We’re out there telling the Ponoko story to online shoppers, particularly via shopping blogs, media and retailers.

So here’s what to do if you get contacted by them:

Contact by shoppers
One thing to remember is to reply to shoppers when they make contact with you. Sounds simple, but trust me, non reply happens more often than you might think! One way to encourage yourself to reply is to realize that the person contacting you may be a buyer for a very large retailer, and they’re testing you out.

Another thing to do is to save their contact details so you can contact them at other times into the future. We’ll talk more about this in a later post. But for now, simply save them all on one place. This list is gold for you.

Contact by shopping blogs / media
Now if shopping blogs and media contact you, they are likely to want to do something special to introduce you to their audience. They may ask for a free sample, a special deal or something like that. One of the easier things to do is to offer free shipping. But other things are possible too - just contact us if you want to talk through some options.

Contact by retailers
They’ll want to buy your product for at least half the price you are selling it at retail. Of course this will be tough going for many of you, so contact us and let’s talk about some wholesale pricing options and how we can make this work with the most ease for you and, importantly, the retailer.

Anyhow, the key thing to remember is that we’re here to support you get your creativity out there and up there. We’re super incentivized to support you in all sorts of ways. So remember to drop us a line at any time and we’ll work stuff out with you!

And if you are interested in getting more people to buy from you, you’ll want to sign up to hear about the new service going live in a few weeks.

The evolution of selling stuff goes kinda like this - Step one: Design and make cool stuff. Step two: Get people to your Showroom. Step 3: Convince them to buy.

We’ve started talking about steps one and two in the past - but what about #3?

Well, one important aspect of this is creating trust. And this can be tough, particularly with a new product.

So here’s 4 ways you can be on the front foot to create trust in your great product:

1) Get product reviews - make sure you get your existing customers to post reviews about your product - there’s absolutely nothing better than this.

2) Show it in action with real people - it’s tough to buy something unique from a few online photos, so a link from your Showroom to a video showing it in context will be a big help.

3) Guarantee it - make it crystal clear you stand behind your product by offering a full refund if things don’t work out.

4) Describe your product fully - tell people about the 101 prototypes you made to get it just right for them!

HOW TO GET PRODUCT REVIEWS
Because this is your #1 way to create trust online, we’ve made it darned easy for you to do!

Just email your customers and ask them to write a review in the box at the bottom of your product page.

You can check out an example at the bottom of the page here.

Let us know how you get on - and feel free to leave comments below to discuss other ways to build trust online.

In my last couple of blog posts we talked about getting more customers to your Showroom.

Today let’s give you some ideas on how to give you more time to create, save your customers some cash and cut down on carbon emissions.

To do this you need to setup your Showroom so your products are made and shipped direct from Ponoko to your customers.

To start off, check out a really good example of a Showroom set up to ship a product direct from Ponoko.

You’ll see it has a number of examples of shipping costs (John continues to add more when buyers in specific locations ask him to). It also sets the expectation that the buyer will be receiving something direct from Ponoko (in the video it shows the buyer will need to pull the protective tape off the material, and self assemble).

To see how it works (what the buyer pays and what you get paid) I recommend you click the green ‘Buy’ button in the example and follow it through to the point you need to put in your CC (no need to make a purchase).

What you’ll see is how the money flows
FIRST #1 - You get paid by your customer the amount you advertise (which is the sum of the product cost in the green color PLUS the shipping cost you advertise below this);

THEN #2 - You pay us the amount quoted in a separate transaction within your MyPonoko account (which is the sum of making + materials + shipping costs).

You just need to make sure that #1 is higher than #2 (both including shipping costs to your customer’s specific location):

Now onto how to make this happen …

How to determine the shipping price to include in your Showroom:

1) First, think about some key places you want to ship to (you’ll see the example above now has 8 locations). Remember you can add to these over time as people ask you to, but it’s good to cover a few base destinations first.

2) Now go to your MyPonoko account and run your product through the quoting system as if you are delivering to the different example locations you have nominated (in the example above this means John went through the quoting system 8 times).

3) Make sure you use the exact product design that you are selling, because the shipping price is different for different designs.

4) As a result of your efforts the quoting system will give you the shipping prices direct from Ponoko to your nominated locations.

5) Write these down and then enter them into Step 4 of the ‘Show’ your item process in your MyPonoko account. They will now appear on the product page in your public Showroom.

Congrats! You know you’re done when your Showroom looks like the example above AND the visible shipping prices you charge buyers are the same as (or higher) than the shipping prices you will pay Ponoko to ship direct to your buyers on your behalf.

How this all comes together

1) Buyer makes a purchase – the amount they pay you is the product price + the shipping price you have stated in your Showroom using the process above.

2) You get a sale email alert from Ponoko – so visit your MyPonoko account to see the details of the order. It will include the shipping details for the buyer which (should) match the shipping destination option they chose in your Showroom.

3) You confirm you have received the money and have some ‘thank you’ conversations with the buyer. You may get to clarify some things with them too - and spark up a relationship for your future products.

