Saturday, July 10, 2010

Promote Yourself!

We long ago decided in order to be successful in an online environment, selling handmade creations you had to get others to 'notice' you. That meant promoting yourself to the world. Countries are closer than they have ever been. You can skype a friend across the other side of the world and feel as near as you would to your next door neighbour. The boundaries of distance no longer apply in an online world. And with this comes the opportunity to broaden your market!




So Kazzalblue set up a page on Facebook. Facebook is one of the top social media sites in the world. Millions of people use it daily and you would be surprised for how long each day! This meant we could now promote our baby and childrens wares to a much larger market.





Tags - Facebook allows us to promote our shop and shops of others in a reciprocal environment. Always type @straight before the shopname - this will make it into a tag which appears on the other sellers shop page as well as your page. Your name will be there too which means more people will see it.

Tabs - Along the top of your shop page you can set up various tabs. Facebook allows you to have a My Etsy Tab and a My Felt Shop Tab. Kazzalblue also has a Shop Now tab. So if you want to set up these tabs here is what to do.

I always find the easiest way to set up the tabs I want is to go and look at someone elses page first. There is generally a link I can use to short cut the process. In this case go to my My Etsy tab and there is a link. You can see it on the right hand side in blue font in the pic below. It says "Want your Etsy Shop and Favourites on Facebook? Click here to get started" Sounds like a great place to start - right!





Now in order to set up the Shop Now tab, which virtually gives you an online shop complete with a shopping cart, you go to this page ( see below). Scroll down to the link at the very bottom called Payvment. Click on that and it takes you through the set up for Shop Now. You do need to have a Paypal account to operate it first though. But if you haven't then it will take you through this process as well.





I've tried to show you the easy way of doing things but believe me it does not always work out this way. I have spent hours fiddling with html codes and redoing what I thought I had done in the first place to get things to work. I think one of the things I absolutely love about facebook is it does some of the hardwork for you.

Badges - You can make a badge to display on your blog. Just go to 'edit page', under your avatar, then scroll to the bottom and click on 'get your badge'. This will give you several options of using your avatar. You can have a play with various styles before saving the edit you have done and choosing 'where you want to add the badge'. Mine is on my blog. Take a look. Once there it automatically takes those who click on it back to your facebook page!



Usernames - The other thing you can do, once you have 25+ followers on your facebook page, is choose your own user name for your page. Just go to www.facebook.com/username
and click on 'Set a username for your Pages'. You can check out whether your name is available or not BUT remember once you change it, you're stuck with it for good! You can't change your mind later!





Twittering - I have set up my Facebook page to automatically load posts onto Twitter. It takes anything I post onto my Kazzalblue page and sends it straight to twitter. Very handy not having to do 2 posts. Just go to www.facebook.com/twitter/ to set this up. It should look similar to the partial screen shot below. Course you will need a twitter account!




I hope these tips have helped you get a better idea of how Facebook can help you in your online marketing just like it helped us at Kazzalblue. This is just the tip of the iceberg but it will get you started.

Joy




4 comments:

Sleepandhersisters said...

Thanks for that Joy, lots of good info there...

Pam said...

Great tips, thank you! I just wish I'd seen this before I faffed my way through setting up my shop! ;)

Unknown said...

Great post, so much great info, bookmarked for later.
X K

jazzalblue said...

Thanks. Glad it was helpful. I will be doing another 'Facebook tips' post over the next month so stay in touch.