If you’re in the market for an ecommerce solution, it’s important to have a clear picture of what features you need your ecommerce system to offer. Below is a checklist of some of the features you might want to put on your must-haves list:

Marketing
SEO Optimized – Make sure any ecomm system you are considering creates Title Tags and URLs that are optimized for search engines.

Gift Cards – Do you want to sell gift cards? If so you need a system that sells and accepts them. Customer should be able to buy gift cards in varying amounts, spend the cards in varying amounts and check gift card balances.

Customer Rewards Program – Do you want to offer a customer rewards program? If so make sure your ecommerce system is set up to administer it. That means awarding points and allowing customers to redeem them for specific things.

Social Bookmark Plugins – Want customers to spread your content around the web? Then you’ll need an ecomm site that allows you to insert social bookmarking plugins like Add This

Wish List – If you want customers to be able to create wish lists, you’ll need a system that allows customers to create a wish list, share their wish list and allows others to look up the wish lists of friends and family.

Sale Pricing – If you want customers to see a mark down on an item, you’ll need a system that displays current price and previous price.

Product Feeds – If you want your products in a feed for programs like Google Products, Bing Shopping or Shopzilla you’ll want an ecomm system that can create these feeds for you.

Usability
Site Search – Do you want customers to be able to search your site for products? If so you’ll need a robust search tool. A great search tool allows you to do keyword tagging on your products, accounts for typos and gives you reporting data on what customers searched on your site.

Merchandising – Do you want to add products to multiple categories? Maybe you want to display holiday ornaments in home decor AND gifts under $10.00. You’ll need a system that allows you to create unlimited categories and add products to more than one.

Product Pages
Product Options – Do your items come in varying sizes or colors? If so you’ll need a cart that enables you to display that information to customers. You’ll want customers to have fields to select product color, product size, etc.

Product Photos – You’ll probably want to display several photos of each product, so make sure your system enables multiple product images.

Cross-Sells – Showing related or similar products on product pages and view cart pages can increase average order value, so this may be a feature you’ll want to look for.

Custom Layouts – Online marketers test the heck out of product page layouts to see what helps boost conversions. Don’t get stuck in a system that forces you into one template. You may want to move elements of your pages around and run tests to see which layouts are most effective.

Checkout
Coupons – Do you want to offer coupons? If so what kind? Free shipping? Free shipping within a certain country? 10% off? $10 off? Do you want the coupon to require a minimum spend? Do you want the coupon to only apply to certain items? If so you’ll need a sophisticated coupon tool that allows you to create an accept these types of coupons.

Guest Checkout – A lot of customers find it very annoying to have to create an account to buy things. You may want a system that accepts checkouts without creating an account.

Account Management – Alternately, you may want to allow frequent buyers to create accounts. You’ll want to make sure customers can access their account info to change things also such as email address or billing and shipping info.

Payment Integration – Make sure you pick a cart that integrates with the payment methods you accept.

Cart Persistence – You may want to save the contents of a customer’s cart for them. What if they add items to their cart and come back a few days later to complete their order? It’s best to save their selections for them, so you’ll want a system that does this.

Order Confirmation Emails – Customers expect to see an email confirming their order. Make sure the system you select generates one, and make sure it’s something you can customize.

Gift Options – Do you offer gift wrap or gift notes? If so you’ll want fields on your checkout forms that allow customers to indicate if an item is a gift and include a gift note.

Shipping and Taxes
Sales Tax – Do you charge sales tax? If so you’ll want an ecommerce system that automatically calculates the taxes and adds them to your order totals.

Shipping Options – Do you charge flat rate? Do you charge shipping based on weight or number of items? Do you have different shipping options? Do you charge different rates depending on destination? Shipping rules can be extremely complicated so make sure you select a system that can accommodate your shipping rules. You may also want to have a tool that does shipping calculations on your product pages. Customers like to know what shipping will be before they get to checkout.