4) You then place an order with Ponoko to make and deliver your item direct to the buyer, by entering their shipping details (instead of yours) during the quoting process in your MyPonoko account.

5) After you pay, Ponoko will then make and ship your item directly to the buyer.

Cool! You know you’re successful when the buyer has paid you in a single Ponoko Showroom transaction a sum of money which is more than you have paid Ponoko to make and ship direct to the buyer.

Of course this means you will want to provide self assembly instructions. Something I will cover into the future

Please let me know if you have any questions by posting in the Comments section below.

There are a number of basic things you need to do to promote yourself and sell online.

Once you have an e-commerce website (like your free Ponoko Showroom) and you have populated it with some items for sale (like the ones you make with Ponoko), it’s time to attract the right buyers, keep them coming back and telling others about you.

And last week we started a 2 part series on how to get highly qualified search engine traffic to your product pages.

We talked about how it’s not about playing magic tricks. That we’ve already optimized your Showroom for search engine success and there are 2 key things for you to focus on:
1)    Content – rich descriptions of your products, yourself, your process, etc, etc.
2)    Popularity – getting other people to link to your website.

So last week we went into detail on #1. To summarize, it’s REALLY important that you do 2 things:
1)    Add lots of (relevant) content to your Showroom – without it, you’re selling yourself short. You do not need to use sales language, in fact its best you don’t. You need to describe your product, how to use it, how you made it, your passion for it. That’s it. When you do this, you’ll get more people find you in search engines like Google.
2)    After you’ve done #1 then optimize your content by adding in specific words and phrases that people are ACTUALLY using to find products like yours – this is where http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ comes in.

But if you do nothing else to promote your products and you are not into selling anything to anyone then you MUST add lots of great content to tell a story about it. This is key.

Now in tandem with the website optimization work we have done for your Showroom, the search engines will be able to pick up your content on their radars. Great!

Ok, ok … on to what we want to cover this week …

Now you have some great content, what’s really important now is to increase your online popularity.

Google will give your product a top ranking in its search results if your product page is the most popular among all the other web pages talking about the same sort of product.

So how do you become popular?

Well, you have great content AND you get as many other (quality) websites to link to your product page as you possibly can.

Now you don’t want to run out and buy links or join link farms or anything crazy like that. Instead you want to take your time, identify great websites and contact them to talk about you. And do this on a regular basis. If you did one per week, you’ll be VERY surprised with the results.

The great thing about building your link popularity is that it gives you 2 benefits – first you can get loads of traffic from the website that links to you and second you’ll rise up Google’s ranking, which means more traffic too. So when someone writes about you there’s a bit of a spike in traffic to your Showroom and then over time the search engine traffic will build and build quietly in the background and turn out to be the #1 source of new customers for you.

So the goal is to get as many websites to talk about you and link to you. You can do it via email, so it’s not difficult. And there is no rocket science.

But how do you find them and which ones do you choose?

There’s 2 basic rules:

1)    Choose sites that are relevant
Will they be interested in your product? I mean its kinda useless to contact someone at a motor mechanic website to talk about your jewelry product. So you need to be a match with them, otherwise they will not even consider talking about you and linking to you. Google will also give you a higher ranking if you are linked to by a set of (quality) websites that have a consistent theme.

2)    Choose sites that are popular
It’s always good to start at the top and work down. Get some links. And go back to the top again. There are (at least) 2 ways to figure out who is popular:
•    Check out how much traffic they are getting – enter their name into www.compete.com
•    Check out their Google Page Rank – enter their name into http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

As a basic rule of thumb it’s best to get links from other websites with a Google Page Rank of at least 3.

Easy right? Yes indeedy! As I say, there’s absolutely no rocket science here about how to get search engine traffic to your Showroom.

So the key question right now is where to start – where do you find the first website to check out its relevance and popularity, to then ask for a link?

There’s multiple sources for finding websites to link to you.

Here’s the simplest way to get started:
1)    Use Google to search for websites that are into designer stuff – the best websites are those who target a consumer / shopper audience. But don’t discount websites that target designers also – its great to get links from other designer crafted goods websites because this tells Google that you must be about this stuff too.
2)    When you find a website that you’d like to be seen on, find someone to have a personal conversation with. Save their details so you can record who you have been in contact with. Some people will say yes immediately and some will take time.
3)    If you have a blog, write about them. (We’ll talk about your blog in a future edition – bottom line is that you need a place to share information online and a blog is the perfect tool for this).
4)    Now make contact. Send them an email to strike up a conversation.
5)    Show what you have done for them and ask if you can do anything more for them. And remember to ask them to write about you. Give them a good reason.
6)    Keep the relationship going. They may not write about you immediately but if there’s one thing you can count on, things change over time ☺
7)    Go back to that website and search for other websites they are related to – and repeat the process above.

Here’s an example.

First I searched Google for shopping websites. And I found http://shopping.alltop.com/ - great!

