Behind the Scenes...

I have spent the better part of the past week or two trying to understand the behind the scenes workings of promoting my web pages on and off Artfire. First and foremost is SEO...getting the search engines to read your content and rank your pages. Obviously, the object is to get your pages ranked higher in the searches, first 3 pages is good, but first page is great. There isn't any hard and fast rule on how to achieve this positioning, it is really best done through trial and error. This process can and does take a lot of time making changes and waiting until enough time has passed to determine if the content and keywords you are using is placing your pages any higher than they did before you started tweaking them.

Then there is the social media that we are strongly advised to participate in to develop connections, Facebook, Twitter, Blogging...and there is a recommended mix of the type of sharing we should do amongst our connections, lest we come off as spammers that do nothing but promote our shops and listings. For Twitter there is a recommended mix of tweet types to use if you are a business that includes:

• Personal - let your target audience get to know you. Show your human side.
• Useful 3rd party information - provide links to content of interest to you from blogs, your favorite e-books, helpful hints of interest to most anybody.
• Re-tweets - Re-tweeting something posted by someone else tells your followers that you find value in what this person has to say and increases your value to your followers by sharing meaningful or entertaining posts.
• Thank-yous - Thank your audience for following you, or thank others for off site activities that they have done for you or helped you with.
• Promotional - too much of this can turn people off. It is highly recommended to limit the self-promotion to as little as 1 in 10 tweets...1 in 5 maybe okay for some and it may bother others.

I am getting my feet wet, I have had a Facebook page for a good while, I recently joined Twitter and I have just resurrected my own blog in my attempt to meet the prescribed mix of social media networking needed to optimize my SEO...my head is spinning.

Thanks to Artfire I am learning a great deal about SEO on their forums and getting the most mileage from social media by participating in their hosted Social Media Boot Camp.

The Starving Artists Mother’s Day Giveaway Event is on now! What are we giving away? Three gift certificates that can be used towards the purchase of jewelry from any of the participating team members! See this post for the complete list of participating shops, and to find out how to enter.

Featuring artisan handmade creations by the Starving Artists jewelry Team, the SATeam members create handcrafted jewelry and beads. More information about our team and its current shop owner members can be found at SATEAM.etsy.com and here on ArtFire.