Tracyville Biz Tips: Cheap Ways To Promote Your Handmade Business Part 2

Here's a continuation of last week's article on ways to promote your business. This week, I'm giving you a listing of websites that feature handmade goods. You'll have to check out their submission guidelines and also do your homework to see if these sites promote work like yours. A quick look at someone's site should tell you if your work will fit in with the look of the their site. Good luck!

Submit Your Products

Crafty

Try Handmade

CraftGawker

PoppyTalk

Craftsyble
Heart Handmade

Design & Fashion
Apartment Therapy
Decor8
Desire 2 Inspire
Comfort Creatures
Inhabitat
Indie Fixx
Frolic Blog
Scoutie Girl
Swiss Miss
Lonny NY
Design Sponge
Daily Candy
Oh Happy Day
Oh Joy

Baby & Kids

Cool Mom Picks
Oh Dee Doh
A-List Mom
Simple Kids

Press Release Distribution Sites

Create a Press Release. If you don't know how to write one, you know where to get the information - Google! :)  There is an industry format for writing Press Releases aka News Releases and it probably takes a bit of practice to write a good one. For example, they should be no longer than one page, the title should be stunning and captivating, and same goes for the opening sentence, etc. But they are not difficult to do once you get the hang of it and know the simple format.

These sites offer submissions for FREE, which is a great thing because you not only have the chance of them running your Press Release, but generally when you're featured on other sites, you tend to receive a spike in views to your sites and potential sales in your shop.

News Wire Today

ECommWire

PR

PR Urgent

Express Press Release

PR Buzz

Click Press

PR Log

Social Media & More

. LinkedIn: My personal fave. It was super easy to get followers on Linkedin!
. Facebook
. Pinterest: Also love Pinterest, but found it extremely difficult to gain followers (my experience). -Pinterest folks are a tough audience (my opinion) but all of a sudden, I do see my numbers climbing, after being on that site for months and months. It may be a year that I've been there and my #'s have only just started to climb.
. Twitter: I am not a tweety bird yet. Don't know why, just haven't gotten around to it.
. Podcasting: Start a podcast and share your work and your knowledge.
. Flickr: (photo sharing) Flickr has been around a while and they're still popular with the handmade community.
. Behance: Create your art portfolio with Behance. I've been planning on checking into this one since it seems to be very popular. One day....soon.....I hope.
. Deviant Art
. YouTube: Youtube, as you know, is allowing anybody to have some variety of fame.
. Vimeo: Another video sharing site.
. We Love Etsy: Lot's of people are still on Etsy, but lots of handmakers are also turning to or have already turned to alternatives - of which there are many out there - even FREE ones, like Storenvy, Tictail and Zibbet.
. Etsy Teams