A One-Woman Marketing Department

Whether you are someone who is just getting started in the world of online sales or you are a seasoned veteran making many sales a week, you may feel yourself getting pulled in different directions for what you should be doing for your business. It can be a little confusing, especially if you consider yourself more of a crafter / maker than an online salesman. Etsy wants you to do their business on their marketplace, but companies like Shopify want you to migrate your shop over there and host a stand-alone site. They've been so successful at getting new sellers, that now Etsy even offers "Pattern", they're own version of allowing you to have a stand-alone shop. But all you want to do is grow your business and make sales, so what's the best way to accomplish that? Well I'm sorry to say that there's no one answer that fits every situation. You'll have to evaluate your business and goals for yourself, but what I am going to do for you is to

Let's talk Etsy traffic. Etsy is obviously an excellent site for makers who don't have the time / knowledge or desire to create their own brand or stand-alone site. However, even though Etsy comes with a whole lot of built in traffic and users, simply putting your products up on Etsy and waiting for the sales to roll in, isn't quite how it's going to work. Etsy is essentially a search engine – albeit a much more targeted search engine – and to be successful you'll need to learn how to optimize your posts and listings to get views and traffic. Etsy will encourage you to pay for ad placements to increase your views, which may be a viable option for you, however, I want to talk about how you can optimize your posts to earn as much organic traffic through Etsy as possible. 1. Know your keywords. The most important thing you'll want to start with is establishing the keywords you are going to target.

Social Media .... Strategy?! Yes! Believe it or not, if you are a business trying to win at the social media marketing game, you NEED to come at it with a plan and a strategy. Not only that, depending on how much of your marketing goes into social media, you need to revisit this plan at least yearly... or even quarterly. Social media marketing is so much more than just posting pictures of your product on Facebook with a link, Twitter and Instagram and hoping the traffic will just flow in. In fact, that is exactly what NOT to do. Coming up with a social media strategy is the important first step for any social media marketer to gain meaningful brand awareness, engagement and site traffic or sales for their business. If you're not sure about how to get started with your strategy, you're in the right place. This post will help you put together a basic outline for establishing your social media marketing plan. If you are running an commerce site or other online busine

For the first five years, let me repeat ... FIVE YEARS ... of NebraskaBison.com, I could not get my site to rank on page 1 of Google for my main keyword "bison meat". Honestly, I couldn't understand why. I cannot tell you how many posts and tips I read and how many hours I spent working and optimizing and doing everything I could -- based on all the good advice I could find online -- working to get my site on the top. And when I would look at the sites that were on the top, it left me even more flabbergasted, as it seemed the only thing they had on me was the age of the site. But that was my reality for the first five years of NebraskaBison.com. I'm happy to report, that as of this winter, my site suddenly began making massive headway -- knock on wood -- and has been inching it's way up Page 1 on Google -- and the organic traffic has been great. But in those first five years, paid traffic got expensive and there has to be other ways to get traffic to your

Shopify provides a great basic framework for creating an e-commerce store. They provide great customer support and an easy to use framework at a good value. But after opening up shop, you may realize that the basic Shopify framework doesn't support all the features you want it to right out of the gate. And Shopify never intends to. In all honesty, that would probably make the framework too complicated and bulky for their average user anyway. So, Shopify makes up for this by having an open app marketplace for add-ons and features for very basic things to solving much more complicated problems. Many of these apps have one-time charges or monthly fees that tack on to your Shopify bill, and it's up to you to decide if it's worth the money for that feature. I, myself, am more of a DIY-er and learned enough of Shopify's liquid code (it helped that I already had intermediate HTML/CSS knowledge) in order to make a lot of customizations to my code myself in order to limit

Instagram, when utilized to it's full extent and alongside a comprehensive marketing strategy, can be an incredibly powerful marketing platform for small business owners, entrepreneurs and e-commerce retailers. You may already have some familiarity with Instagram, you may even already follow some businesses (large or small) on Instagram. The purpose of this post is to help you learn to utilize Instagram to its full potential and to help you make sales. There are 3 parts of Instagram Marketing we are going to focus on in this post to get you started: Creating Winning Instagram Content Finding the Right Instagram Hashtags for Your Business How to Gain Instagram Followers All you need to begin in a registered account with a suitable username. Note: Although, each situation is always different, in most cases I would recommend that the account you use for marketing/promoting your business is separate from any personal account. The most important thing to remember: F