You spend so much time working on your creations and have every right to be proud and now it is time to promote your work!  You post and list and promote some more, but you don’t seem to be getting the response you expected from all your effort….why not?

Well, after a number of years watching artists promote themselves I have learned a thing or two that I am happy to pass along to you in order to help make your promotion time much more productive.

Words, words and more words….most of the time, unless I am researching a topic, my eyes will glaze over at the site of a bunch of words on sites like Facebook or Pinterest.  I look at those sites to relax and blocks of text don’t register as something I want to look closer at.  What does catch the eye?  Pictures!  Bright, bold, eye catching pictures will get a lot more attention from your average customer than just a “Like my page “link” will ever get.

This rule is the same when posting on Its Better Handmade.  I love to look at the beautiful treasures that are posted to this site daily, however, you have no idea how many posts I see come by with NO pictures!  Why lose the opportunity to catch a person’s attention when all it takes is a couple of clicks to add some color to your post?

Spelling!!! Grammar!!!! I’m sure most of us would not turn in a school assignment full of silly misspellings and grammar mistakes because we would care about our grade, so why do we think it is OK online?  I get it, nobody is perfect, but those titles and descriptions are what search engines like Google and Yahoo use to find your products.  I can place a pretty safe bet that nobody searching for “skool” will stumble upon the adorable school house bird house created by Tom’s Crafts.

Take a few seconds, before hitting post or share to look at what you just wrote.  Did you spell things correctly or forget an apostrophe where there needs to be one?  That second look could mean the difference between getting found by a new customer and never even coming up in a search.

Finally, don’t post and run!  I know that we all lead busy lives and time must be spent on our own home and work, but a bit of love shown to others can go a long way!  Trust me, if a person comments on a post or blog article, myself and others will click on their name just to see who they are and what they do.  It is one of the easiest way to be passively found without seeming like a promotion machine.

Spend some time on the forums, commenting on interesting blogs or complimenting a fellow artist on their latest creation and I believe you will find that your own work is getting some extra love in return.

While nobody can guarantee you that all your hard spent hours of promotion will lead to boatloads of sales, I can promise you that a few extra minutes to make sure you have an eye catching picture, that all your titles and descriptions are spelled correctly, and commenting on occasion on others posts and blogs will gain you more exposure over time.