In my last post I talked about starting up a passive revenue stream. I decided on Etsy as my first foray into this realm of potential new stream of income. This began with creating multiple designs for digital printables which I uploaded to my shop on Etsy and are now available for downloading. By having digital downloads, they will always be there for customers. I don’t have to continually create new products like I would with original artwork. This fit in perfectly with the idea of a passive income stream. Etsy would do the work for me once I created the artwork and uploaded it.
Today I wanted to discuss what I’ve been learning about promoting on social media. This is something that I never thought I would be getting into, but it is really REALLY useful for bringing in viewers, fans, and better yet, potential customers! I watched many youtube videos and read many blog posts online to figure out the best strategy for my shop in particular. I probably over-researched it, but I really wanted to do it right. I went with Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter as my go-to social media trio.
Facebook is something I’ve always used so that was easy to start up. I just started up a new page via my personal Facebook page. Facebook makes that pretty easy. My shop’s Facebook page even has a shop now button connected to my Etsy page. Pretty slick. I use that to update people on new products, blog posts, and so on.
Pinterest was a little different. What I found out from a lot of reading and watching videos was that I should start off by building my boards first. I needed to get plenty of pins up first before I started to follow others. Otherwise I wouldn’t have a reason for them to follow me back. Plus, I have pins that are connected to items in my shop within those boards which brings in potential new viewers and customers too. I’ve only just started following people after taking a good amount of time building strategic boards.
Twitter is another unique animal. It’s kind of a hub where I show off new stuff on my other social media as well as my shop. And you have to make sure you don’t under tweet or over tweet. If you under tweet, you’ll be ignored and lose followers. If you over tweet, you’re spamming and you’ll lose followers then too. Mind you, I’m being more picky as a business than I would be if it were just a personal twitter account. Being that I want to keep my viewers/fans/customers happy, I’m more careful with it. If I were just being me with my artwork on there, I would be more relaxed. But I’m all new to this, so we’ll see how my style of tweeting works out.
The other thing I wanted to briefly talk about was creating physical products from my Etsy artwork. I looked at many different sites out there. I started out with cafe press.com as I potential outlet for products. It’s a site I’m familiar as I used them years ago. But I wanted to look around and see what else was out there. I came across society6.com and started a shop there. I really liked how they looked. They have a very high quality look and feel to their site and products. It’s very artist-friendly. They really get behind their artists and they have great customer service.
I also got there right when they rolled out a new art uploading system. Mind you, they’re still working out a few bugs, but overall it’s pretty slick. I will say that it is up to you to promote your art and products. That’s not really what they do. But they do offer discounts that you can mention to you followers and link them back to it.
An example of one of my products on my Society6 shop page!
In my next post, I’ll be going over some of the things I learned along the way while working on my Etsy and my Society6 shops.
Stay tuned!
Josh Hagen 
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