Admin Tools
Order Status – Do you give customers a delivery confirmation number? Do you want them to be able to check order status? If so you’ll want a back end tool that allows you to enter order status info and a front end tool that allows customer to look up order status.

Reporting  – Do you want to know your gross sales? Your net sales? Your best sellers? Your busiest day of the week? Your busiest period in the month? An ecommerce tool with reporting information can help you pull this information, so you can more effectively make decisions about your business.

Order Management – Do you need a system that helps you keep track of orders internally? Do you need to use your ecommerce system to keep track of what has shipped, what is being returned, etc. If so a tool that manages order status for you or your staff is essential.

Customer Management/CRM – Do you need a tool to keep track of customer emails, phone calls, feedback, etc? A CRM that’s built into your ecommerce system can help you store and organize this information.

Open Source – Sometimes you just need to get into the guts of your system. Maybe you need a feature that doesn’t exist in any ecommerce system out of the box. For those situations, you’ll want to look for a system that allows you to access and modify the source code.

Inventory Management
Inventory Management – Do you need a system that keeps track of what’s in stock, what’s out and what’s running low? Maybe you want to be alerted when your stock level drops to a certain number. Some ecommerce systems have built in inventory management and can deduct inventory as items are sold or even add inventory as returns are accepted.

Inventory Notices for Customers – A really good system will allow customers to indicate that they want to be notified when an out of stock product comes back to the store. The system will then email them when your inventory is replenished. You may also want to look for an option that alerts cart abandoners when you are about to run out of a product, in case they want to complete their order before the item is no longer available.

Navigating the world of online advertising is tricky; there are so many options and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Two important distinctions to consider are SEM and placement targeted ads. Below is a breakdown of the benefits and drawbacks of these two ad types:

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Although many things fall under the header of “SEM”, I am referring specifically to the  ads that appear through search engines. The program you’re probably most familiar with is Google Adwords. The premise is that your ad appears when people are searching for what you sell. For example, you sell vegan cosmetics. I search for “vegan cosmetics”, your ad appears, I click, I go to your site and I buy.

Pros:

• These ads are typically paid for on a cost-per-click basis. You only pay when you get traffic. If no one clicks, you pay nothing.
• You are getting visitors that are looking for exactly what you sell. In theory, this should yield a good number of purchases if your site is optimized for conversions.
• You can control your costs easily, since you choose what you’re willing to pay per click and what your ad budget is for the day.

Cons:

• This advertising method isn’t for beginners. There’s some technical know-how that’s required. You need to understand phrase matching and broad matching, negative keywords and keyword research. You need to understand click fraud and how to spot it. There are professionals who do just CPC advertising for clients because there’s so much technical know-how involved. You can learn to do your own CPC ads, but be prepared to educate yourself.
• This advertising method doesn’t really provide branding benefits. Your target market probably isn’t seeing your brand name over and over every time they visit their favorite website.

Placement Targeted Ads/Banners:
These are ads that you usually see on your favorite blogs. They tend to be standard sizes like 160×600 pixels. The idea with these ads is that your target market gets frequent exposure to your brand, and this creates brand awareness, which in turn increases traffic and sales.

Pros:

• Your brand is being seen by your target market every day. Even if they do not click today and buy, they will be so aware of your brand that they may seek out your website when they have to buy a holiday gift, etc. These ads can also yield a large number of newsletter sign ups or social media followers, which means you can market to these people over and over now that they’ve expressed an interest in your brand.
• These ads can be less expensive that other CPC ads, if you happen to get a good deal and have an ad that’s generating  a high click-through rate. Sometimes you end up only paying a few cents per click, whereas SEM ads are usually over 10 cents/click.
• These ads are somewhat less complicated than SEM ads;  they do not require tons of technical know-how, although design skills are necessary.

