Promoting your Online Stores - 6 Tips

Those of us who sell our artwork through online stores know all too well that the secret of success is to make sure our work gets seen by the buying public. 

And, given the sheer vastness of the internet and all that it contains, that can seem like an impossible task. I’m no marketing expert but I have picked up a few tips from people who are and, by trial and error, I’ve worked out a few guidelines that I hope will be helpful –

1. Identify your potential customer. This is probably the most important tip of all – and possibly also the most difficult. If you aren't in a position to be in contact with your customers, look at what you are offering and decide what kind of person it would appeal to and find out as much as you can about them. Apart from their age, gender and income bracket, think about what design style they would probably prefer (this will hopefully be YOUR style!). Once you’ve identified your typical customer, use the information you’ve noted down to search the internet for articles and blog posts that will tell you where such people hang out online, which social media they use and when etc.

2. Get organised – write a marketing plan. Once you’ve gathered that information, write yourself a ‘starter’ marketing plan. It may be a good idea to begin with using all the main social media to some extent – facebook, G+, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Squidoo and of course, a blog - even if you have discovered a clear link between your potential customers and where they are most likely to find you. However, this should only a temporary phase in your marketing plan as so much social networking could start to get overwhelming and seriously crowd out the time you spend on actually creating designs and products!

3. Stay organised. It’s important to update regularly. So set out your plan in writing so that you can keep tabs on what you’ve done and what you still need to do. And set aside specific times of day/week to dedicate to your marketing endeavours.

4. Monitor your progress using stats. Wherever possible make good use of any statistics you can access, such as facebook’s ‘Insights’ and blogger’s ‘Stats’, to monitor the times of day and types of updates that are most successful in terms of ‘engagement’. You may not be able to see a direct link between your updates and your sales - it’s very satisfying when you do! - so use Google Analytics, or a similar service, to gather information about which of the social media are bring more customers to your door – and revise your marketing plan accordingly! 

5. Make use of scheduling services. If this all seems like an awful lot of work, don’t worry, promoting won’t necessarily continue to take up so much of your time and effort forever. For one thing, there are free sites, such as Hootsuite and Buffer, that you can use to schedule some of your updates. While my experience has been that scheduled updates don’t get as much of that magic ‘engagement’ as ‘live’ ones, I’ve found that a good balance is to post ‘live’ once a day and schedule another one or two updates in advance. 

6. Grow your following organically. Finally, another tip that should save you from feeling as if you’re drowning in social media! Whichever marketing channel you decide to invest most of your time and effort in, don’t be tempted to spend so much time increasing your following that you don’t have time or energy left to actually engage with your ‘fans’ or ‘followers’! There are plenty of opportunities to grow your following rapidly through ‘like-ladders’ and so on but my experience has been that it’s far more effective to grow one’s following ‘organically’. For instance, you might like to check whether any of your new twitter followers has a facebook page. If so, visit it and see if you think they are likely to be someone you can happily interact with before deciding whether to ‘like’ their page and leave a message in the hope that they will return the favour.

Of course, no amount of savvy promoting will translate into sales if your products are totally lacking in appeal! But one encouraging thing that I’ve learned since I started selling online is that you never know what someone is going to find so attractive that they 'put their money where their mouth is'!

Please feel free to download and print this high resolution image.
If you pin it to Pinterest, I'd appreciate it if you could add a link to my blog.

So, I hope I’ve helped you in some small way on your journey towards a successful online business – and if you have any tips of your own that you’d like to pass on, please brave the captcha (sorry!) and leave them in the comments.

Selling online - is it turning you into a workaholic?

Are you comfortable with how much time you spend online?

I find myself in a confusing position; most of my ‘offline’ friends, some of whom don’t use a computer at all and others who don’t work, repeatedly tell me that I work too hard. And there is probably some truth in this. But, on the other hand, as soon as I turn on my computer I feel bombarded by exhortations to work even harder!

Forums and newsletters are full of suggestions for getting more sales. A recent Zazzle newsletter was actually titled, ‘Seller To-do list’! And Twitter will lead you to vast choice of blogs and articles, often contradictory, about things to do to increase your income.

But I don’t even need to visit a forum or log on to Twitter to feel pressured. Ever since I submitted my sites to a list of search engines – a suggestion from a forum! – I’ve had several emails daily with Subject lines that suggest there is more I should be doing if I’m serious about my business!

And of course,

The Internet never sleeps!

A partial solution for me has been to set myself ‘working hours’, as if I were going out to a job, to avoid allowing work to take over my life. I say ‘partial’ solution because it hasn’t solved the fact that I still feel pressured by all these 'suggestions', especially when sales are slow and I start to wonder whether I’m really doing enough ‘promotion’.

When I started offering my artwork in its various forms on the internet, I was warned that I would probably spend 20% of my time creating, and 80% promoting. Recently I was asked by the Inland Revenue to give a breakdown of how I spend my working time, as part of a review of my benefits. Luckily I had my ‘work schedule’ to refer to but when I typed it out to send it to them, I looked at it in more detail.

This is what became apparent - and it astonished me:

·    I work a minimum of 52 hours a week, often more.
·    I spend roughly 4 hours a week painting/designing.
·    I spend a further 4 hours a week scanning and editing my designs and adding the texts.
·    The remaining 44 hours are more or less equally divided between the uploading and ‘processing’ of my creative work and promoting it.

So, according to my calculator, I’m spending less than 16% of my time on ‘creative’ activities, half of that if you restrict that term to the actual painting!

I think what’s at the heart of this difficulty is that it’s almost impossible to say what really works when it comes to promoting. So we go on trying this, that and the other, in the hope that something will make a noticeable difference. And it all takes up time.

