Free Tools for Promoting Your Crochet Business

Free Tools for Promoting Your Crochet Business

 Many avid crocheters have at least considered trying to make a career out of their hobby. There are many people who have turned their love of crochet into a success business such as Annie’s Attic and Crochet Me.
With the recent trend toward handmade and indie goods, there are many outlets to promote your new crochet business for free or at little cost to you. Here are a few options available to promote your products.
1. Etsy. Etsy is probably the most well known site to list your handmade products. Opening up an Etsy shop is free. Each item you list in your shop will cost you $0.20 and they take a 3.5% commission on any sold items. The benefit to creating a shop on Etsy is that the site is extremely well known and they have a high traffic rate.
2. Start a blog. Blogging can bring in a diverse audience to your work. Signing up for a blog on Blogger or Wordpress is completely free. You can use your blog to describe your work, promote new items available for sale and run sales and promotions. The key to blogging is to register your blog with as many directories as you can to gain followers. Some well known directories are Networked Blogs, Bloggers, Bloggeries, and Blog Catalog.
3. Create a Facebook Page. Start a Facebook page and invite all your friends to "like" and share it. You will be surprised how fast word will spread. Additionally, Facebook occassionally offers advertising credits that can be used to create ads and help you gain followers. Creating a Facebook page is free but they do now charge $5 to promote a public post. This just means that when you update your status, not all of your followers will see the post in their feed. You will still be reaching a percentage of your following and you cannot beat free advertising.
4. Twitter. You can create a twitter account for your business and tweet links to your new items for sale, updates about your shop...etc.
5. Goodsmiths. Create a shop for your merchandise on Goodsmiths. Goodsmiths, like Etsy, is a site dedicated to promoting sellers of handmade goods. Unlike Etsy, Goodsmiths does not charge a fee to list an item. They do however charge a 5% fee upon sale of a listing.
The options listed above may also be combined to more effectively market your site in a small amount of time. For instance, you can link your blog to your facebook and twitter accounts through Networked Blogs so that every time you publish a new blog post, it will automatically post on Facebook and Twitter. These sites are just a few ways to promote your shop. There are many additional free services available to you on the web.