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The Hand Made Product Shopping Directory
Profile Information
- Location:
- Phoenix AZ
- About Me:
- The purpose of this site is as a meeting and sharing place for all those who create and sell handmade or handcrafted products. Our goal is to help all sellers better market and sell what they produce. We post many helpful articles here and on our group Craft Marketing Central weekly. Feel free to post your articles also.
ARE YOU LISTED IN THE HAND MADE PRODUCT DIRECTORY? The Directory is an on line Shopping Directory your customers can use from the comfort of their homes with categorized, search able listings of online shopping sites from around the world offering many different handmade and handcrafted products to choose from! With thousands of stores currently listed in the directory, shoppers are finding The Hand Made Product Directory their one stop shopping location for their handmade and handcrafted needs. JUST JOINING US HERE ON INDIEPUBLIC DOES NOT GET YOU LISTED IN THE DIRECTORY YOU NEED TO GO HERE TO PICK UP YOUR FREE LISTING IN The Hand Made Product Directory
Be sure to check out THE GALLERY
- I am a/an:
- Independent Artist/Designer, Blogger, Independent Retailer
- Website:
- http://www.dmpmc.net/THMD
- Website #2:
- http://TheHandMadeProductDirectory.blogspot.com
- Website #3:
- http://dmproductionandsales.blogspot.com
A new selling venue for those more expensive items you create
If you create and sell handmade or handcrafted products and some of the items that you sell are more on the high end and you have trouble selling them on the venue you are currently using, we have some news for you. There is a new venue coming on line in just a few days that will be specializing in handmade and handcrafted creations that are over $50.00 or are high end creations. The site isn’t live yet but you can get a sneak preview at the testing site by going to http://www.dmpmc.net/hw.html . Once it goes on line, the url will be http://www.dmpmc.net/
What is nice about the site is that there are No Listing Fees, No Setup Fees and No Monthly Maintenance Fees. Everything else is explained at the web site. Even though the site isn’t on line yer, you can pre-register by going to the Sell page an following the instructions on the page. We have some rather unique plans for marketing the site once we are on line and some products have been listed. This is a good way for many who sell those more expensive items to do so at no up front costs.
What is nice about the site is that there are No Listing Fees, No Setup Fees and No Monthly Maintenance Fees. Everything else is explained at the web site. Even though the site isn’t on line yer, you can pre-register by going to the Sell page an following the instructions on the page. We have some rather unique plans for marketing the site once we are on line and some products have been listed. This is a good way for many who sell those more expensive items to do so at no up front costs.
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Danielle
Even for those of us who have been in business for many years, this last few weeks have really been an experience. One I personally would rather have not had. I can't tell you how many emails we've received from store owners seeking some direction on what to do. Do we start our advertising, do we hold off to see what is going to happen, how much advertising should we do, ect..
Now I can't tell the future but one advantage of having so many more years behind me than I probably have in front of me is that I've seen and been through a lot of thing over those years. This does give me the ability to look at things from a historical perspective a little better than younger individuals.
What I'm driving at here is that although all this economic upheaval is frustrating and very nerve racking, we have been through difficult times before in this country and not only came through them but came through them much better and much stronger Americans. We will do the same now.
Here are some proven business fact that if you would talk to the vast majority of successful business people will agree on.
Fact 1) You have to make your business decisions based on solid business principles and not on your emotions.
Fact 2) Unless you are planning on going out of business you should never stop marketing and advertising. No matter what the economy may look like, if you want customers, you have to go out and get them, You can't wait for them to find you by accident.
Fact 3) When shoppers are reluctant to buy for any reason, a merchant has to get aggressive. That doesn't mean strong arming them into your store. It does mean that you need to give them a very strong reason (value, need, whatever) for purchasing your product. There are only two ways you can do this is. Either by talking to each potential customer individually, which isn't very practical, or through your marketing and advertising. This means you have to aggressively market and advertise you product or service.
Fact 4) Those businesses that aggressively go after those sales and take the associated risks involved will reap the rewards.
If you look at the majority of major successful business around you today, you will find that they followed the simple principle of "when things are tough, the tough get going". It takes courage, it takes using good business practices, it takes time and energy and it takes faith on your part. Faith in yourself and your product.
Get out there and kick your marketing and advertising into full gear now. Don't wait for those customers to come to you. Give them a reason to buy only from you. While your doing this, look at your business. Trim down where you can. Improve where you can and give yourself a break from the worrying. You can only control what is in your sphere of influence so loosing sleep over what you have no control over just doesn't make sense.
Now the plug. When you do your advertising, do some of it in The Hand Made Product Shopping Directory
For all our indiepublic friends, we wanted to let you know about the Holiday Shopping Pages that will launch Nov 1st at the directory. If you would like to have your store listed in the pages, this url gives you the details.
http://www.dmpmc.net/THMD/specialannouncment.html
The simple fact is that it doesn’t make any difference what is going on, good times or bad, if you aren’t advertising and promoting your store and products, you are not going to make sales. What makes things really bad right now is that many who are still fence straddling are going to be left behind now that we are really closing in on the holiday sales season.
It takes time for any marketing and promotional efforts to start showing results and those that have already or have been continually marketing and advertising their stores and products are going to be reaping greater rewards from their efforts all through the season and not just for a few short weeks. When it comes to marketing and advertising, continuity and persistence are big factors.
