free marketing

Now that you have your site up and running it's time to advertise yourself! Let's start with the free marketing options that are out there! The great thing about most of them is that they are all connected and you can often post on one medium and have it show up on multiple sites. 

Some of the major free marketing websites:

FACEBOOK - www.facebook.com - on facebook you can create a separate page for your business. It is important to keep your personal life and your work life separate. You can use the same image as your banner for your "cover photo" and such. It's a good idea to keep it looking consistent with your website. You can even add things like "shop", "pinterest", etc to your facebook page to easily navigate to your shop. 

Example:

Blogger - www.blogger.com - blogger is a website powered by google that allows you to have your own blog. Having your own blog is a great way to advertise yourself. Depending on what you sell will depict what kinds of things you should post about. Make sure it's always related to your product. So if you make clothing you can have "upcoming stock", "just in", "editorial shoots", "how it's made", etc. 

Example:

Tumblr - www.tumblr.com - If you'd rather just post pictures with very little wording this is another great blogging site. You can also put a link to your website / shop site with all of your work so when people see it or re-post is they can always know where it came from!

Twitter - www.twitter.com - Twitter is a site devoted to updating statuses basically. So it's words only but you can post links to photos or web pages. Twitter is a great social networking site that helps you connect with like minded people as well as customers. This is where you can tell people about your upcoming sales, you new products, or your future plans for the shop!

Instagram - www.instagram.com - most people use this as an app on their phone. You can take pictures of the things you are doing and post them on your account. You can then write a little description and hashtag it with related words to find more followers. 
Example:

Pinterest - www.pinterest.com - this is a site full of images of anything and everything. You build folders called "boards" and pin images to it. In this regard you can post the images from your store with links to your shop when they click on the image. Then hopefully you'll get you image re-pinned and it will start to float around the internet! 

An important key to using all of these sites is being part of the community. You can't just start one of these sites and expect to have a million followers. You must post on other people's blogs, or posts. You must start following them yourself and show that you are interested in what other people are doing as well. 

Now there are many other useful free marketing sites but these are the most popular ones currently. I will go through these one by one on how to actually set them up and use them to their fullest potential! :)