Inexpensive Ways to Promote Your Craft Business

There are inexpensive and even FREE ways to promote your craft business. One of the first you should consider is creating a separate public PAGE on Facebook. If you have a personal Facebook page now it is very simple to create a separate page for your handcraft business. You can keep your personal Facebook account private just for your friends and family and the business page is public. Once you have changed your personal Facebook page privacy settings for just those you want to see your information then you click on “Create a Page”. It is free to create and once you have it setup and get some “Likes” Facebook will allow you to change the name to a more user friendly URL that you can add to business cards and fliers.

You can also set up a business page on Twitter and Instagram. These social media pages are windows into your craft business and should be posted to on a regular basis. You can post pictures of past items you have made, future ones you want to offer for sale and, of course, links to where you have these items for sale online. You should post information about which vendor events you will be participating with in the future, pictures from previous events and you might want to post short videos of you making the stuff you sell. Those are just a few ideas of what to post and you can link these social media accounts to your website/blog to post automatically to them when you write an article or make an announcement of upcoming sale events.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even Google Plus are all free social media pages that can, potentially, reach hundreds of new and returning customers. Once you get them setup make sure you post links to these accounts on your online stores, add them to your business cards and other marketing materials. If you have a “Tech-savvy” teen in your house you might want to enlist their help in making regular posts to your social media accounts. Some of us even schedule posts using software programs that you can schedule a bunch of these post a week in advance. Hootesuite allows you to post to 3 different social media pages up to 30 posts at a time. These can be self scheduled or you can let the software schedule them for you. More than that and you will need to pay them a fee. They recommend that you don’t post the same thing to each of the social media pages but rather something different. For example 10 to Twitter, 10 to Facebook and 10 to Instagram scheduled at different times and days. In theory you can post twice a day to each for 5 days or 1 time a day for 10 days or 3 times a day for 3 days, etc. You will need to schedule a couple of hours each week just to set this up and running. Once you get in the habit of scheduling posts then you can spend an hour each evening reviewing your social media accounts for comments, shares, likes and new followers.

Just a FYI but Handmade Amazon has extended the no-monthly fees to handmade artists until December 2019. This would be a great time to fill out their application, create your handmade store and add your items for sale online. Read through their requirements on mailing, returns, refunds, etc. Once you start to sell items you will, hopefully, get more favorable reviews and the more people who are willing to review your products the more Amazon seems to push them into view of their customers. You can, of course, agree to “Sponsored Ads” but I have had just as much luck with posting the links to my Amazon items on my social media pages than getting more customers via “Ads”. I think this also applies to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Ads as well. But you will have to experiment for your self.