Cons:

• Although some placement targeted ads are CPC (Google has a CPC program for placement targeted ads), they are more often paid on a CPM or flat rate basis; this means you pay whether you get clicks or not.
• Unlike SEM, you may be advertising to people when they aren’t in the market to buy stuff, which means no matter how great your ad/products are, you may not see tons of sales immediately. Some people will make impulses purchases, but a lot of people may take weeks or months to actually come make a purchase.
• You need great design skills — not everyone knows how to design nice looking ads, and if your ad design isn’t up to par, it may not get you any clicks.

So which type of advertising should you do? Personally, I do both, and wouldn’t say that one form is right or wrong.  It’s important to understand what to expect from both so you can plan accordingly.

Co-op advertising, through sites like ishopindie.com, has been a nice middle ground for me because they have the expense of placement targeted ads shared among several businesses, but the benefits of brand visibility and impulse purchases are still there. Since I am able to track all the conversions on my site over time, I can see all the traffic from co-op placements that converts right away, and the visitors who convert weeks or months later.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Tips on Saving the Sale After a Credit Card is Declined
• Top Must-Have Features For Your Ecommerce Site
• Road Reps vs Show Rooms: Which Route Is Best for Your Wholesale Business?
• Tips on Where to Find Sales Reps
• Tips to Build a Social Media Following
• How to Choose the Right Social Media Platform
• How to Create Useful Content for Social Media

Turbo Charge Your Holiday Sales!
I am in the final stages of putting together my Holiday Advertising Co-op. The main co-op site will be IShopIndie.com but all members will be able to feature their items on loungeluxe.com and cutique.com as an added bonus. Both sites have been around for a few years and get lots of organic traffic every day from search engines and links. In addition, membership comes with 12 months of newsletter advertising (monthly newsletters reach 1000s of fans of indie shopping and handmade goods) and 12 months of promotion through Twitter and Facebook. And as always, real time stats on your click-throughs and access to update your listings in real time too!

If you are hoping to get in on this you’ll be in some amazing company, some of our members will be: Shanalogic, Cry Wolf Clothing, WishJewel, Xmittens, Piggy’s Little Shop, and Ex-Boyfriend. We have space for just a few more designers, so if you want in let me know today!

I saw an artisan ask the other day “how can I market my stuff without feeling like a sleazy sales person?” The anxiety of coming off as sleazy or pestering to customers can keep you from marketing your products and services effectively, so below are some surefire ways that keep you from coming off this way.

1. Be There When They Need You
Sometimes people actually want to buy stuff, your best bet at getting money from those people is getting in front of them when they are looking for stuff to buy. Thankfully search engines have made this task easier than ever before. You just have to know how to leverage them. This is why search engine optimization and search engine marketing is extremely important.

Imagine I want to buy organic infant apparel, imagine that’s what you sell. If you’ve done your search marketing job properly I find your brand through organic search results when I search for “organic infant clothes”. I find your Adwords ads when I search for “organic infant shirts”. I find your products when I look for “organic infant sleepwear” on Google Products. You sell what I want and you’ve positioned yourself to let me know about your products. This is one of the top ways online retailers get sales. (Hint: I have written and linked tons of articles on SEO, here’s where you can find them. SEO and SEM can be very tedious and technical but it’s probably one of the most important things you’ll for for your online business.)

2. Get Permission
The great thing about online marketing is that customers can give you permission to market to them. They can opt into your newsletter, they can follow you on Twitter, they can read your blog, they can subscribe to your Youtube channel, they can like you on Facebook. These are all actions they take to indicate that they want to hear from you so take advantage of this.

Of course you can abuse this privilege, so it’s important to follow some guidelines like making sure you sure content you provide is of interest to your customers and making sure you don’t bug them non-stop. This means you don’t email them 10 times a day or post 10 promotions to Facebook about your current clearance sale. That is sleazy and annoying. But the weekly, monthly or bi-monthly email they signed up for is fine. The daily blog post is great. The handful of Tweets about a new creative project, a funny news story or a request for feedback is well within reason. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and try to imagine how you’d react if you saw the same content coming from another company’s newsletter, blog or social media accounts.

