Selling Your Crafts - Get Some Link Love!

By Bob Beacham

If you're serious about selling your crafts on the internet you probably have to go into areas that you're maybe not to familiar with just yet. Things with unfathomable three letter acronyms like SEO. Well let's de-mistify (and simplify) SEO right now!

SEO just stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a flashy way of saying something quite obvious - that you want your blog or website to be as attractive to the search engines as possible. Makes sense, yes? The more attractive your craft blog, the more people visit. More people is inevitably more potential customers. Now you can advertise to get them, of course, but that costs money. If we can get a bit of SEO in there, that's free.

Unless I miss my guess, when you're building your craft business your budget is probably pretty tight. Free sounds really good!

One SEO area is what we call "link love" and it will definitely help your blog or website popularity. Stands to reason that will will help selling your crafts.

Link love is not to be confused with having a links page where you put all your favorite craft blogs and websites, because frankly that's a bit of a waste of time. You see when Google looks at your blog it wants to see who is pointing at you, not who you are pointing at. If sites it considers important, or relevant, are pointing at you, it considers you more important. It puts you higher up the rankings.

Getting that link love working for you perhaps requires a more professional attitude than before. Those links going out are a waste of space... mostly.

If someone gets in touch with you and wants a link, it's pointless just putting that link up. What you want is a "reciprocal" link - them linking back to you. That way you both benefit and it costs you nothing. Of course if your craft is knitting and they're a firm of architects it's all pointless anyway - relevant links is key. What's the point of an architect linking to you? None.

Of course you can reverse this process and politely ask other sites to exchange links. You can also post comments on other people's craft blogs - which usually gives you the opportunity to add you web address. Don't abuse this or people will just delete your posts but it's that magic word "relevant" again. make a relevant, interesting or informative comment and you have another link back. What's more, people will see your comment and follow that link so you get real eyes on your site as well as the search engines!

I'll look into more free SEO tactics in my next article. Individually they may not make a massive difference overnight but they're easy, fast to do and the cumulative effect will have a huge effect on the business of selling your crafts.

Link love is just one of many free ways to improve your craft sales. There's more invaluable information at Selling Your Crafts where you can also pick up your free copy of the highly acclaimed fact file "Craft Success Online".