Ideas to draw traffic to my website.?

Question

My girlfriend and I have started a new handmade wooden craft business and are having trouble drawing traffic to our website at:

www.freewebs.com/lynnescountrycrafts

We have gotten many compliments from local people on our work at craft shows and craft malls however we can't get our name out there without spending lots of money it seems.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Have your website's domain name emblazoned on the side of your vehicle.  People will see it wherever you go, and they will be curious and visit your site filled with interesting graphics.

Answer 2

You can get traffic by trying a free traffic exchange service like TrafficSwarm at http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?56268...

or WebCentreSurf at http://webcentresurf.com/?27972

Try StumbleUpon at http://www.stumbleupon.com and add your site to your favorites.

You can try article marketing at an article submission service like http://www.ezinearticles.com and link back to your website in the resource box for your articles.

You can also comment on popular blogs like John Chow's or Joel Comm's that allow linkbacks to your URL. Do a Yahoo Search.

Create a video and upload it to YouTube with your URL flashed on the screen. All of these are free.

Answer 3

I did a couple quick checks.  Your site is not optimized for Google or Yahoo, the internet's 2 top search engines.  

For keywords, you only have wooden crafts, homemade, seasonal, holiday and gift items.  You should include many more - basically any search phrase (including the mis-spelled ones) that someone might use to find your site.  Include your names, address, city, town and state.

<meta name="keywords" content="wooden crafts, homemade, seasonal, holiday , gift items">

I recommend using a site like meta Tag builder to optimize your pages: http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk-me...

I recommend using a site like Add Me's free service.  They will help you with optimization suggestions: http://www.addme.com/submission/free-sub...

And finally, the best way to get people to your site is by building "buzz" or web presence.  You need to get involved in popular social sites like facebook, myspace, craigslist - posting regularly with links to your site.  You need to find out where the most popular crafts-related discussion forums are, join and post regularly.  Make sure your post signature lists links to your site.

If you'd like more information I'm happy to help.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

Hi..

It's great you are getting the compliments... What I would do is get or use the comments people make as testimonials for your products. I would also suggest that if you are truly serious about selling your crafts online that you get your own domain name and a hosted website or blog.

It all can be done at low cost. Domains are about $9 a year and hosting about $7 a month or thereabouts. I encourage you to try using a WordPress blog where you talk about what you are working on, and why, current projects, how you do it, etc. Or maybe a blog and a html site would work well together.

I use http://hurleypix.com/blue  for my hosting but see which way you want to go. There are an abundance of website hosting options out there. :)

You could also write articles about what you do. Articles can bring a lot of good traffic through to your site... If you decide to go that way, you can download a free guide about how you can use article marketing to bring traffic to your site here:

http://photomarketeers.com/cool-resource...

The other thing I use is http://hurleypix.com/3wl  This costs a monthly fee - but it works very effectively at giving you very nice rankings in Google. Look over the site if you want to learn more. :)

Another option is by using web 2.0 sites such as Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, Craigs List, Stumbleupon, etc. You have to get 'in there' and communicate and learn about these sites, build your profile up, etc, but they are pretty good too at motivating people to come look at your website.

There's other ways as well including press releases and contributing in forums often.

Yes so that's what I would do... get your own domain name, hosted, get a blog or html site up, and then over deliver with good content that wows people...

If you have more questions just ask. :)

Answer 6

make some stickers with address on it, actually get a better website address something that sounds legit like lynnescountrycrafts.com not a sections of freewebs.com it only costs you maybe ~5 bucks a month depending on who you hire to host then make a bunch of stickers give them out eerywhere stick them on streetlights send out with orders etc etc