3. Be the News/Buzz
There’s a difference between the huge Revlon ad in the middle of Self Magazine and the detailed editorial written in Self about the editor-approved best mascaras, right? You want to be the latter. The former is just advertising, but the latter is a product that’s become news and part of the content. Get your products and services in front of the media. Look for opportunities to generate word of mouth from friends and fans. Institute a customer referral program or sponsor a charitable cause that gives people and press outlets a reason to talk about what you’re up to and generate interest in your company.

SOCIAL MEDIA BLOGGING MEME: Be sure to check out Blacksburg Belle’s post today on how to create useful content in social media.

As small business owners, we sometimes get in the habit of using our social media accounts just to broadcast news about our brands. While social media can be useful for keeping interested parties in the loop, keeping the conversation entirely one-sided means you’re missing out on other ways to interact with your target markets. So who should you be talking to on social media and how should you engage them:

1. Customers
People who might or have purchased your products are an important audience and you don’t want them to feel like all you do is sell to them. You can use social media to let customers see what goes on behind the scenes, share content both you and your customers might find interesting, engage customers in shaping your product line. Here are a few examples of how you might do some of this:

• A clothing designer shares an inspiration board from a recent product design on her blog. She then posts a note on Twitter and Facebook letting customers know about this new entry and invites them to give feedback. She also shares her inspiration board on Flickr, so Flickr users can provide feedback there.

• A jewelry designer, who focuses on bridal jewelry, blogs about an article discussing the merits of big and small weddings from an online wedding magazine, and then asks her customers which they plan to have and why.

• A skincare company is working on coming up with new fall fragrances, the company owner asks fans on Twitter to tell her what scents remind them of fall.

All of these actions invite the customers to get to know the creators behind the brands and even let the customers take part in shaping the brands.

2. Peers
Although peers are not a primary audience for your social media efforts, there can be some advantages to networking with peers via social media. You might want to engage fellow artisans or small business owners to engage in some cross-promotion or collaborations.  Here are some examples of how this could be done:

• An illustrator who knows a t-shirt maker via a message board, contacts the t-shirt maker via private message to ask if the printer would like to print some of her drawings on her t-shirts.

• A handbag designer follows and is followed by artisans that design jewelry and shoes on Twitter. She sends a message using the @ symbol to these fellow business owners to ask them if they’d like to share the cost of an ad in a magazine.

• An invitation designer who sells wedding invitations asks a wedding photographer, a florist and a jewelry designer to take part in a blogging meme about winter wedding ideas. As each company posts their articles, they link to each others’ websites.

3. Media, Sales Reps, Etc.
Another audience to consider in social media are professionals who might in some way help your business. This could be press, well-connected sales reps, a buyer for a retail chain you’d like to get a wholesale account from. Social media is a great way to get on their radar. Some examples of how this might work:

• A catnip toy designer Googles the names of some writers who work for Cat Fancy. She sees that a few of them have Twitter accounts and follows them and sends a hello saying “I liked your article in Cat Fancy. I look forward to reading about your upcoming articles.” Now they’re aware of her and will hopefully follow her back. Even if they do not, she can use Twitter to see if they mention what articles they have coming up so she can pitch them her products.

• A home decor maker meets a sales rep at a trade show. She decides to look her up on Linked In after the show and chat with her about possibly representing her line.

Today’s post is part of a series of posts on social media. For the next week and a half, fellow bloggers will be sharing secrets to using social media for small business success. You can follow along and get more details on the series here. Participating bloggers include: Blacksburg Belle, The Artists’ House, Big Thinking for Small Businesses, heartmade, Miss Malaprop, Madeline Bea, Imaginative Bloom, and Jessica Swift.

Small businesses are operated by small staffs, maybe even a staff of one. That’s why it’s important to be insanely efficient with your time. A few months ago I wrote about 5 common time sinks for small business owners, and today I have 5 more tips on tweaks you can make to your current routine to get even more efficient.

