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Simple Steps to Promote Your Craft Website

How to Attract Visitors

Five Ways To Promote Your Crafts Site

by: Rick Rouse

Crafters are unique in that they have the ability to take raw materials and produce interesting and useful items for the home.

Whether it's quilting, woodworking, candle making, or whatever, their products are in demand all over the world.

But if you're like many crafters, you're probably finding that selling your creations on your website can be difficult. Getting targeted visitors to your site who are actually interested in your products can be expensive and time-consuming. But it doesn't have to be.

Here are a few tips on how to promote your website to get visitors (customers) to flock to your site:

1 - Submit your website's URL to as many crafts directories and general-purpose directories as you can. Many directories accept free submissions, but don't hesitate to pay a reasonable fee for getting listed in a high quality, high traffic directory. It will pay off handsomely.

2 - Exchange links with other craft sites. A well-planned and executed link exchange campaign can be one of the most effective ways to get targeted traffic to your site! Be willing to provide a link on a high traffic page on your site in return for one on the other site and you'll come out well in the deal.

3 - Swap banners or buy inexpensive banner ad campaigns on other craft sites. Banner impressions come cheap these days and they do still work if you have an eye-catching banner.

4 - With well-planned and monitored Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC), you can drive targeted traffic to your site for pennies. Good places to start are Mamma.com and Google Adwords.

5 - Write articles for other crafters to place on their websites and include a short "bio" with your website's URL in it. You can explain how to make something or talk about crafting in general. Anything is fine as long as it's useful and interesting. This is an excellent way to promote your website wide across the Internet!

Now here are a few don'ts:

1 - Don't send spam email. Spamming used to result in inconveniences such as losing your ISP connection and your web hosting account, but as more and more anti-spam laws go on the books many spammers will find themselves faced with enormous fines and jail time.

Advertising via email is fine, but you can safely send your mailings only to a double opt-in list that you compile yourself.

2 - Don't buy pop-under traffic. Pop-ups and pop-unders annoy most web surfers and you'll be lucky if you can sell anything at all to someone who arrives at your site that way. Even worse, pop-up blocking software is very common now and it even comes as a standard feature on many new web browsers. Paying for pop-under traffic could mean paying for traffic that never even gets to your website!

3 - Don't use Free-For-All links pages (FFAs). Doing so will associate your site with "bad neighborhoods" and your search engine rankings will be diminished.

4 - Don't spam the search engines with hidden text or other frowned-upon techniques. Doing so will get your site banned or penalized and your traffic flow will come to a halt.

For more ways to promote your website, please visit Marketing Your Website.

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