Journey to a Successful Etsy Shop - Part 2

If you haven't read Part 1 of this post, you can read it here: Journey to a Successful Etsy Shop - Part 1

Google Adwords
After failing at promoting my Facebook page, I decided to jump right in with Google Adwords.  To be succinct, it is rocket science.  It is a plethora of jargon, acronyms and terms that I had not encountered in my daily life.   And it wasn't something I could learn on the fly and in a hurry.  Still, that didn't deter me.  I plopped down another $50 or so for a text ad (you set a daily budget and I had determined to spend a whopping $1/day).  I spent an afternoon searching keywords that I thought would entice people to my Etsy store.  I set up my Campaign and then my Ad and I was set to go.  77 impressions and 3 clicks later, I still had no sales.  Impressions are the number of times your ad is shown and clicks are the number of times someone actually clicked on the ad.  I was still having no success.

To add more salt to my wound, Google Adwords informed me that my budget was too low to drive traffic to my site and they were only able to show my ad periodically throughout the day so as not to go over my $1/day budget early in the day.  So, I upped the ante and changed my budget to $3/day and I changed some of my keywords.  A few more impressions and 2 additional clicks and still no sales.  I was getting nowhere in a hurry and throwing money away to boot.  And Google kept yelling that my budget was too low.

Etsy
For those of you familiar with Etsy, you know that you can promote your items on Etsy (similar to Google Adwords but the promotion is only within Etsy).  I began to promote my items using Etsy's promotion tools.  Basically, you set a budget per day and then determine which items you want to promote.  You can automate the bid or set it manually.  I chose to promote three items from my store and manually set the bid.  I set it higher than the automated bid in hopes that my ad would show ahead of another store that was selling similar items.  I spent $23 on advertising and made one sale - totaling $24 including shipping.  I was still in the red even though I had made a sale.

I still wasn't willing to give up.  I decided to try creating a newsletter to send to the few people that were coming to my Etsy shop.  More on that in the next post....

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