Tuesday Tip: Join a Group!

Are you looking for a way to promote your shop and make friends? It's easy to do when you join a group based on any of a variety of similar interests or circumstances.

Love to knit? Are you a mom with young children? Like to scrapbook? Love to make found objects into something new? Love to cook? Whatever it is there is a group you can join to discuss you passion and get advice not only on the group topic, but other things as well.

Etsy has loads of groups, or you can try flikr, facebook, as well as your email provider. Google and yahoo both have groups you can search to find the right one for you.

A word of advice though. Before jumping right in, take some time to read the posts from the last few days or weeks so you can get a feel for what the group is talking about, points they may have already covered and a general sense of the rules of posting. Then when you join you'll be less likely to be treated as a noobie and more likely to be welcomed.

Tuesday Tip: Optimizing Your Shop for Search Engines

A while back the fine people at Etsy came out with a set of VERY helpful hints on how to optimize your shop titles, listings and descriptions to be more attractive to search engines. I tried this on my shop and I saw a lot more hits in the following weeks.

To gage the difference in before and after, you should totally be using Google analytics to see who and where your shop visitors are coming from. To do this, log into your shop and on the left hand side there's the menu of shop areas. Under "shop setup" there's a listing for web analytics and there are directions for what you need to do.

These SEO(search engine optimization) principles can also be applied to blogs or other social media sites to help people on the big wide interwebs find you and what you're trying to say, sell, show - whatever!

Here's a link to the step by step process along with handy photos to help you understand what all that crazy technical jargon means. The techies in your life will be very impressed with what you've learned :)

Tuesday Tip: Build a Better Birthday Party

Here's a few fun and relatively easy ideas to help make your child's upcoming birthday bash more fun!

Cupcake Bar

Great for all ages, but especially for younger kids, this activity is fun and tasty too! All you have to do is bake the cupcakes and let the guests do all the work. Set out cans of frosting, a variety of sprinkles, and other fun toppings like mini-marshmallows, chocolate chips, gummy candies and more!

Photo Booth

Use a sheet or create a fun themed back ground, round up a variety of silly props(boas, sunglasses, hats, etc) and have the kids strike a pose. You can either print the photos and send home with the kids or mail them out later as a way for your child to say thanks for coming.

Fun Favors

Let kids create their own party favors: tie dyed shirts, seedlings in hand painted flower pots, or if the part is a sleep over, pillow cased personalized with fabric markers.

Tuesday Tip: Essential Social Media

In case you're not up on the latest when it comes to social media, here's an article that can help you understand a little of what they can do for you as you promote your business or yourself.

Granted they don't all work for everyone, but experiment and try them out. You should be able to get a feel for those that are the best and then you can focus on a few, instead of spending all your time trying to do them all.

Some of the highlights include: 5 unique ways to use twitter for business, 8 strategies to engage multicultural consumers, why retention should be a priority in social marketing, and HowTo: add Blogger Outreach to your PR plan.

Check it out and see if there's something that can help you get more traffic to your shop, blog or whatever you're trying to do online.