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If your craft items make creative ideas for valentine’s day gifts, NetworkingWitches.com is seeking info on Valentine gift items to feature on NetWorkingWitches.com, gifts for (all ages) men, women, children, even for pets. Especially interested in green gifts for Valentines? Send your creative Valentine ideas to Rose by email RoseRedNeckWitch (at) gmail.com. Use “Valentine Feature” in the subject line. Deadline is January 11, 2010.

100CafeStreet.com – a Dessert Blog is looking to feature some of the most beautiful Valentine cupcakes out there. If you have pictures, recipes or just sell cupcakes online, e-mail Betty at 100cafestreet (at) gmail.com. Include “Valentines’s Day cupcakes” in the subject line. Deadline is Jan. 12, 2010

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In marketing, it’s not what you say about yourself, but what others say about you that people pay attention to. The more positive third party reviews and ratings you have, the better.

Getting reviews on some of the sites listed below provide excellent ways to help you get found in local searches. Local search is becoming more and more popular, but still overlooked as a marketing method by many craft business owners.

Here are some of the top social shopping review sites:

Stylefeeder.com — StyleFeeder is a shopping engine that makes personal recommendations. Shoppers use tags to search for items they want or they can browse the bookmarked lists of other members. It’s fairly easy to add items to the site, even your own.

Iliketotallyloveit.com — Love this site’s name! This site allows users to publish and share products with the broader public which they find cool, innovative, exceptionally beautiful, or just weird. Included with every item is a link to an online shop where it can be purchased, like your Etsy or Artfire store.

Myhandmaderegistry.com — List your craft items at this handmade registry, where visitors can create a personal page with a list of their favorite items from only handmade retailers. Designed for handcraft shop owners to share their wishlist with their families and friends.

Thefind.com — Consumers can search products from stores and online merchants here. When I typed in the word “handmade,” there were 5,504 stores with 855,457 products. They also have a blog where you can add your RSS feed at Thefindbuzz.com.

Shopwiki.com — Shopwiki is a guide designed to help consumers find specific products on the Internet via consumer-written wikis. It’s a resource for quickly finding facts and pricing on all kinds of items.

The above five listings are part of the list of 50 social shopping and shopping blog sites included in the book,Sell Your Crafts Online, More Than 500 Free and Low-Cost Ideas to Reach More Buyers of Handmade Crafts.

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The site is called FindaFeature.blogspot.com. Unfortunately, the owner chose a theme with a dark background and light colored text, so the posts are difficult to read. But this could still be a good resource for finding sites that will let you get the word out about your handmades.

From the home page, look on the upper left for “Blog Features Needed” to see if you have an item that could fit.

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My biggest concern about free blog sites is that by placing your content on them, you are at risk, to the extent that if their site disappears, so does your work. In my business, I like to reduce risks whenever I can, including hosting my blog on my own sites.

Having said that, I do have some blogs on free hosts, but I use them as a way to put up content that then links back to my own domain. Incoming one-way links from popular domain names are good.

Regardless of where you place your blog, there are several advantages of a blog site over a static pages (just plain HTML web pages that don’t change often) site:

* When you post blogs at least 3 to 4 times a week, the search engines tend to visit your site more frequently, because they favor sites with fresh content.

* It is very easy to put up your own blog on your own domain using Fantastico (comes with many hosting packages). WordPress offers lots of free themes so you don’t have to worry about design until you get up and running and have more time to fine tune the look of the site.

* Each blog post becomes a separate page on your site. The more pages you have, the more opportunities for your crafts to show up in search engine results

* Each of your craft items can be described on its own blog page. You can categorize items and then customers can browse by categories, like color, size, material, dimension or any other measure of distinction that gives the shopper more choices. Categories are very easy to set up on WordPress blogs.

For those who are confused about just how to start blogging, here are some sites that will help clear up the mystery:

http://www.becomeablogger.com/

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/14/blogging-for-beginners-2/

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/08/29/learning-about-blogging-and-how-to-blog/

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/01/09/dont-just-have-a-blog-learn-to-think-like-a-blogger/

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