Selling Crafts Online

Have you tried out Squidoo.com? If not I can give you a referral link. You can make a lens which is sort of like a blog and advertise your Etsy store on there.

I never did well on Etsy. You can try Artfire, it's free. But, you have a lot of competition there. Depends on what you are selling and the price. Or, you can try Ebay. I did best there, but, it cost a lot of money if you post a lot. Good luck.

while i love etsy, i have to agree with you because there are just so many sellers on there, your stuff just tends to get buried. i am in the same boat as you and am interested in what people have to say. i guess it just depends on what you have to sell on there eh?

I to sell on etsy when I can. It has alot of people and what I do some is get in the discussions and alot of people buy from each other, also twitter is a good aftertizeing spot for your sales, put a signature in you e-mails to advertize your sales when you e-mail others. also go to swap bot and join for free they swap things and you can add your store there for free and maybe draw some sales to your site.

I can probably give you several tips on how to help yourself to increasing visits to your shop.
I'm going to assume that your listings are informative for the customer and your images are very good...detailed, clear pictures of the items you are selling (I don't see a shop link in your profile here at myLot)The most important aspect of Etsy, once you have the above down pat...promoting.

As one response already mentioned, there are a lot of sellers on Etsy and those that list a new item only have a small window of time where their item is visible to the buyers that happen to be on the site at that time. By promoting your listings in the promotional forum on Etsy, you have now begun to list your item links for others to find any time of the day.

I try to promote daily in the Etsy forums. I also have linked my shop to Twitter, so all new items get promoted on the Twitter site withing an hour of being listed...I also list many new items on Facebook. But the most important promoting you can do, in my opinion, is in the Etsy promo forum. When I first started on Etsy, approx 90% of my sales came from the time I spent promoting on the site and now more than 2 years later, I'd have to say that at least 50% of my sales continue to come from my promoting in the forums.

Like I mentioned, your listings get lost in the crowd after a small amount of time on Etsy (maybe 30 minutes, if you are lucky) and during that small amount of time, what percentage of the daily buyers might be logged on at that time? A very small percentage I would guess. By promoting in the forums, you give your items/shop the opportunity to be viewed later in the day... even while you are sleeping at night and the more potential customers you can drive to your shop, the chances of making sales increase dramatically. You have already made a couple of sales, so your creations have "commercial appeal"...you now need to increase the amount of eyes that view your creations.

I'll share with you, what I was told when I first joined Etsy. An experienced seller told me if you want to make sales on Etsy (and there were far fewer sellers back then) this is what you need to do- promote, promote, promote and when you think you promoted enough, go back and promote some more. Put your creations in front of the world of Etsy for everyone to see...there are buyers for your items out there, they might be surfing Etsy right now, looking for something...something that you are selling- show it to them!
Best of luck to you!!
PS- add your shop link and/or an Etsy mini to your profile here at myLot (click on my profile and you'll see my Etsy mini)you never know who's looking or where your next sale is going to come from

I've only made one sale - it was quite a while ago, and then i sort of left it alone for awhile.

I think I'm going to try again, and this time I'm going to promote it by adding a little ad to my blog, which actually oddly has a lot of readers but it's not about crafts so i don't know how many would be interested. I'm also going to look around etsy to see if I can promote it there. I might make a youtube video - a how to - and embed a link to my etsy shop. And I'm going to try to get my friends to post it on their face book pages.