8 ways to get traffic to your handmade shop

July 16, 2019

If you have a handmade shop but you’re not getting quite as much traffic to it as you’d like to, then this video is going to be great for you.

I’ll help you make an inventory of 8 different traffic sources you can leverage to bring more visitors to your shop. I also have two freebies that will help you: a workbook that will help you assess your traffic and create a marketing strategy, and a traffic calculator that will show you how many visitors you need each month in your shop to reach your revenue goals.

Let’s dive into today’s topic.

You can watch the video or read the written version below.

Think of a traffic “source” as a tap that you’d turn on so that visitors come flowing to your handmade shop. I’d like to categorize those sources into 2 categories: free and paid traffic.

Free traffic

There are 4 main free traffic sources.

The first is social media: Facebook, Instagram or any other social media platform that you might use to promote your product so that you can bring people back to your shop.
The second group is PR (public relations). It’s getting your brand, products, and shop inside of printed magazines, TV or radio (although that might not apply quite as well to a handmade shop). Now it’s also moving into the online sphere and digital publications because magazines now usually also have digital content that they only have online and that they’re not necessarily printing.
The third is live events. These are craft fairs or markets that you may be selling at. Often you don’t think of actually taking people in “real life” and bringing them back to your online shop but craft markets are a perfect opportunity to do that. Even if they’re not buying from you on the day you can get them to either sign up for your email list or grab a flyer or your business card so they come back to your shop online and you can keep in touch with them.
The fourth in the free traffic category is working with influencers. That’s pretty new. It definitely wasn’t even a word 10 years ago, but now you can collaborate and create partnerships with people who have bigger audiences than yours. If those audiences are your ideal customers you can reach out to those people – either Instagram influencers or bloggers or YouTubers – and work with them so that they showcase your brand and your product to their audience.

Grab this free handmade shop traffic bundle!

Paid traffic sources

Now let’s look at the paid traffic sources. We have four more here, and the first one is paid social media ads. These are the ads you pay for on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social media platform you’d like to use. By paying you get more visibility and more reach for your posts on that platform.
The second is paid search engine ads. That includes things like Google ads or Etsy ads (if you’re selling on Etsy).
The third is paid magazine ads. We’ve talked about getting in the press for free, but you can also purchase ads that get printed or displayed on the digital publications of those magazines. I’m not saying these are the absolute best ways to spend your money. I would much rather you invest in advertisement online, on social media or Google or Etsy – it’s much easier to track your results.
The fourth is paid partnerships with bloggers or influences. Sometimes you will do a very nice collaboration for free as we’ve mentioned before, but sometimes they will require a fee for them to actually showcase that to their audience and bring more traffic to your shop.

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A few last tips

These are the 8 traffic sources. Now the question is how to put it all together. You can really use only one traffic source or mix and match them so that it works for your specific situation and for your specific handmade shop. I highly recommend you to watch this live workshop about getting traffic to your shop and to download the free workbook and calculator.

What I will say is don’t be too quick to dismiss a traffic source because it’s not working. For example, if you’re working on your Instagram strategy and you’re thinking “I’m not getting enough traffic, I’m just going to start working on Facebook as well” I would say be careful because it is not necessarily going to be easier on Facebook than it was on Instagram. Don’t just dismiss a traffic source and move onto the next one until you really are sure that this is not working for you, that your customers aren’t there and this is really not paying off. I don’t want you to spread yourself thin and start doing too much to a point where nothing is really done properly. I would way rather you focus on a few key traffic sources, really be consistent and get some traction from them before you start adding more to your list.