Internet Advertising for Small Stores

Since I started LovetheLimelight.com, I’ve been operating on a shoestring budget. The only money I’ve spent has been on supplies and inventory and Web hosting. The rest of it-site design, logos, marketing, picture taking, even most of the jewelry making, it’s all been me. I love it, it’s an amazing experience. So I’m passing on a bit of my knowledge today.

Small business advertising does not have to be costly. In fact, you can do it without spending any money for a while if you have the time to do some viral marketing on your own.

I started off by creating a group on Facebook for my site and inviting all my friends. I encouraged them to invite their friends too. Not a fan of the new facebook, by the way. I’m just anti-change and when you spend 10 minutes trying to find your friend’s wall-to-wall with another person, you’d be too.

Next, I created “passcards” using the business card feature in my word processor (size 2×3.5) and inserting my logo, site name and slogan. I hesitate to call them business cards because that sounds really official and I like the independent sound of “passcards”. I printed some off on cardstock paper and cut them up to pass out to people and to give my friends to pass out as well. I uploaded the document to my server and implored my friends who had joined the Facebook group to print and pass them out as well. (if you want to help, click HERE)

I also went on a major search one day for free online classified directories, and posted either individual items for sale on my site or general summary ads of my site (like craigslist, backpage, etc). There are so many FREE directories out there that you should never pay for a classified ad. It’s just not worth it. Craigslist is by far the biggest classifieds site, but they do have restrictions (more about that in a later post). Don’t underestimate new-looking classifieds sites with few postings either, the fewer posting there are, the more exposure your ads get. Yes, the traffic may not be great, but it’s free, and every link to your site helps.

Another area I tapped into is the selling communities of Livejournal. This is harder to understand unless you’re already familiar with Livejournal communities. Create a good (short!) post with linked photos of products you offer (use an lj cut for more than one photo to be polite) and blanket post to selling communities. check Wants communities too and post if you sell something people are looking for. I don’t recommend this until you’ve been a personal user of LJ for a while though, it gets confusing. And don’t forget to make sure your journal (either personal or created for your business) has plenty of information about your site.

Buying adspace, whether through google ads, facebook ads or link exchanges is also an option, but I don’t recommend it if you’re on a budget. They charge you per click, which means that you’re basically penalized every time someone clicks on your ad, even if they accidentally clicked on it and have no intention of buying from your site. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a good deal to me. No, what I recommend is ProjectWonderful.com, which charges you by the day, not by how many people click on the ad. It makes more sense, and since it’s populated by independent sites (not corporations), you can get ads for pennies a day. I just started it, so I’ll let you know how my ads do.

If you use ProjectWonderful.com, you’ll have to create a banner ad ahead of time with certain size parameters, so get started! You have to entice people to click, so post pictures of your most popular items with a bright background.
Contact me if you want an animated GIF image designed for you. After hours of trying to figure it out and eventually succeeding, I consider myself quite proficient and I won’t charge you $100 an hour! (see my banner ads HERE as an example)

The next big idea is link exchanges with other, similar sites. For instance, I recently joined Kawaii Exchange and The Kawaii Directory. Contact other sites you like that are in your same genre and offer to exchange links, which means you post the link to their site on your Links or About Us page (just recommended places, you can post them anywhere easily accessible on your site) and they post the link to your site on theirs.

And don’t forget, if you sell wearable stuff, WEAR IT! I get business all the time when I wear my handcrafted earrings, then give a passcard to people who ask about them.

This is a lot to take in, so I’ll end the tutorial here and elaborate on some of the finer points later. Good luck!

~Lindsey
LovetheLimelight.com

Here I Am!

The first blog post is always so awkward, I never know how to start, do I say, Hi, I’m so-and-so, or do I just launch into a description of my day? Well I still don’t know, but I think I’m going to start off with a bit about what this blog is, since I guess I’ve already technically started the post.

This is the official blog for LovetheLimelight.com, which is an online webstore run by me, Lindsey, and only me for the moment. I do all the web updating (and code writing, patting myself on the back there, it’s a hard thing to jump into and learn on the fly!), marketing, content writing, product descriptions, picture taking, and on top of that, I make a lot of the things I sell.

