Pinterest

I finally got off my butt and joined Pinterest a few weeks ago.  What the heck was I waiting for?  I see so many of my friends and craft vendors have been pinning away already so I had some catching up to do.  What can you do with Pinterest?  What can't you do is really the question.  People create boards with different themes such as My Style, Food, Crafts, Kitchens, etc.  Then they "pin" photographs they find online or "re pin" from other users to their boards.  It's a brilliant way to find inspiration for project, keep track of photos of kitchens you like for a big remodel, get garden design ideas and so much more!  Really the ideas of how to use this site are endless.

Another interesting way to use Pinterest is for your craft business.  Talk about viral sharing, this is the place to make it happen.  Create a board for the items you create and pin directly from your Etsy site or your website. if you put a $ in the description (Etsy does this automatically) it will create a small price banner across your photo.  If you are manually adding your pin remember to put in the website url so people can click through to the page.  I've created a board here for Queen City Craft.  I'm using it to promote items created by indie crafters in Vermont.  The more people re pin, the more viral your products go.  Just remember to delete the picture if it is something that has sold.  Also don't make your Pinterest account all about selling.  Create other boards of interest so you have a variety of content to share.  Check it out and think about how you can use this great new tool to help out your business as well.

Don't forget to check your web analytics tool to see if you are getting referral traffic from this great new source!

The Business of Craft: Intro to Web Analytics

This is the first of many posts to come about web analytics and digital marketing. I have worked in the web world since 2001. In addition to my experience running Queen City Craft and my own indie craft business I was a Web Project manager at Burton Snowboards for 5 years and I am going on my second year as the Web Analyst for them now. Web Analytics and digital marketing can be overwhelming. I am excited to mesh my experience in both the digital world and that of indie craft to help you better manage your businesses.

These days being an indie crafter you have more online tools than ever to help promote and sell your products. Long gone are the days of just having a blog or website. Social sharing, social selling and web analytics have become very important ways to help support your business but the question is are you using them? It can also be overwhelming trying to manage all of your different accounts. Your business is probably spread across several places online like Facebook, Twitter and Etsy, but how do you keep track of what source is working best for you?

First of all if you are not using web analytics to track your website or blog you need to go sign up for an account now! Google Analytics is FREE and it offers a powerful tool to help you understand trends in your traffic sources and content. It does so much more than that, but you don't have to be an expert or even understand half of what the tool can do in order to get meaningful insights out of it.

Let's start with the basics.

The Dashboard
The dashboard is the first screen you see when you log into your Google Analytics account. You can create this to show different reports but it starts you off with the basics. The graph you see at the top shows you traffic to your website over a time period that you can adjust. In this example I am showing stats on a blog  I created for my 20 year high school reunion coming up this summer (yikes). See the big spike in the graph? That is the day I posted a link to the website on our Facebook reunion page.

 I can keep track of activities like this by adding an annotation below the graph that helps me remember what I did to try to drive traffic and on what date. Annotations are available under graphs on all reports and allow you to keep track of any marketing promotions you launch or changes to your website. Keeping these important reminders in one place will help you relate site changes and marketing efforts to your reports.

The Site Usage section below the graph gives you a quick view of some of the basic web metrics Here is a quick breakdown of what some of the most basic ones are.

Visits - a visit is when someone arrives at your website and starts looking around. These are not absolute unique visitors. If I come to your website 5 times in one day the Visits metric will count all 5 unlike the unique visitors metric which would only count me once. A visit can have multiple pageviews or just one.

Pageviews - This metric tells you how many pages were viewed on your site. Don't expect this metric to match your visits. Typically pageviews will be higher than visits.

Bounce Rate - This can be a powerful metric that will tell you a lot about your site. It explains how many people land on your website but choose to not go anywhere else but the page they landed on. They leave without exploring meaning they bounce. This is a great way to measure the quality of the content you have on your site. You don't want your visitors to bounce upon arrival. You want them to dig deeper and visit more pages. A basic rule of thumb here is anything over 30% should be a red flag which should make you scratch your head and see what improvements you can make to your site.

The Content Overview section gives you a quick peek at the top pages being viewed on your site.  

All of the info on the dashboard is available to dig into deeper using the report links in the left hand navigation.

Now we get into my favorite part of Google Analytics - Traffic Sources. I dig into this every day and it is amazing the nuggets of information you can pull out from this one report. There are basically three main buckets your traffic goes into. Direct, Referral and Search.

Direct in a nutshell refers to people who type in the address of your website directly into their web browser or have it bookmarked. This used to be a pretty clean cut metric but with the uprising of third party apps such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite along with untracked email campaigns, your Direct traffic bucket is going to be filled with spillover from a few of these areas. Don't worry too much about it for now though. In general Direct traffic is a good indicator of brand loyalty.

Referral traffic is someone who comes to your site via another online source. For example if do a blog post about your craft business on Queen City Craft and have a link to your site from my blog post, someone clicks on the link from my post which brings them to your site you would see www.queencitycraft.com show up in your referral traffic report. Checking this report is an excellent way to see what websites are driving the most traffic to your site. Is it Facebook, Twitter, Queen City Craft, or another source? You may be surprised at what you find. The results will help you figure out where you should be spending most of your online marketing time and which blogs you should try to hook up with to promote your products. It is also a great way to find out if someone promoted you that you weren't aware of. If all of a sudden you see 100 visits from Design Sponge for example you can check to see if they posted something about you and end up really happy!