1. Your PR Strategy:
Remove media outlets that aren’t a match for your work from your media list. If you’ve got a media contact you’ve pitched repeatedly over time and they ignore your pitches or constantly reject your work, get them off your list. Instead use that time to seek out and build relationships with media contacts who will give you press.

2. Your Social Media Strategy:
While networking with peers is fun and can sometimes lead to useful opportunities, don’t make fellow business owners the focus of your social media efforts, unless your target market is your peers. Instead use your Facebook profile, YouTube account, Twitter profile, etc. to generate interest from your target market. Connect with the kind of people who would buy your products or services. Connect with media contacts who would give you press. If you’re going to connect with peers, do it in a way that has an end goal in mind like cross-promotion or collaboration. Amassing thousands of other business owners as friends/fans/followers is probably not the best route to increasing sales unless you’re selling a B2B product or service.

3. Your Content Creation Strategy:
Don’t create blog posts, Tweets and Facebook updates that are all about you. Customers don’t want to read a constant stream of “Just listed  this new item on Etsy.” Instead create content that fits in with your SEO strategy AND piques the interest of your target market.

4.Your Ecommerce System:
Don’t spend all your time wrestling with a slow or inefficient method of getting your products posted to your website or online shop. If your goal is to sell a lot of product, get an ecommerce system that’s easy to manage and doesn’t take a lot of time. In my case, we have over 1000 unique products on our website. If I tried to list all of that on Etsy I’d never have time to do anything else! That’s why I use an ecommerce system that offers great efficiency when it comes to product management. I can post new products to my website with 1 click and easily get reporting information on sales data. I don’t spend time pouring over excel spreadsheets or trying to keep track of order status in a manual way, my ecommerce system does it all for me. (Hint: Looking for a new ecommerce system? One of my favorite blogs has reviewed hundreds of them! You can see those reviews here.)

5. Your Time Management System:
Lose the post it notes and myriad of to do lists you may be storing on your computer or desktop. These types of lists are difficult to keep track of and don’t allow you to truly organize. Instead find a task management system that can store all of your to-dos and allow you to easily sort, update, delegate, prioritize and expound upon all of your tasks.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Etsy Storque Asks: What’s Your Point of Difference – how are you different than your competitors?
• 6 Ways to Tackle the Promo Code Problem
• How to Create a Reveal Tab on Facebook – ever wanted to share a special coupon code or ebook download with Facebook fans only? Learn how to do it with a reveal tab.
• Ittybiz Reveals Tips on How To Get Your Newsletter Read by Subscribers
• Depending on Etsy to Market Your Shop? DON’T!
• 3 Twitter Tools for Small Business Ecommerce Sites
• 3 Reasons Why Articles May Not be Your Best Web Content Strategy
• Performance Metrics for Ecommerce Websites
• Grab More Rankings Wtih Google’s Branded Search Results
• The Impact of Google Instant on Ecommerce Websites
• 40 Tips on Crafting SEO Friendly Title Tags
• Get Inspired By These Minimalist Business Card Designs

On a forum I read, a fellow indie biz blogger said blogging is not that great for SEO. She said this in the context of asking small business owners WHY they blog. It’s an important question to think about, but the answer certainly can be SEO. The truth is a blog can be great for SEO, it depends on how you use it. So today’s post is about how to make your blog part of your SEO strategy.

1. Research
To really make your blog great for SEO, you’re going to want to do some keyword research. Let’s imagine I sell stationery, and I do a lot of business with wedding invitations. The first thing I want to do is hit up Google’s keyword tool and plug in “wedding invitations”. When I do this I immediately get two awesome things: ideas for blog posts AND keywords people in the market for wedding invitations use when they are shopping. Some of the phrases I get are:
- wedding invitation wording
- beach wedding invitations
- wedding invitation designs

I got lots of others, but we’ll just go with those 3 for now. They make for great blog post ideas and they are keywords we want to capture to attract customers from the web.