I’m not a very good blog writer. I assume I’ll get better as I do more, but I tend to jump around a lot, so sometimes I’m kinda hard to follow. I’ll back up a bit further.  My aunt, my mom and I have been making jewelry (mainly necklaces for them, mainly earrings for me) for several years. It started off as me messing around with some seed beads I found in a shoebox in my room, and my aunt dusting off some beads and books from her youth and letting me play around with them. Then she got involved. Then my mom. I was in high school then. I’m 21 now and between the 3 of us we have thousands of beads and hundreds of jewelry pieces have been made along the way. When I started college, I didn’t have space in my room for my beads so I left them at home and fell behind, skill-wise, compared to my mom and aunt. They started making a lot, and started selling them to friends and craft shows.

I’m a communication major, so I took a web design class and decided that I ought to do my part in our little side business/hobby and start a website so we could tap into a greater audience. It took a long time to actually get around to doing it, and all I really managed to do for a long time was pick out a name and buy the domain (just in case, you know, so someone wouldn’t steal it!). It wasn’t until a few months ago when I lost my job and a friend told me I should look at this as an opportunity that I decided to take the plunge. Since I wanted to also sell other things I found and purchased at great deals, I decided to make it an accessories boutique, not just a jewelry store. I had my last paycheck still and decided I had x dollars that needed to pay my bills, which left me y dollars to invest in my new business, so I hopped on board.

Starting up a website isn’t easy! I used to think I was pretty internet savvy, and I’ve worked as a web admin for several websites, but I knew NOTHING about starting from scratch with hosting, ftp servers and all of that crap. It took days of calling up my provider and searching google before the lightbulb finally started flickering on in my head. Since I learned html on  WYSIWYG editors (like dreamweaver), I built a basic html site using paypal shopping cart links for the time being. At least I was getting my site together, even if it was pretty small. I was proud of my little accomplishment though, it was a great moment for me when I hit that transfer button on my ftp server, typed lovethelimelight.com into firefox, and watched my site emerge. It was always temporary though, as I knew I’d have to make a real store eventually with a shopping cart and everything. I had sifted through a lot of wholesalers when buying inventory, and I’d scored good deals on accessories and sunglasses, but money’s money and I was running low, so I knew whatever I shopping cart I chose, it’d better be free. Enter open-source! I was going to use zencart at first, but for some reason (who knows what I was thinking at 2am) went with oscommerce instead. I had to switch my host server from windows to linux, learned what an sql database is (well, learned that it exists, I’m still not really clear what it DOES) and then had to figure out what on earth I was supposed to do with my downloaded folder full of text-only php files. Long story short, and many tears of frustration and exhaustion later, I finally started figuring out how oscommerce works. I started adding mods (community contributions that add a new feature to the site) and delving into the php files to add them, thus learning what all the code means. I’m still a long way from “expert” but it’s getting really fun as I learn more about what I’m doing. I’ll never forget that first time where I managed to read a piece of code successfully and edit out a mistake from a contribution by myself without following a specific set of instructions, and it worked! It was an awesome feeling.

It took a long time to also transform my site into something that didn’t scream oscommerce template. I changed the colors, messed around with placement of things, and created my own logo (I created all my own logos, buttons, backgrounds and icons as well. Just call me renaissance girl). I looked at other sites like mine too that were run by girls with handmade products and took notes. Theirs were designed by professionals though, so it was a little hard for me to think I could ever get a site looking like that. I spent a long night the other day updating my css file and finding fun, girly colors for my site. I designed a background using the shape maker and paint bucket tool in photoshop and then spent another few hours trying to implement it all. I got an awesome, fresh and colorful site though so it was definitely worth it. It’s still not as top notch as the other sites I saw, but I definitely feel like it’s coming close.

Okay this was a really long first post so I’ll stop now. Congratulations if you made it all the way through!
~Lindsey
LovetheLimelight.com