If you're selling your handmade work online, you know how challenging marketing and promotion can be. No matter which venue you choose to house your shop, getting potential patrons to view your work is one of the most difficult aspects of an artistic business. Enter byhand.me Artisan Co-op. We are not a venue. We are something entirely different.
Byhand.me is a free online community created to provide artists with an array of innovative tools they can use to connect with potential buyers. With byhand.me you spend your time and effort promoting your work, not a venue. And you can tap into the experiences of other artists, free from the constraints of any particular sales site. Registration is easy and best of all, free! Here you'll find community, camaraderie, and the following tools to help you reach your goals:
Your Artisan Directory listing is a free place where all of your web identities can become one. It's a comprehensive home for all of your shop links, blogs, websites, twitter... every link you'd like to share. With a photo, a description of your work, and all of your links in one place, buyers can find you by name or by the category of your work.
Artisan Spotlights allow you to create a visual collection of your work, or the work of others, in which every item links back to its listing no matter where on the major handmade venues that listing may be. Spotlights are a very valuable tool because they are so easy to share... they can be posted (and stay fully functional) on your blog, or a link can be added to an email or used on Twitter. If you create a particularly stunning Spotlight it may be picked up by others and posted on sites and blogs across the web, gaining extraordinary exposure not only for the presented work, but for the curator as well. All of your Spotlights will stay active until you delete them.
With your free byhand.me membership comes your own blog space. Byhand.me blogs are unique in that you can choose to share your thoughts with the entire community by publishing your post to the byhand.me front page. Front page exposure gets your post in front of a multitude of web surfers who visit our site each day. Some rules apply, but in general any member is free to share their posts on the front page, and have their post link tweeted by twitter.com/byhandme. In addition, you can choose to have your post reposted to any of your Blogspot (Blogger) or WordPress blogs with just a few clicks, thus eliminating the numerous steps normally required to repost.
The Byhand.me Forum is a place to meet and discuss issues relevant to members in an evenhanded, unbiased environment. Ask for advice, tout your latest creation, or just chat... you'll find a community of your peers with shops in every handmade venue on the web, happy to share their experiences.
Byhand.me Clubhouses are where members gather in groups based on location, artistic specialty, venue, or other interest. Clubs can be private or open to all and each has its own forum. Don't see what you're looking for? Create your own!
Other outstanding features include Handmade Wishlists, which allow you to create and organize shareable photo wishlists and registries with items from any of the major handmade venues; a multi-venue search that finds the handmade items you're looking for with one click, no matter where they're listed; an ever changing gallery of handmade items randomly selected from member Spotlights called Window Shopping, currently being featured on blogs and sites all over the web; and a chat feature open to all byhand.me members. Best of all, while byhand.me is free to members, ad revenues collected will be used to alert buyers to our Artisan Co-op, our members and their work.
CreatNTrade is ByHand's Trading Manager. Use CreatNTrade to list handmade items that you have for trade and make bartering online a whole lot easier! Make requests for what types of items you'd like to trade for when listing. Listing is free, trading is free! CreatNTrade is just another terrific benefit for members of the ByHand community and all registered users can participate.
Let's put it into some analogies if it may help. Say you sell in three different cities. Obviously, you can't be in them all at once, so you have three trucks and two employees, and you all drive to each city. Once you get there, well, your products are exposed to those folks in each city for sure, but you had to spend three times the amount of people and time to get that exposure. The folks from City A are comfortable in City A, and they don't want to shop in City B, even though it only takes 30 seconds to get there.
Now, wouldn't it be great if you could eliminate your employees, and your trucks, and still reach all the people from all three cities, letting them choose where they buy and shop? That is what the byhand.me artisan co-op is all about. We are the farmers market or craft fair that allows you to make those personal connections with your customers online, but there are no booth fees, because you already have 3 booths elsewhere. So now you have that single place that you can promote instead of three.
So what are you waiting for? Register now and start promoting your art, not a venue!
Helpful Links for Artists:
How to Track ByHand Referrals in Google Analytics
