I have just had my 100th (and 101st) sale on Folksy today and while I have a long way to go before I have made my first million or indeed made enough to craft as a job rather than a hobby, I thought these facts might be of interest to those struggling on Folksy.
I opened my shop in January 2013 and had my first sale on Feb 09 2013. Up until May this year I had listed things in my shop and occasionally added a link to my shop on my Facebook page but other than that I just let things go their own way generally trying to promote my makes on Facebook. Then in May I decided Facebook wasnāt really working for me and decided to spend much more time actively promoting my shop using these forums, adding links to Facebook, using pinterest and twitter and other social media occasionally and generally trying to promote folksy to everyone I knew.
These are the statistics of those first 100 sales
From Jan 2013- May 2014 (16 months) - no active promotion - 30 sales
From May 2014 - present (5.5months) - active promotion - 71 sales
Admittedly I have changed the focus of my shop recently but I really do feel that the active promotion is the main driving force for the sales I have had. So in summary all I can say is PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE - it does work. The sales fairy is out there but she needs encouragement to visit you.
I love Folksy and will continue to work hard to promote my shop. I have a shop on the other side and although I have had a few sales there I donāt do enough promotion there to make it work the same (mainly because Im not sure how their forums work!) So now Iām off to do a bit more promotion and make a few more items for my shop!
Iāve had about 6 weeks where I have done no promotion due to the house move and building the new bunny housing, but have had a wee trickle of sales. Iām hoping to have the time for much more promotion by the weekend. Iām on 671 sales and am aiming high and hoping to hit 800 by Christmas
This is great to hear. Thanks for sharing, it is very encouraging
Although I have had a little encouragement already today as I was featured in a trend list (thanks Folksy!) itās still good to see hard work paying off.
Thatās great news. Congratulations and well done!
Thank you for being generous enough to share your ideas and āsecretsā with us. I wish you lots more success!
Very well done - at 3 sales, 100 seems very far off to me! But the thrill of each is the same! Same here, for the first 9 months I did no promotion myself and had very few views. Then I started to interact with the forums, and my views doubled. Iāve just set up a facebook page and am trying to make that an interesting place to visit, and have my fingers crossed for more success.
I proote on FB and Twitter. I think Ive had 1 sale from each place over the years. im clearly not promoting in the right places.
Well done Roz, great to hear of all your sales.
Well done. I had 2 sales yesterday within half an hour of our Moon and Stars Bunting appearing in the Folksy newsletter! Wish we could be in there all the time!!!
Fabulous news on the sale and great advice - I have never done much promotion for my Folksy shop hence just the 1 sale always done it for the āotherā shop - but I plan to use promote my Folksy shop a lot more - I am with you with Facebook doesnāt do much for me and feel promotion is better in the forums - hope you get many more sales
