Blog & Sell: The Easiest Way to Market Your Handmade Business

As handmade business owners we need to maximize our marketing efforts so we can get back to doing what we love, making. Promoting your business is a necessary step in being successful and, more importantly, profitable.

This is where blogging comes into play.

Let’s take a step back. Why exactly is marketing important? If you don’t actively promote your business, you aren’t reminding customers you exist and you aren’t getting your products in front of buyers who are looking for you. It’s important to ask for the sale. If you don’t, you will be part of the “small biz closure” statistic.

Here is how you make marketing and blogging easy for your small business so that you increase your exposure and your sales.

1. You need to know who your ideal customer is and create a profile for them. Think of the customers you like designing for and whom you want shopping with you more frequently when creating the profile. Start by answer these simple questions:

• What is their gender, age, highest educational level, and location? Do they have any children, a spouse or significant other?
• What other sorts of products do they buy that relate to yours?
• Does your ideal customer have any hobbies or do anything for fun?
• How did they find you and how do they gather their information?

Write out as much as you can about your ideal customer. Knowing everything you can about them helps you as you write your blog posts, product descriptions, and even design your website. Give your ideal customer a name if you’d like to.

2. Begin writing for your new ideal customer. Write your posts like they are your BFF. If you find something online that you think that they would like, you need to make sure that that is in content schedule. Knowing your customer profile makes your life 100% easier. 

If you know ideal customer is searching for a solution on problem X, get that post written ASAP. Make that topic one that you write about for a solid month so you are the expert in that area. This will help with SEO. By using your key words and phrases that you want to be known for, it helps drive up your ranking for those words. As ideal customer is searching for that solution, s/he lands on your blog post and is directed to your site.

Let me give you an example: Let’s say you make handcrafted dog beds that are waterproof and are fashion forward. I just got a new puppy and I need a place for him to sleep but I do not like the mass-produced products that I saw in the big box store. I go online and start searching for washable, decorative dog beds.  The blog posts I need to see you writing about are: how to decorate with your super awesome washable pet beds, the color of the year and how your dog bed coordinates with it, how the fashionable fabric doesn’t fade when washed in your home washing machine, and so on.

Now, you can easily stop here. Blogging weekly will help drive traffic to your site. It gives google something new to index on a regular basis, which helps with SEO. It’s always a good thing to have google on your side! Writing posts for your ideal target market and making it easy for them to hit your site is exactly what you are looking to do. It will give you handmade business a human feel that the box stores have trouble emulating and is a know feature with shopping with handmade or small businesses.

BUT – why not take it one step further and dramatically increase your exposure all by using the content you’ve just created?

Here’s what you need to do:

1.  Create a graphic to promote each blog post. You can do this for free using an online tool calledCanva.com. They have free templates & graphics you can use plus you can upload your own photos. Use a template you like to create an Instagram post & a Pinterest post.

2. Post the graphics to their respective social accounts with links going directly back to your blog post. For Instagram, make sure you link is in your profile so people can click on it and be taken straight there. Also include hash tags from generic ex: #jewelry #dogbed to specific #yourbusinessname #yourtown. For pPnterest, you can gain even greater exposure for your pins by posting your pin to a large group board.

3. Send the blog post out to your newsletter email list. You just need to send a snippet and direct them to click over to your site to read the rest. The best part about this is you are building credibility with your list and not just selling to them like 99% of the emails out there. That turns subscribers into readers, readers into buyers, and buyers into evangelists for your brand.

Plus, you can do steps 1 and 2 over and over again for each post so that you don’t have to keep pushing yourself to come up with so much social media content. It takes the pressure off of you to come up with social posts while promoting the great content you’ve just written.