Businesses that don’t market and advertise get left behind at best and at worse, simply die. There is far too much competition these days to let up on your marketing and advertising even for a brief period of time. It has been said that for every day a business doesn’t market and advertise in some way, it takes them 3 to 4 days to make up for it. If that is true, some sellers better not hold back another hour.
There are still some sellers that haven’t caught on to the fact that although a few sales will come to them simply because they have a store on Etsy, the vast majority of their sales (certain categories excluded) will come from outside of Etsy and it is up to them to bring those customers in. Neither Etsy or any other venue is going to do your marketing and advertising for you. Both online and off line marketing and advertising is necessary if a seller wants sales. You have to target your market and focus your marketing and advertising on them and towards them.
I want to encourage everyone who has been sitting back waiting for something to happen from an economic stand point, to get in gear before it is too late.
If you haven't started your holiday advertising yet, consider starting at The Hand Made Product Shopping Direcoty
We have had several request about how to write a promotional article for use on multiple online types of places where you could possibly post the article that would help bring in more traffic to a store. Instead of giving a lecture on writing, what I have done is place a copy (below) of a marketing article that we have used and posted online in various locations.
Let me first tell you where we are currently posting this article (besides here). We have posted this article on our a couple of our blogs (http://thehandmadeproductdirectory.blogspot.com) and (http://handmadewanted.blogspot.com) as well as on Google Data Base. Yes, you can post articles and news in the Base. The key in doing this is a good Title. We are also posting this on Craft Marketing Central, our group here on indiepublic ( http://www.indiepublic.com/group/craftmarketingcentral.
A note about blog postings. Pinging your blog is absolutely necessary if you want to generate visibility for that blog. We use Ping-O-Matic ( http://pingomatic.com/) and ( http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/) but there are plenty of others you can use. The point is that you have to use them to get your blog seen. Another element is to make sure that your blog setting are set for allowing RSS Feeds. I will be also posting this article in several other location also and may even do a press release using it.
Now to the article itself. First you may notice that the length isn’t long. It isn’t real short either. The idea with article length is to only make it long enough to keep the readers attention so they read all of it. I know, this flies in the face of some professional writers but to me, when I want information, I want it quickly without a bunch of fill.
The article Title has to be a grabber. If the tile doesn’t grab the interest of a reader, they probably will not read the article. Being able to write good titles is a real art and I admit I’m not really all that good at this myself. It takes practice and some trial and error.
A marketing article is slightly different than a Press Release. In fact if you have the capability to do so I recommend switching off any Press Release thinking in you mind when writing marketing articles. Press Release formats have a tendency to be a little too ridged to use when writing marketing articles.
I use this simple formula when writing marketing articles. There are other formulas and probably better ones but for me, this seems to work. There are 3 basic parts
The Tile, which I already mentioned,
He Intro or beginning section. In this section I endeavor to give the reader something very useful (news or general information) they can take with them and at the same time, set the tone or mood for the article.
The actual marketing material – I try real hard to keep this section as absolutely as short as possible. Tell the reader about your product or service and why they need it.
Finally, a call to action. You have to tell the reader what you want them to do.
Keep this in mind. Making a marketing article sound like it isn’t really marketing or advertising is the over all goal.
That is a very abbreviated explanation of what many schools take weeks and months to teach people. Writing good and effective marketing articles takes practice so don’t be discouraged if your first efforts seem less than what you wanted.
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Where Should You To Do Your Holiday Online Shopping?
For a growing percentage of shoppers this holiday season, buying gifts online will be an interregnal part of the “Gift Buying Process”. This year more than any, the online shopping locations will be greater than ever. This means that for many a significant amount of time will be spend surfing the internet in hopes of finding the right stores to shop from.
Although many may use search engines and some will use General Shopping Directories, many shoppers are unaware of the Specialized or Niche Shopping Directories that are available for their use. These Niche types of Shopping Directories can take much of the work out of the shopping process since as their tag implies, they specialized or focus in on a specific niche set of products.
The size and scope of these Niche Shopping directories varies widely. In most instances, they are very user friendly and come in two types. Type 1, is an actual shopping venue where shoppers actually shop for products on the site itself. Type 2, are shopping directories that give the shopper a much greater variety of choices by actually listing merchants stores with their associated description. Shoppers can select which stores appeal to them and then by visiting that particular store see a much wider selection of products to choose from.
One of these latter types is called The Hand Made Product Shopping Directory. This particular shopping directory has some unique features to it in that it is completely human edited. Merchants’ stores are reviewed by an actual human prior to placing them into the directory. Also as the name implies, what a shopper will find at the directory is thousands of stores which create and sell handmade or handcrafted products.
Dollar for dollar, handmade or handcrafted products are some of the best values to be found on the internet today. In most instances the quality and workmanship is far superior to most mass produced products to be found anywhere. Much of what will be found are one-of-a-kind creations and products that almost any shopper will find hard to resist.
Although you will find a wide range of prices, in the majority of cases pricing is not only very reasonable but realistic. This makes purchasing handmade and handcrafted products one of the wisest things any shopper can do today.
Visit The Hand Made Product Shopping Directory today for quality unique products created by very talented people.
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