2. Come Up With a Plan
Now that I have ideas for phrases I want to optimize for, and ideas for posts, I want to come up with an editorial calendar for my blog that will incorporate those keywords. I also want to think about how I’ll promote my posts so I can get as much mileage from them as possible.

Let’s say I decide I’ll do one post called “Wedding Invitation Wording: 10 Great Examples from Traditional to Humorous” Then I write a post sharing examples of wedding invitation wording. My next course of action would be to find a few places to get links to this post. Maybe I’ll see if people are looking for ideas for wedding invite wording on Yahoo Answers or a message board about weddings. Hopefully I’ve networked with other people in the business like wedding photographers or florists and maybe they have blogs too. I can ask them to link my post in one of their posts.

I’ll want to plan posts around each of the phrases I want to optimize for just like I’ve described above. Maybe I’d write a post about “Beach Wedding Invitations and 5 Other Must Haves for the Perfect Beach Wedding” or “Wedding Invitations Design Inspiration Boards” and then I’d post some inspiration boards I used when designing my invitations. This gives customers eye candy, a look behind the scenes AND optimizes for my keywords. Again, I’ll want to work on getting links to my posts so I can get as much use from them as possible.

3. Balance
Blogs can be powerful SEO vehicles, and you’ll want to work target key phrases into your posts, but make sure your posts don’t come off as too calculated. If your post is clearly written for search bots and has no personality, search engines might find you, but people won’t want to read what you wrote. Not every single post has to be about SEO, but some of them certainly should be.

Every time you update your blog, you’re creating another page for search engines to index and more reasons for them to send traffic to your website. So every time you post to your blog, you’re essentially buying a ticket to the search engine lottery. Even if each ticket isn’t a million dollar winner, a ticket that scores you a dollar here and five dollars there eventually adds up to a pretty big win.

4. Maintain
Stick to a blogging schedule, even if it’s just two or three posts per week. This will give existing fans a reason to check your blog regularly and continue to create new fodder for the search engines.

Use a tool like WordPress so you can install your blog ON YOUR OWN DOMAIN. This is important because it makes your domain more credible with search engines and also helps keep prospective customers on your website. (Using a hosted solution like Blogger or Tumblr is okay, but you’re doing SEO work for a domain you don’t own or control, which is less than ideal.)

Make sure the blogging software you use is SEO compliant. This means your blog uses url names, h1 tags and title tags that incorporate your blog post name. Also be sure to link to your own posts when appropriate, doing this still counts as “links” as far as search engines are concerned.

Still confused by SEO? Here’s a beginner’s guide that explains the basics.

The easiest-to-market products are those that solve a problem for customers. That sounds like BS lofty marketing speak, and also sounds like something that may not apply to what you sell. So let me give you concrete examples of how this might apply to you:

1. You sell bracelets. Many people can’t find bracelets that fit just right. I’m on the petite side and most bracelets fall right off of my wrists and hands, thus I don’t own many bracelets. Conversely, a plus sized consumer might find most bracelets are too small. So there’s your problem: bracelets have fit issues. You can solve the problem by selling a product with a custom fit or maybe in different sizes.

2. You sell handbags. I hate when my lipstick opens up in my bag and gets all over my bag. You can solve this problem by designing a bag that has a built in cosmetics compartment that’s stain-proof and easy to clean.

3. You sell dresses. I never know if something is going to fit me and I hate to pay for shipping both ways just to try something on. You solve the problem by offering free shipping and free returns. You absorb the cost by raising your product prices. As a consumer, I don’t mind because it’s such a huge convenience to be able to try on clothing for free. (Hint: this is what Zappos does and it’s very successful for them.)

Alright, now that we’re clear on how you as a crafty business owner might solve a problem for a customer, let’s move on to how you can figure out what your USP is. A USP, by the way, is a unique selling proposition. It’s the thing that makes your business different/better than your competitors.

