3 Free or Low-Cost ways to promote your shop

Paid advertising is great, and can certainly work wonders for getting your shop seen, but free or low cost promotion is, of course, even better!  Here are a few suggestions for promoting your shop on the cheap:

Post a Craigslist ad – Craigslist is a thriving community of shoppers, sellers and browsers.  They have sections there for everything from arts and crafts to real-estate, and everything in between.  There are lots of places there where your shop might fit in.  You can post an ad in the arts and crafts for sale section or clothing section, and if you specialize or have certain themes in your shop, you can post in those sections too, for example if you have a lot of vehicle themed themed designs or items in your shop, you can post in the cars & trucks section as well.  Also, don’t overlook the creative services and community sections there as well, there could be a goldmine of prospects just waiting to be found!

Set up a blog - Run, don’t walk over to Wordpress or Blogger and get yourself signed up for one of them there free blogs is you don’t have one already.  Or if you have web hosting, many of them include free blogs with their packages as well.  Point is, blogs are a great networking tool for your business.  Not only can you use it to promote your shop, new items, and announcements, it’s also a great way to interact with customers, general admirers, and other people in business.  Trading links will bring traffic and attention to your blog, which can trickle down to your shop, featuring other blogs and artists can do the same, and commenting on other peoples blogs will get your name out there as well.  Keeping updated can sometimes be a challenge, but if you stick to it you will start to build up a following which will immerse you in the community where your potential customers can be found.  So post, comment, link…. repeat for continued success!

Spread the word – Talk up your shop, no one can emphasize the finer points of your shop better than you can yourself.  You have to take any opportunity to let people know about it that you can.  You may mention it to someone who wouldn’t have a need for your items, but who knows someone who sews all the time, or who collects buttons, or wears nothing but t-shirts.  Get yourself some business cards (Vistaprint is notorious for running free and cheap business card promotions, where you only pay shipping, and there are many others as well).  Give your cards to friends and family who can hand them out, put them on bulletin boards at coffee shops and supermarkets or craft stores, include a link to your store in all electronic signatures for e-mail and forums, order a t-shirt with your biz name on it and wear it everyday (ok, that’s a bit extreme, but wear it sometimes!),  write an e-mail that describes your shop and what products are being offered and include a link to your shop, then send it to 10 of your friends, and ask them to forward it to 5 of their friends.  Word of mouth is the best form of advertising there is. 

Okay, so there’s today’s 3 promotion tips.  Stay tuned for more ideas coming soon!

Tags: branding, promote, selling

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Promotions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.