Sell Handmade

Do you want to sell more of your handmade products? Of course you do. What a silly question. Well, I suspect two things are stopping you selling more.

1) Your relative obscurity. You can't sell to people who don't know you even exist. And, most likely, that's almost everyone. You're a handmaker, first and foremost, not a web marketing expert. If you wanted to be designing and building websites, you would hardly be wasting your time on handmade products.

2) Your lack of range. Chances are you simply don't have enough stuff to sell. It's rarely economically viable to build an online marketing campaign around 10 or 20 or even 50 products. OK, there are exceptions. It works for products targeting very specialised needs, like hair loss. But, for pure discretionary purchases like jewellery, style accessories, homewares, giftware, it mainly doesn't. You just can't cover enough tastes and price points. This makes it hard to make investments in advertising or even search engine optimisation pay.

Don't believe me? Well consider this, clawing your way out of obscurity means beating literally hundreds of thousands (if you're lucky) or millions of other websites. And, they aren't all plucky amateurs with meagre resources and budgets, either. Consider, also that the average conversion rate on a website is just 2-3%. The smaller your range the worse that's going to get. It's logical. If you had just one lovely necklace, would it really wow all your visitors? What about if you had ten thousand necklaces all different?

Why am I telling you this? Well, I am not saying throw in the towel on your website. Or, maybe I am when it comes to having your own, standing on its lonesome. Maybe your efforts on the web would be better spent where the traffic is? Head for the aggregators - places where shoppers can browse lots of handmade items. Get there and work on standing out in the crowd. That way, more than half the job is done for you. They already dragged the shoppers in, which is the real battle!