At one time I thought that keeping track of statistics would provide some clarity so I tried various forms of analytics for a while – another job to do! But the statistics bore no relation whatsoever to my sales – eg when I had a UK sale on Zazzle, there was no trace of any visits from the UK on the day concerned. So I gave that up as a bad job.

So, what’s the answer? Well, given that we have no control over how the internet works, I don’t think we can look for a solution from outside of ourselves.

That leaves us with individual choices to make about how we spend our time. The results of analysing my working time came as a bit of a shock to me and I think being aware of how we’re living is a good starting place. For me that means steering my own course between what my offline friends would have me do and the pressure that comes with being online!

Also bear in mind that at least some of the suggestions about how we can get to the top of pile stem from someone else’s self-interest; there are plenty of people out there trying to sell us something which they claim will increase our chances of success. and our strong desire to succeed in the face of overwhelming competition, can sway our judgement.

But I always remember a thread on the Zazzle forum where a ‘newbie’ asked ProSellers for tips. All the usual advice was wheeled out – get your keywords right, promote on facebook, etc etc etc. Then another ‘Pro’ came on and admitted that he didn’t do any promotion at all!

It made me wonder!

Three Ways of Selling

Cries of London: 'Sweet Oranges'

In the late 1990s I changed from British Telecom to another company for my telephone calls and enjoyed much smaller bills for a long time. Then the company was taken over by another one...and another one...and another one and nowadays I get frequent unsolicited phone calls from them about switching to their broadband/telephone/line rental package. Apart from the fact that I don’t like getting phonecalls when I’m working and I’ve already looked at the package online and decided against, I really object to these phonecalls because they are what I’d call really aggressive marketing! On one occasion, when I said I wasn’t interested, the telemarketer turned quite sarcastic...and I put the phone down. But they still continue to call me about every six weeks, in spite of my frequent requests not to. When I ask a question, the caller never replies but continues with his sales pitch regardless.

The calls show up as ‘out of area’ which is the same as calls from my daughter in Sweden, so I pick up the phone, just in case.

To me this is an abuse of the fact that, as my telephone calls supplier, they know my telephone number. It’s what I’d call the ‘Hard Sell’ kind of marketing and I can’t see the point of it as it so easily leaves the potential customer annoyed if not downright furious. I can’t imagine it works that often but presumably, it does result in ‘sales’ just often enough to be worth their while continuing.

So, what is the best way to approach selling, if, like me, you are not a ‘natural’ salesman?

Over and over, I’ve read that networking, forging relationships, building trust, is what it’s all about and that social networking sites are the place to do it. I suppose that is what you might call a ‘Soft’ selling technique. But while I do think that the social media are great ways to get to know people, and even to become friends, that still leaves me with a problem. I feel really uncomfortable with the thought that my friends might think that I’m trying to sell them something!

I’ve recently sent out my first ever email newsletter to both old and new friends in my email contacts list and I found it really hard to click on the ‘SEND’ button, even though it wasn’t a blatantly ‘selling’ newsletter. I steeled myself to do it and almost immediately email replies came back with offers of help to build my partyplan network and even some promises to buy my cards. Also a request for advice on social media!

So, yes, when it’s a question of ‘I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine’ – or ‘I’ll tweet your link if you’ll tweet mine’ – I think getting to know people through social networking, whether on or offline, is great.

But for me it doesn’t solve the problem of how to sell.

Is it something to do with being English? I read somewhere recently that we in the UK are far less comfortable with promoting ourselves and our wares than our friends across the pond. Or is it an introvert/extrovert preference? Whatever the reason, I think many of us have an almighty dread of being seen to ‘brag’ and none of us wants to be thought of as ‘pushy’. I’ve found that people are happier to offer my greeting cards for sale to their friends and colleagues if they let it be known that the proceeds will be donated to a charity or good cause – nothing ‘pushy’ about that!

I can persuade myself to put my artwork out on public display because I believe that art is about communication and I don’t want my paintings and designs to be reduced to talking to themselves! But I have great difficulty describing my designs in the sort of glowing terms that I’ve seen some artist do; I’ll leave that to others if that’s how they feel about my work!

So, in the face of the competition from those who have no such qualms, are we introverted English at a disadvantage when it comes to selling? Do we need to model ourselves on market traders – ‘Get your pork sausages here – only the best!’ ? We have, after all, been referred to as  a ‘nation of shopkeepers’!

My mother had a set of prints known as ‘The Cries of London’ – ‘Buy my Sweet Lavender!’ etc and I have a similar set of French ones with sellers of clogs, kindling and eels! But that was all right if you were poor and only selling to the rich, it was just the way things were, as you can see from the illustrations on the plates. Which is not necessarily the position we are in, though it may sometimes work out that way!

I’m beginning to think there may be a third alternative to the Hard Sell/Soft Sell options – the ‘Indirect Sell’ – and it’s a solution that I have no problems at all with! Instead of selling direct to ‘people’, it involves ‘selling’ to the search engines – and I don’t really care if the search engines think I’m pushy or bragging, in spite of my tendency to ‘anthropomorphosise’!

Which is why I began my second, ‘products only’ blog that allows me to display my goods for sale without cluttering up my Art & Design blog. Since I began to tweet the link to that blog and post it on facebook, my sales have definitely increased . So I’m very grateful to my friends who have retweeted those links – and I try to return the favour wherever I can!

To me that’s like ‘setting out my stall’ but without the shouting – or simply dressing my shop window - and neither is a problem for me. I just hope it is sufficient to keep the sales coming!

How do you feel about marketing and promoting yourself and your work - which, in a way, amounts to the same thing?

Cries of London: 'Who'll buy my Sweet Lavender?'