the magic that's going to happen when you do launch that collection.

It's just going to be a magic formula for you to make a thousand extra dollars a month, just literally by doing this. 

Have I sold you on email now? I told you I would!

If you'd like to watch me chat about this blog post, you can watch the YouTube video by clicking HERE