3.01.2006
I swear, one of these days i promise i will post about something other than Alicia's blog. But her recent post really made me renew my interest in supporting indie artists. two of my business ventures are both primarily to help indie businesses. tonight, i really want to talk about PR for businesses. in Alicia's post she talks about how many crafters go out of business because so many people look at their work, but never purchase. The question is, why do some businesses make it, and others dont? I obviously can not answer this, but I can say that i think that an important aspect of running a handmade business is to expose your work to people who dont make things.
As a crafter, i know a lot of times i shop around online or in the stores, and i never buy anything. If i do find something that i love, i often times thing, "i can make that!" and being my poor self, decide that at some point in my busy life i will set aside the time to learn how to make my object of lust. Of course i wont! Anyways, here a couple of ways that you can expose your website to people outside of the crafty world.
The first is SeekIndie. This is one of my projects. Its run by myself and 2 other indie crafters. We are trying to gain exposure for the indie world and crafters everywhere. It started a couple of months ago, with our goal to get some PR for valentines day sales. We got the idea on Monday, and on Friday the contest started. Hehe. Our idea was to have each of the business donate one item, and then each would hide a graphic within their website. People who want to enter into the contest have to find 5 of the graphics. During the couple weeks of the contest, we had 9000 hits and nearly 400 entries. Really amazing!
Today we just started the registration process for the next round. It lasts until march 24th. The contest runs from April 17th until May 1st. Our theme is "April showers bring may flowers." Fun!
For more info on seekindie:
www.seekindie.com
And this is directly to the business info: Business Info
It is currently being organized by 3 indie designers; myself, Nicole, www.pinklovesbrown.com and Jeaneen, www.yattabags.com . I personally feel that there are so many people that give up on their crafty dreams because of lack of sales. I hate seeing that, because there are so many talented people in the world. Everyone deserves a chance. I hope that seekindie can help make all indie businesses stronger.
Lili at 10:37 PM