An artisan might say “well my products are prettier,” but this is too subjective and may not be enough of a competitive edge. There are lots of pretty products out there, the business person who figures out how to solve a problem is the one who will make the most money.

To figure out if your business solves a problem…

1. Make a list
Make a list of all the selling points for your product/brand. Do you offer a large range of sizes? Do you have the best prices? Do you offer a ton of color choices? Do you offer free shipping? Do you have a generous return policy? Do your products have a special feature that saves time or offers convenience?

Make a list of every little thing you can think of that serves as a selling point for your brand. (Note: while I said pretty isn’t a selling point, it might be one if you sell a product that normally isn’t pretty like orthopedic footwear or maternity underwear. If you sell jewelry or handbags or dresses or paintings, pretty is a given, don’t put that on your list.)

2. Scope the competition
Find other brands that sell in your niche and see if they have any of the same features and benefits. Any time you find competitors who share the same selling points, cross that item off your list.

Note: you’ll only want to cross things off if competitors share some of the same combinations that you offer. For example, a competitor might have low prices, but they may charge a ton for shipping to make up for it. You’ll want to really carefully evaluate what your competitors offer to see if their advantages are truly the same as your own.

3. Define
Once you’ve figured out what you truly have to offer that other brands do not, you need to showcase this offering to customers. If your advantage is that you have the most size options, say this on your website and in your marketing copy. If your advantage is that you have the most generous return policy, highlight this throughout your marketing copy in places like shopping cart, check out and product pages.

What if I can’t find a USP?
If you can’t find a USP, you may be in trouble. If your sales are slow and you feel like your business is going nowhere, your lack of USP may be part of the problem. Re-think how you can change your products, store policies, etc. to give yourself a competitive edge.

If you’re not sure what your USP should be, talk to customers or prospective customers. Try to figure out what problems they have when they try to buy the kind of product you sell. Then think about what you can change to address those problems.

Today Megan at Craft MBA pointed out a video series that shows artisans doing boring repetitive tasks. The videos were produced by crafters in an attempt to explain to the craft-buying public why handmade products can’t be offered at Wal-Mart prices. Megan wrote about how this marketing message rubbed her the wrong way and I agree, but this post is about why.

Whining that your job is hard so you should get paid more is still whining. No one likes whiners. But the bigger problem here, is that this marketing message is about what customers should do for YOU. You (customer) should pay ME (artist) more because my job is hard.

Marketing messages are not about you, they are about the customer. Your focus needs to be on what benefits your product gives the customer. They don’t care if it took you 1000 hours to make or cost $1000 in materials. They just want to know what’s in it for them.

Take for example the new Nissan Leaf ads. They depict a polar bear watching his icy home melt. The bear treks across the ocean and into a suburban neighborhood where he finds a Nissan Leaf owner, and gives him a hug, for driving an eco-friendly car that’s helping preserve his habitat. Who is the protagonist in this narrative? It’s not Nissan, it’s the consumer, it’s the car owner. The message is clear, buy this car so YOU can feel like a hero to the planet. This car is worth $30,000, because it’s a small price to pay to get to be a hero.

Imagine if Nissan’s ad were all about the years of R&D their researchers had to do to design the car. Imagine if the ad were all about how expensive it is to make a Leaf. Would that make you want the car? Probably not. You don’t care. All you care about is what will the car do for you.

Good marketing appeals to the customer’s ego, fears, hopes, sense of self. A better approach to getting customers to buy handmade might include appealing to:

- Their needs to feel like a non-conformist or trend setter

- Their desire to have something customized and upscale

- Their sense of patriotism

- Their concern for the environment

The “handmade is hard work and I don’t get health insurance” message makes artisans come off like panhandlers trying to elicit sympathy. Think about how you feel when someone in rags asks you for spare change. You might have sympathy for them, but mostly you feel put out and uncomfortable. Do you want your marketing to make your customer feel like a star or do you want them to feel like they want to get away from you as fast as possible?