If you have a handmade shop but you're not getting quite as much traffic to it
as you'd like to, then this video is going to be great for you.
I'm going to list out - do an inventory if you wish - of all the different ways
that you can bring more visitors to your shop. Let's dive in.
Hi, I'm Deb, the founder of Tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers and handmade shop owners.
Today I want to talk to you about the different traffic sources that you can use
to bring more visitors and put more eyes on your product.
We call "traffic sources" really any way that you can use to get more people to
your shop.
I guess you could think of it as a tap that you'd turn on so that visitors come
flowing to your handmade shop.
I'd like to categorise traffic sources into two main categories.
The first one is free traffic sources and the second one is paid traffic
sources. Let's start with free traffic sources. Oh,
and actually before I forget:
I do have some great freebies for you guys that are linked to below this video,
including a traffic goal calculator so you know exactly how much traffic you
need to reach your revenue goal and a traffic assessment guide,
which is a workbook that's really going to help you streamline your traffic
strategy so that you know how to put your traffic strategy together.
So make sure you check out the links below.
But back to our free traffic sources: there are four of them.
The first bucket (I say bucket because it has sub traffic sources if you wish)
is social media, so that's Facebook,
Instagram or any other social media platform that you might use to promote your
product so that you can bring people back to your shop.
The second group is PR or public relations.
That used to be mostly getting your brand,
products and shop inside of printed magazines (and that's still the case);
also TV,
radio (although that might not apply quite as well to a handmade shop).
Now it's also moving into the online sphere (digital publications) because
magazines now usually also have digital content that they only have online and
that they're not necessarily printing.
And so PR really is all of this.
It's really getting yourself out there in the press. The third is live events.
So these are craft fairs or markets that you may be selling at.
Often you don't think of actually taking people in "real life" and bringing them
back to your online shop but there is a lot of free traffic at those events and
there's a lot of opportunities for you to get them - even if they're not buying
from you on the day - to either sign up for your email list or grab a flyer or
your business card so they come back to your shop online and so that you can
keep in touch with them.
And fourth in the free traffic category is working with influences.
That's pretty new. It definitely wasn't even a word 10 years ago,
but now you can collaborate and create partnerships with people who have bigger
audiences than yours.
If those audiences are your ideal customers and people who would be interested
in purchasing your product,
you can reach out to them - either Instagram influencers or bloggers or
youtubers - and work with them so that they showcase your brand and your product
to their audience. Now let's look at the paid traffic sources.
We have four more here,
so there'll be a total of eight different traffic sources.
The first one is paid social media ads.
These are ads that you pay for on Facebook, Pinterest,
Instagram, Twitter, or any other social media platform that you'd like to use.
By paying you get more visibility and more reach for your posts on that
platform. The second is paid search engine ads,
and that includes things like Google ads or Google adwords,
but also things like Etsy ads (if you're selling on Etsy
of course).
The third is paid press or magazine ads.
We've talked about getting in the press for free,
but you can also purchase ads that get printed or that get displayed on the
digital publications of those magazines.
I'm not necessarily saying these are the absolute best ways to spend your money.
I would much rather you invest in advertisement online,
on social media or on something like Google or Etsy because it's much easier to
track your results - but I'm going on a tangent here,
so let's get back to our list.
So paid press or magazine ads was the third and then the fourth is paid
partnerships with bloggers or influences.
Sometimes you will do a very nice collaboration for free like we've mentioned
before,
but sometimes they will require a fee for them to actually showcase that to
their audience and bring more traffic to your shop.
So these are the four paid traffic sources, so we have eight in total.
Now
the question is how to put it all together?
You can really use only one or mix and match them so that it works for your
specific situation and for your specific handmade shop.
What I will say is first,
don't be too quick to dismiss a traffic source because it's not working.
So if you're working on your Instagram strategy and you're like, "okay,
I'm not getting enough traffic,
I'm just going to start working on Facebook as well".
I would say be careful because that is not necessarily going to be easier on
Facebook than it was on Instagram.
Don't just dismiss a traffic source and move onto the next one until you really
are sure that this is not working for you,
that your customers aren't there and this is really not paying off because I
don't want you - and that's my second tip - to spread yourself thin and start
doing too much to a point where nothing is really done properly.
I would way rather you focus on a few key traffic sources,
really be consistent with that,
get some traction from it before you start adding more to your list.
To help you with that ,again,
I'll link to resources and freebies and that workbook that I've mentioned at the
beginning of the video to help you assess your traffic strategy and really
streamline it to make sure that you are doing everything you can to bring
traffic to your shop. I hope those resources will help. In fact,
I know they will help,
so make sure you click that link and if you liked this video,
make sure to subscribe to my channel. I'll talk to you next Tuesday.