A Better Way to Market Your Handmade Jewelry?

Online selling can be a fantastic way to market your handmade jewelry! It allows you to reach a national market as well as an international one. Online sales of all types of goods are increasing on a yearly basis as more and more people discover the convenience of internet shopping.

The conventional way of marketing jewelry is to put up a website with a shopping cart and wait for the buyers to come flocking to your site. There's only one problem. Not enough people show up! With the competition in the jewelry world, it's not surprising that it can be difficult to attract traffic to a stand alone website.

Some jewelry designers have chosen to market their handmade creations on Ebay, which can be a viable market, although it's difficult to get your asking price in an environment where many people are searching for bargains and with the recent fee increases initiated by Ebay, it's becoming more and more difficult to make a decent profit on Ebay.

Fortunately, there's an affordable alternative. You can sell your jewelry through an online gallery. The advantages to selling through a gallery are:

1. The online gallery will promote the site by getting high placement with the search engines and by direct advertising. This takes some of the burden off of you. You can concentrate on producing your jewelry.

2. Buyers who come to an online gallery are generally motivated buyers. They are looking for a special gift or a unique piece of jewelry or art for themselves. You don't have to sell them on what you have to offer as they're already in a buying mood.

3. Exhibiting in an online gallery gives you credibility. When buyers see you have a presence in an online art gallery, they think of you as being a true artist rather than just another online store.

4. When you sell your jewelry in an online gallery, generally, payment processing is handled by the gallery. There may not be a need to get credit card privledges which can be a hassle as well as an additional expense.

5. You can market your online gallery at craft shows and home parties by including the address on receipts, business cards, flyers etc. You can even send out a regular newsletter that highlights new additions to your gallery.

Even though the online gallery setting can help to boost sales of your handmade jewelry by bringing motivated buyers to your listings, I would still recommend that you do some promotion of your own as there are lots of other jewelry sellers competing for the buyer's attention.

The best way to attract traffic to your listings is to optimize the keywords you use in in your titles and descriptions. You want to use SPECIFIC terms that people might search for when looking for a particular type of jewelry. The more focused and specific, the better. For example, in your title, you wouldn't simply say "silver necklace". You'd want to say "Onyx & Sterling Silver Semiprecious Stone Necklace". This would allow you to pick up buyers looking for onyx, silver, and semiprecious necklaces. The more focused you can be with your keywords, the more motivated traffic you'll draw to your listings.

There are lots of other ways to promote an online gallery including free classified sites such as Craig's List and US Free Ads. These are two of the higher traffic sites that really do get results. You can write articles on how to pick or care for jewelry and publish them with a link to your online gallery. Ezine artles and Go Articles are two excellent sites for this. I'll be giving you more ways to market your online gallery and more in depth explanations of the above techniques in the future.

If you're interested in setting up an online gallery risk free with a 14 day free trial, click here. I've had some good reports from other jewelry sellers who have done well on this site.

We'll talk more about increasing your online jewelry sales soon! Thanks for reading. :-)

Kristie