Great pictures make a huge difference when selling crafts online.

The other day I was ordering some essential oils on eBay. I want to experiment with making some soaps (I’ll post the results of my experiments in the future) and other cosmetics, and I was picking up a few raw materials. As I searched through all of the sellers trying to find a good combination of quality items, reasonable prices and fair shipping fees, I was struck by something odd that was going on in my brain.

I was comparing two different sellers and deciding who I would order from. Both sellers had what I was looking for. One seller sold his essential oils for a slightly lower price, but the pictures on his auctions were not particularly inspiring. The other seller sold items that, based on the description, were exactly the same, for a slightly higher price. The second seller had gorgeous photos of juicy fruits and blooming plants that matched with the scents for each of his auctions.

As I compared the two sellers, I realized I was leaning toward buying from the more expensive seller simply because his images were more compelling. Somehow, in a very subtle way, the gorgeous pictures made me believe that seller’s items were superior.

When I considered:
1. I was buying the oils for their scents, not for the way they looked (the photos gave me no real information about the quality of the items), and
2. I’ve spent a fair amount of time researching ways to market products

I was amazed by how easily I was pulled in by the gorgeous photos on the other seller’s auctions.

If images can make such a huge impact in a case where the look of the product is not particularly relevant to the buyer, imagine how important images are when it comes to selling jewelry or dresses, or pottery online.

You really can’t underestimate the importance of great photography when selling crafts online. Your images convey so much more than you may realize to your craft customers. You’re not simply showing a product in your craft photos, you’re creating an image that compels your customer to buy.

My favorite source for tips on craft photography is the book Photographing Arts, Crafts and Collectibles. See my review of this craft photography book on the main Inspiri site.

If you’re selling crafts online, one of the easiest ways to promote your craft business website is by writing great content. Search engines look for content-rich sites, and readers respond to great content by spending more time on your site, which in turn makes the search engines happy. Professional crafters tend to be more visually oriented people, so you may be tempted to focus on the look of your site. Of course, having a professional looking site that shows off your work to its best advantage is important, but don’t underestimate the value of good content for bringing traffic to your site.

For more free and inexpensive ways to promote your website, please see Tips for Selling Crafts Online.

If you are thinking about selling crafts online, you must have a plan for getting traffic to your site.

The biggest mistake people make when planning to sell crafts online lies in failing to develop a realistic plan to market their craft business website. Too often, people invest huge amounts of time and money in creating a gorgeous site, but fail to determine exactly how they will get customers to visit their site. It really doesn’t matter how creative, artistic and impressive-looking your craft business website is if no one is visiting your site.

Like any facet of business, selling crafts online will require some promotional efforts in order to build success. Luckily, there are several easy and free or inexpensive ways to promote your online craft business.

You can promote your online craft business by:

1. Getting related but non-competing sites to link to your site.
While you may get some direct traffic from these links (commonly called backlinks), the main value of these links lies in their impact on search engines. Getting good rankings at the major search engines are the key to plenty of free traffic on your craft business site. Search engines see backlinks as a “vote” for the quality of your site, so these links help your site to rank higher with the search engines.

2. Submitting articles to popular sites
This strategy is just one way to get backlinks to your site. Website owners are always looking for good content, and many sites accept articles from guest authors. Some sites specialize in providing these types of articles for other website owners to use. Normally the “payment” you receive for allowing another website owner to publish your article is a link back to your site. These links can be very valuable both for the direct traffic they generate and for their ability to help your craft business site to rank higher with search engines.

3. Writing plenty of great content
The more great content you write and post on your site, the more search engines will see your site as an authority on your topic. That results in good rankings with the major search engines.

In order to rank well with search engines, they must not view the articles on your site as duplicate content (i.e. it must not exist on some other website. For that reason, ensure that the content you write on your own site is different from the content you allow others to post in exchange for backlinks.

4. Trying social networking
Social networking sites such as Flickr, Squidoo and Twitter can provide good opportunities for you to keep in touch with your customers, for new customers to find you and to obtain backlinks to your main site.

5. Using good keywords
Include in your meta tags and in the information you include on your site, plenty of keywords that people would normally use if they were searching for a site like yours on one of the major search engines. You don’t have to guess at these keywords; there are actually several good tools, Wordtracker is one, that allow you to find out what keywords people are using in your particular niche.

With the right tools in place, selling crafts online can be a very cost effective strategy for building and promoting your home craft business. With the right tools, it is absolutely possible to build and market a craft business site that gets plenty of free traffic on a daily basis.

It takes commitment to sell your crafts online. If you’re willing to put in the work required to bring traffic to your site, it can be quite rewarding to sell your crafts online.

The biggest mistake people make when they create a website for selling crafts lies in failing to determine a strategy for promoting that site. They create gorgeous sites that are often works of art in and of themselves, but then they fall short on marketing the site. There are over 100 million websites, and that number is growing every day, so your work is not done once you craft business website is designed. Without a strategy to promote the site, an online craft business will not survive.

Luckily, there are great, cost effective resources that can help you to promote your online craft business. In fact, there’s no shortage on information about building an online business. The biggest challenge lies in separating the truth from the hype. I’ve written several articles about selling crafts online. You may also want to check out my favorite resource for building an online business, Site Build It! It’s affordable, it provides you with all of the tools, information and support you need to launch an online business from scratch, and my favorite thing about Site Build It! is the fact that the company is run with absolute utmost integrity.

If you are selling crafts online with your own site, you’ll need to find ways to promote your site so it ranks well at the major search engines. One fairly simple and free (or inexpensive) way to promote your site is through backlinks. A backlink is simply a link to your site from another site. Search engines like them because they see them as a “vote” for your site. That is, they assume that if another site links to your site, it is, in effect, saying ‘this is a good site’.

One simple way to get backlinks is through the Value Exchange program. It’s free to join. You simply enter in keywords that are related to your site, and you will be provided with a list of other websites and their owners who have also joined Value Exchange and are interested in exchanging links. You can also download the free e-book Make Your Links Work (scroll about half-way down the page) for more tips on promoting your site with backlinks.

For more free and inexpensive ways to promote your website, please see Tips for Selling Crafts Online.