This post about how to promote an Etsy shop online,  is inspired by my friend Mairead, who decided after 10 years working in the financial sector to pack it all in and dedicate all her precious time to her real passion – making handbags!! I really admire her dedication and guts to leave her job and just go and be her own boss at Breagha – Handmade bags.

Now Mairead doesn’t have her own e-commerce site and sells her bags on Etsy, a website, which allows anyone to create their own shop within the site and sell their handmade goods, like handbags, jewlery etc. It pretty much works like Ebay, where it’s possible to create a shop and Etsy will take a cut of any sold item, with two significant differences:

1) Etsy takes a smaller percentage of the sold goods

2) There is no auction-style selling.

My friend has not the option of having her own website at the moment, now, how could she still utilise the web to promote her Etsy shop with other means?

The site offers the option to sign up for an RSS feed, so it’s possible to keep up to date with any new products a certain seller puts up, but Mairead at this point wants to spread the word.

Mairead shared the link to her Etsy shop on Facebook. Another option to show this link at all times is to add it to the information, which appears on the right-hand side on below the profile picture.

These are all valid ways of reaching a very small group, only direct friends. If looking at the Facebook Advertiser tool, the following statistics are pretty interesting. In the UK alone, there are 6,860 females interested in handbags, in the US 5,720 and these are just two examples, as Etsy is used world-wide.

Further options are:

• Creating a shop page on Facebook, this can reach more people who are interested in handbags
• Stumble the Etsy shop page (which I have already done)
• Create a Twitter account and keep it public, updating people on new products posted. I’ve undertaken a handbag search and already quite a few other people utilise Twitter for this purpose
• Become a member of various handbag fan pages and leave comments, directing people to your shop

During my brief research for this, I’ve also seen that there are many shop and fan pages on Facebook for people who are interested in handbags. Mairead could also be cheeky and invite these people with her Facebook shop page, however, this could be seen as “unethical”, as it could be perceived as spam or unwanted contact by Facebook users. I’d be intersted to hear your comments on this.

Anyhow, I hope that Mairead’s business succeeds and as I can see she’s already been making a few sales, which is great! Good luck, Mairead!

There is now a second part to this “How to promote an Etsy shop online” series called How to promote an Etsy shop online – Part 2.

written by Feli \\ tags: E-commerce, facebook, SEO, Social Media, twitter

You are probably thinking “why would you use Twitter as reputation management tool?”. Most people use Twitter to keep their friends and workmates informed on personal updates and to share funny videos or even a good website etc. Also it becomes now a lot easier to update and follow your Twitter-friends with Twitterfox, a firefox extension, which I talked about in my previous post on socialnetworking toolbars and Firefox extensions. It allows you to access Twitter from your status bar and other peoples’ tweets appear as a pop up too, so you always are in the loop of what your friends are up to.

Now to the reputation management properties of Twitter.

A few days ago, I came across a case study on SEOmoz, where one of the contributing writers tells a very fascinating story about how ComScore used Twitter as a reputation management tool. It starts with a very frustrating story of the lady being unable to reach ComScore by phone to cancel a NBA basketball membership, which was automatically renewed. When she finally gets through to the company, the customer service agent declares that she is unable to refund the money for the membership as she called 4 days into the membership renewal. The frustrated lady tweets “I hate ComScore”. A minute later a representative from ComScore replies “What’s the issue?”.

Within only a few tweets the problem is resolved and the SEOmoz writer receives a refund, without any problem. I personally think that ComScore really embraced the opportunity Twitter offers with the Twitter search function, which enables you to search within all tweets mentions of a company name or product or whatever you are interested in. This will enable a lot of companies to proactively interact with their customers and resolve issues quickly.

written by Feli \\ tags: reputation management, Social Media, twitter

My post from last week about Social Media Metrics for Google Analytics received a positive response from readers of my blog. Thanks!

Erik Vold from VKI Studios also commented and has pointed out another handy Google Analytics Firefox Extension he’s written, which also includes the Greasemonkey Social Media Metrics features. The main features are as follows:

• Auto access your Google Analytics account
• Cleaner Profile Switching
• Export to Google Docs from Google Analytics
• Google Analytics Absolute Conversion
• Google Analytics Advanced Date Selection
• Google Analytics Table Sorting
• Social Media Metrics

Find more information on the Better Google Analytics Firefox extension on the VKI Studio’s site, where you can also download it.

Exciting stuff for all Google Analytics fans out there and again a shoutout and a big “Thank you” to Erik Vold, Michael Freeman, Arty V, Tyson Kirksey and André Scholten.

written by Feli \\ tags: firefox extensions, Google Analytics, google analytics firefox extension, tools

This week is my “Google Analytics week”, having played around with the new custom reporting features I’ve also now enabled social media metrics for my Google Analytics account.

I came across this really interesting post on the VKI Studios blog, where Erik Vold makes a social media metric script available to the public, which is very generous of him. So what are the features of it?

Once correctly installed (I’ll go into this bit in a minute), you will be able to view social media metrics within your Google Analytics account. These metrics can be viewed within Content > Top Content > Content Detail and appear just below your usual information for a particular page. Once the script is enabled, the following metrics are added:

• Digg
• Sphinn
• Mixx
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Del.icio.us
• Yahoo! Inlinks

It is possible to directly go to the various social media websites by clicking on the blue hyperlink and submit your website/post if it appears as 0 or to view the information directly on the social media sites. Amazing!

So, how do you install this feature for your Google Analytics account?

1) Install Greasemonkey for Firefox and ensure that it is enabled

2) Install the VKI Studios Greasemonkey Google Analtyics script

3) Just log into your Google Analytics account and go to Content > Top Content > Content Detail

Easy!

Enjoy and thank you very much VKI Studios!

written by Feli \\ tags: google analytics metrics, greasemonkey, social media metrics

It’s always nice to wake up in the morning and check your Google Analytics account- and WOW – there are new custom reporting features.

Bizarrely enough, sometimes new Google Analytics features may have been live for a while in the US or in the UK but not here in Spain or vice versa. Therefore I had already read and heard about these features but my account hadn’t been updated with them until today.

So what are these new features, still residing in Beta?

1) Custom reporting

2) Advanced segments

The custom report can be set up using a combination of metrics and dimensions. It is vital to verify first which combination of metrics and dimensions can be used together and should be checkedin the chart here.

Metrics can be any of the following:

• Site usage
• Content
• Goals
• E-commerce
• Advertising

Dimensions are divided as follows:

• Visitors
• Traffic sources
• Content
• E-commerce
• Systems

Creating the reports is very easy. There are already colour-coded fields for “metrics” (blue) and “dimensions” (green) and once you click on the respective fields, a variety of buttons unfold themselves, which can easily dragged and dropped onto the predefined fields. Once you’ve chosen all the metrics and dimension combinations you would like to appear in one report, you can preview it and if you are happy with it click on “create report”.

I’m very excited about these custom reports, as it enables to get more specific information without having to create filters in a variety of profiles.

Have fun with these new Google Analytics reports!

written by Feli \\ tags: custom reports, dimensions, Google Analytics, metrics, reporting, SEO