Etsy Community & Teams... Why Bother???

Today's blog will cover the importance of utilizing the Etsy Community and Teams to promote your Etsy Store...

Etsy provides sellers with great tools to promote your shop.  These tools are easy to use and a great way to Network and Market your online business...

The most important tool that is available to all Etsy sellers is the ability for sellers to join teams.  Teams consist of individual shops that have the same interest or cause in which they promote... these teams are available in several different categories.  Anywhere from Vintage, Jewelry, Craft, Handmade and even individual Street Teams for States and Towns... As most of you are aware I belong to the VJSE Team and EcoChic Vintage as well as the We Love Vintage team.  When I first started with Etsy almost a year and a half ago I didn't belong to any teams and my sales were poor... After joining these teams and being involved in Team discussions on promotions and marketing and learning how to get my shop more views my sales have increased substantially from my beginning days on Etsy... Teams use several different ways to promote their members... Team wide sales, team treasuries, and team blogs are only a few of the ways teams promote each other... if you don't belong to any teams on Etsy I strongly advise you to go to the team section under the community section of Etsy and search for a team to get involved with... they simply apply for membership.

The second tool that is available on Etsy is the "Circle" feature... This was one of those features that I just did NOT want to have anything to do with... My thought on why I didn't want anything to do with it was the fact that I just didn't have the time to add something else to my already busy promotion and marketing schedule... However after reading discussions in my Etsy teams I realized that I really needed to explore this "new" area of Etsy... So to begin with I started adding my team members to my circle and started to "heart" or favorite a few items from my team members in my circle... Soon I had other team members doing the same for me and within days I started to see my shop views increase and so were my shop hearts and item hearts... Some will say that the reason I saw these increases was from my team members adding my items to their favorites... but I can disprove that by looking at who was adding my items to their favorites... what a shock I had when I started to look at this when I saw several people other than my team members adding my items... why did I see these people adding my items to their favorites?  It's quite simple actually they were actually seeing my items in circles that they belonged too... So, this is why the circle feature is important, because once you add a shop to your circle then your "activity" is visible on there "activity" circle as well... so you are not only promoting to people within your own circle but everyone else as well... Recently I have started to add buyers only (people who do not have an Etsy shop) who favorite my items... and this has proven to be a great advantage as well... Another great tool... and it is FREE...

Finally, the Treasury tool is another great way to promote your shop as well as help to promote other shops within the Etsy Community or your Etsy Teams that you belong too... Etsy has even made it easier to share your favorite Treasuries by adding a "Favorite" link to the individual treasury pages... Also, treasuries are added to your "activity" link anytime you create, comment or favorite one... so another great too... and it is Free...

These are only a few of the many tools that are available on Etsy... and I guarantee that if you use them as they were designed to be used that you will see an increase in Views and eventually sales...

I'll be sharing more of these great tools in later post on this blog... I hope that you have enjoyed my blog this week... I'm not sure what I'll be posting about next week, but please add me to your favorites and follow me, because you can guarantee I'll have some great FREE ways to promote and market your online business.