The first one is relying on your Facebook page. Honestly, Facebook is a great tool for various reasons, but using your Facebook business page as the main traffic source to your online shop, if you’re just getting started, might not be the best solution. The reason for that is that it can be really hard to build a large following from scratch using your Facebook business page, unless you’re ready to pay for Facebook ads.
Let me explain that a bit more.
The reason I’m saying that is because when you’re just starting out and if no one really knows about your shop yet, what you tend to do (and you should!) is invite your friends and family to like your page. Then you start showing amazing content that you spend hours putting together, hoping that they’re going to share it, so that more people come and like our page. And yes, people can also find your page using the Facebook search field and your shop could pop up and they could find you, but if they don’t know that your shop exists in the first place, how are they meant to look for you in the search?
Facebook is a bit of a catch 22 like that, when you’re just getting started, which is why I don’t recommend you use this as your main traffic source, and I don’t want you to lose and waste hours of your time trying to grow a following on Facebook, if you don’t already have a little bit of traffic to your website.
Most shops that have a lot of followers on their Facebook page actually already have people visiting their website. Of course there are exceptions, but this is the more often than not the case.
This one is for Etsy sellers. I know that the number one reason Etsy is such a great way to sell your handmade products is because they already have a huge audience, and therefore they can bring traffic to your store without you having to do too much work. Of course, you have to tweak your keywords and your titles and have beautiful images and work on your Etsy SEO (with tools like Marmalead, for example) but Etsy is great because they already have traffic ready to be sent to your store!
So yes, Etsy can bring traffic to you and that’s great, but I don’t want you to rely uniquely on that. You should diversify your traffic sources, so that if there’s anything with Etsy, like an algorithm change (which happens all the time) and suddenly your shop doesn’t rank the way it used to, or people don’t seem to visit your shop that much, you have other traffic sources that you can rely on to make sure that your income and your sales are consistent and not just dependent on the Etsy algorithm and the traffic that Etsy brings to your store.
[free] handmade shop traffic guide
ARE YOU TIRED OF HEARING CRICKETS? TO MAKE SALES, YOU NEED PEOPLE TO VISIT YOUR SHOP, LET’S MAKE IT HAPPEN WITH THIS FREE TRAFFIC GUIDE.
The next one is sharing your products on promotional Facebook groups. I know a lot of you are sharing your products to promotional Facebook groups where Etsy sellers and handmade shop owners are allowed and invited to share their creations and links to their shop, so that people can go and check out your products.
I understand why it is tempting, but this is not at all the best way to get traffic and sales for your handmade shop. Let me explain.
Sharing your products on Facebook groups might bring a short peak of traffic to your store, but it’s not a really good way to build long-lasting traffic and generate recurring sales. The reason for that is because people who are part of those Facebook groups are just like you, they have an Etsy shop or a handmade shop that they’re trying to promote, and so therefore they’re not necessarily your ideal customer.
You might get a lot of traffic to one of your product pages because you’ve just shared it into a group, but that’s just other makers trying to look up what you’re doing, and they’re probably not actually going to end up buying it.
The worst is that if you’re selling on Etsy, this could damage your conversion rate and therefore your ranking, because you get a lot of traffic that doesn’t convert into sales. What that says to Etsy is that people check out your products, but they’re not interested in buying. Therefore, Etsy won’t show it to people when they search because Etsy is thinking, “Well, this product isn’t really selling, it’s not really converting, so we’re not going to rank it really well.”
It’s the same if you sell on your own website because you’re going to get a lot of traffic, but it’s not going to convert into actual sales because it’s not targeted, quality traffic, which is what you should be aiming for.
At the end of the day, traffic is great, but sales is what really matters, so if you get traffic but it’s not converting into sales, well… you’ve got a problem.
Number four is not focusing on what is the most efficient way to get targeted traffic to your store. ALL traffic strategies implemented efficiently can get you positive results and increase the number of visitors to your store, but they’re not all equal in terms of how quickly they can actually get you there, and you need to be focusing on what’s working best. Let me give you an example for that.
I see a lot of people moving from Etsy to their own website, or just even without going through Etsy first, starting their own online shop to sell their products. They start reading about SEO, and they spend a lot of time trying to optimise their website to rank into a Google.
And in a way, that’s great because it does matter and it is a great free strategy to get traffic to your store. But it’s not a strategy that’s going to give you results quickly.
What happens is you end up spending hours trying to work this out every week, and it’s not like you have that much time, and you don’t see results as quickly as you’d like to, so you just get tired and you just feel like giving up. I don’t want this to happen to you.
Yes, on Etsy 100% you should focus on your SEO (with tools like Marmalead where you can tweak and optimise to rank better in the search results on Etsy). But if you’re selling on your own website, I don’t actually recommend that you spend so much time trying to figure out SEO, because you are competing with the entire world on Google. It’s extremely hard to get onto the first page of result, let alone the first results itself, because you’re competing with that many different people. People on the first page are usually bigger companies that have worked for months, if not years, having a really consistent and strong content strategy in place, and most of them are also working with experts who actually focus only on that.
I’m not saying you should just not care about SEO for Google at all. I’m just saying do the minimum. Pick nice keywords in your title and write proper descriptions, make sure when you’re uploading your product image that you put alt description with keywords in it. But don’t go too deep into Google SEO, because it’s just not something that’s going to get you results quickly.
There are better traffic sources that work faster for that. Then, once you have traffic coming from other sources, then yes, I’m more than happy for you to go back and optimise for SEO, but just don’t start there. That’s a mistake I see a lot of makers make.
Number five is not optimising for conversion. I see a lot of makers spend hours each week working on bringing traffic to their store not actually spending time optimising their store, so that that traffic actually converts into sales.
Please, please, please, if you think that you’re spending too much time building up traffic and not enough time optimising your store so that this traffic can become a sale, then you need to think differently and really focus on getting sales, rather than just traffic.
Because with little traffic, if each traffic converts into a sale, you’re still making more money than if you have plenty of people visiting your store but they’re not actually buying anything. Conversion optimization really goes a long way into making sure that you’re actually making money and not just bringing traffic to your store and not making a penny out of it.
When someone gets into your shop, two things can happen:
– They can buy
– Or they can leave without buying anything.
A mistake that many people make is to just let them go and hope that they’re going to come back one day. I don’t want you to make this mistake, which is why I’d love you to start an email list, so that you don’t have to consistently bring new traffic to your store. You need to keep in touch with people that already saw your products and your brand and bring them back to your store.
These people are more likely to buy, because they’ve been exposed to your products and your brand and they already know you. That’s what we call a warm audience. It’s much easier to get a sale from them than from absolute cold traffic. Cold traffic is people who never heard of you before and see your products for the first time.
To avoid spending hours and hours working on how to bring traffic to your store and then just not do anything with that traffic, please, start an email list so that you can keep in touch with people who leave your store without buying and bring them back to your store later on.
So… Are you guilty of any of these traffic mistakes 😉 ? Let me know in the comments below!
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[Free] handmade shop traffic guide
Hi, thank you for sharing this valuable information; it’s honest, really really useful and has helped me understand the bigger picture and where to focus my energy! I’ve been working too hard trying to get more traffic while vaguely trying to optimize my shop and do “something” with that traffic. I’ll definitely work harder on latter now.
I find it hard to get people to subscribe to my newsletter on Etsy and generating traffic to my website harder still. No easy street there!