Search represents both paid or organic search results and the report splits them out as such. Most indie crafters might not be diving into the world of paid search yet, but organic search is an area worth learning more about as it can tell you how well your website is showing up on search engine result pages. If you make recycled coasters for example and someone does a Google search for "Recycled coasters VT" does your website show up in the list of results? If not you need to work on your search engine optimization. This is a topic we can discuss further at a later time.

There is so much more to talk about and I'll continue in future posts.  Please hit me up with any questions you have.

Friend or Fan?

Facebook.  We all love it, we sometimes hate it, but the reality is Facebook has changed the way we interact with each other and surprisingly the way we do business.  There are so may discussions we could have around how Facebook can help your indie craft business, but I am going to start with the most basic one today.  What type of page do you create?

This topic is sort of a pet peeve of mine and writing about it will probably help explain to several people who have recently "friended" me, why I have not accepted.  I have a rule and it is as simple as this.  I don't "friend" a business.  Set up a business/fan page and I'll "like" you for sure, but sending out a Facebook friend request for a business is a no no in my book.  Here's why:


When you become friends with someone on Facebook the other person has access to your personal profile.  Let's role play here.  Say Queen City Craft decided to set up a Facebook page but went with a personal page where I have to "friend" people to get my followers.  I do some promotion to build my following and someone named Beth decides to become friends with my QCCB page.  After she friends me I now have access to her personal profile page because she told Facebook that we are friends and according to her settings her friends can see her wall posts, photos and info page.  She will get my updates, but I will also get hers.  Beth realizes this and decides to stop being friends of QCCB.  She is bummed because she wants to stay connected to QCCB, but she doesn't want QCCB to know all about her Friday night adventures.

The flip side of this is setting up a business page instead.  In this situation QCCB sets up a business page and people "like" it by clicking a button instead of having to send out "friend" requests.  There are several reasons why a business page is better:

1. You will build a bigger and better fan base
2. People will be "like" you more often than they would "friend" you because of privacy concerns.
3. You have the ability to promote your business with ads
4. Business pages come with built in insights so you can have visibility to how engaged people are with your brand page.
5. More robust marketing tools

If QCCB set up  business page instead of a personal page this means Beth could "like" the QCCB page which allows her to stay up to day with what QCCB is doing because whenever they post something to their wall it will show up in Beth's news feed.  The biggest difference here is that what Beth posts on her own Facebook page is NOT seen by QCCB.  QCCB would have no access to Beth's page.

I encounter this situation all the time.  I have several "friend" requests right now in my inbox from businesses and I feel terrible because I just can't "friend" them back.  In some cases we are actually friends in real life, but I can't break my rule.  I don't "friend" businesses.

What can you do?  If you are still thinking about whether you should get your indie biz on Facebook the answer is YES (I'll go into more of that later).  When you decide to make the leap please consider setting up your Facebook page as a business page instead of a personal one.  If you have already set one up and want to switch you may be hesitant thinking you will lose your current following.  My advice is DO IT!  Create the fan page and post it on your current page, message all your "friends" telling them to jump over and "like" you on your new page.  Leave it up there for a while until you see people making the switch.  It will be well worth it.  I promise.

Finding Inspiration

I am often asked by people "how do you do it all?"  They ask this question typically because I am a mother of two boys, I work a full time job outside of the home as a Web Analyst, I run my own indie craft business Subsixstudios, and I run Queen City Craft.  The answer I always give is "I don't."

I know a lot of crafty and creative people who always say they don't have the time to spend on their own creative interests.  This is true for most everyone I know.  Those of us who are trying to make a go of it, and those who can't seem to find a way to start.  Is there a trick?  No.  The only way to make it happen is to try.  No one is judging how much time you can put in.  I never have hours on end to spend on my side businesses.  When I wasn't working full time I did, but since going back to work a year ago that time started collecting dust in my basement on top of my once active craft studio.  Speaking of studio space - this is usually the second obstacle people mention to me as a reason to not get dirty with their supplies.  I know a few people who have studio spaces away from their homes, but most people I know don't.  We work in basements, spare rooms, kitchen tables, sheds, garages, mud rooms, and closets.

The key is to be as organized as you can be.  If you are able to find a free space in your house set up a table, get some storage bins or shelves and organize your supplies so it is easy to work in your small space.  If you do not have a free space in your home it is possible to craft on a kitchen or dining room table.  Again the key is organization.  You obviously will need to pull out all of your supplies and set them up to work as well as pack it all up at the end of the night and put it away so you have a place to eat in the morning.  Again, this is where having bins, trays, bowls etc . . . to work on comes in handy.

Finding the time is a tough battle for everyone.  Most of us create at night after we get home from work, kids are in bed, dishes are (sometimes) done, and usually not after all chores are completed.  Finding the time means making the time.  It means getting off the couch and turning off the TV.  It also means letting go of the need to finish your chores.  You don't need to do this every night, but I think the dust bunnies will understand if you let them shuffle around the floor one more day.

So if you are interested in pursuing your creative interest the best way is to just dive on in.  Let go of your fears and loosen the tight time band we tend to put on our lives.

Twitter

Are you on Twitter? You should be. Don't be afriad. Jump in, join the conversation and start promoting your business now.

Join me on twitter for craft updates and start promoting yourself to the world now.

Handmade by me

Have you heard about this new social networking site for crafters?

check it out here.

I just spotted this site today and thought I would share. The cost seems pretty cheap - worth a try.