In other posts, I have recommended that you use a blog to promote your craft items. I am a fan of having your own domain so you can control as much of your marketing as possible, but there are plenty of free blog hosting sites available, like Blogger.com, Vox.com, WordPress.com. Xanga.com and Clearblogs.com.
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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Obviously I’m not taking advantage of this very well right now, but I’m just getting started (and writing is much harder than building puzzles
I’m not sure about each post becoming a separate page, that I’ll have to look in to. It certainly doesn’t look like a separate page unless I specifically add it that way, but that could be a WordPress thing.
I’ll definitely take a look at setting up each item on a separate page though.
In all, seems like good advice, something to carefully consider.
You may be right about the separate page thing, technically.
What I know for sure is that each blog post gets its own URL (at least in WordPress). I use a WordPress plugin called “All in one SEO” that among other things, lets me customize the URL, title and description tags of each blog post. Very convenient way of optimizing each post for keywords.
Thanks for the information! I will read the articles suggested. I just signed on with Twitter, Facebook and Blogspot, and I need to set things up on Blogspot, but am not sure how.
I’m really bad at keeping up with my blog. After reading this article, I realize I’m missing out on a good opportunity. If I read this right, you are recommending a blog on your website over the free ones. I do have the ability to start a blog on my own website, so I think that may be the answer to driving more traffic there. Enjoyed this article. Thanks!
Thanks for the post! I’m trying to keep the blog and I’m looking for advice to see what kind of things ppl want to read, how to make it interesting, and everything related with it and my crafts work.