So I picked a few, including www.mightygoods.com. Then I did 2 things. First I checked out how much traffic the website got and how popular Google thought it was. It looked great and it really measured up. So I made contact with Maggie to let her know about Ponoko designers and products. I also clicked around her website and found 2 other very cool sites and found people to make contact with there too – www.shanalogic.com and www.kirtsy.com. And so on ☺

What you should do next …

Check out the Alltop.com website above and do exactly what I have done. Your goal is to get one link every week. In reality this means sending an email to at least 5 per week – and in coming weeks following up those who have not engaged with you. When you have a new product is a great time to make contact – or when you have written about them is another good time.

The more links you get means the more traffic you get direct from those websites AND the more traffic you’ll get from Google as you move up their ranking system because you are becoming more popular online.

—–

Now as an extra bonus for those of you who want to be extra clever and work a bit harder – here’s how to put your popularity quest on steroids. Each time someone links to you, you might ask them to use very specific words in their link pointing to your product page.

Which words should you use? Again, this is where http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ comes in. The very best words to use to link to you are words that people are ACTUALLY using to search for products you have.

BUT remember this is not essential as just getting out there and getting some links ☺

—–

OK that’s it for this week.

Now get out there and update the content in your Showroom, then tell others about it to gain some links to your site.

By doing these 2 things you’ll be doing the critical stuff to rise to the top of the search engines to get the best quality shopping traffic your time can buy.

Next week we’ll cover either some more search stuff, blogging or tell me what you want to hear about by leaving some comments below.

And feel free to share this blog post with others by clicking on the Share This tool below.

There are a number of basic things you need to do to promote yourself and sell online.

Once you have an e-commerce website (like your free Ponoko Showroom) and you have populated it with some items for sale (like the ones you make with Ponoko), it’s time to attract the right buyers, keep them coming back and telling others about you.

So let’s start with attracting the right buyers.

As you know, search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! are still the #1 way to get the very best qualified buyers to your website for the first time.

They are the first step in a list of things you want to get done to promote yourself online.

So let’s take this step now.

But remember, what you do not want to do is go out and use an automated website submission service - either paid or free. These can leave you with nothing at best and a black mark against your name at worst.

And you don’t want to get all tied up in knots about the supposed SEO (search engine optimization) black magic voodoo stuff either.

However you do want to focus on the 2 key things that are the simplest and most powerful for your search engine success:

1. Content - rich descriptions of your products, yourself, your process, etc, etc.
2. Popularity - getting other people to link to your website.

When you cover these 2 things then you’ll benefit from the SEO voodoo that we’ve taken care of for you. We have optimized your Showroom in a way that means the text content you write to your Showroom is highly visible to search engines.

We’ve given you a canvas, now you need to color it.

OK, first up - content and how to describe yourself
There’s 2 parts to this.

First thing to understand is this - ‘the more you tell, the more you sell’. It’s corny, but search engines LOVE content.

This means, all other things being equal, a webpage with more content will outperform a webpage with little content.

So this first step is to simply add some content, any (relevant and useful) content, to your Showroom - the more the better.

So whether you get to part 2 of this section on content or not, at least add good content describing yourself - it requires no voodoo whatsoever, just plain common sense.

So to be a little more explicit here’s what to do first … add maximum content in these 3 places:

1. On your Profile page
2. In your Showroom Announcement
3. On every one of your Product pages

In specific reference to your Product pages, this means:

1. Choosing a product name that is descriptive of what it actually is - so if it’s a necklace, make sure this word is in the title.
2. Adding a detailed description - this is where you go to town. Again, the more descriptive you can be, the better.
3. Adding tags - these need to be, surprise surprise, descriptive of what the item actually is.

So that’s it! If you can simply let the writer in you shine through, then you’re about 60% of the way there on the content part of this exercise.

Now onto part 2 … adding extra content that search engines love.

Now there’s a little bit of science to this, but that’s a relief - because you are about to take all of the guesswork out of choosing the right words you need to insert into the content you have just written in step one above.

This is particularly important for the product name and the tags you use. And it’s a great idea to include these same words at the start, middle and end of your product descriptions too.

So you need to use words that do 3 key things:

1. They are words that describe your product well.
2. They are the words that other people are using to describe your product when they enter a search query into Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.
3. And they are words that your competitors are not using.

So how do you figure out the right words to use?

The thing to understand is that the words you might typically use to describe your product may be either:

1. Words that no one else actually uses to search for you - hence you are marketing yourself using the wrong words; or
2. Words that all of your competitors use - hence it will be very difficult for you to rise to the top of the search engine results because others have already beaten you there.

So to avoid these 2 things and choose the right words, go and check out www.wordtracker.com - the tool they market as the one to get an unfair advantage in the search engines.

Most of the very successful search engine optimization companies have been using this tool for years - it’s the gold of the trade.

So get it fired up and just enter in a few keywords that you think are relevant to your product. It will give you 3 really important bits of information:

1. A list of keywords other people are ACTUALLY using to search for your type of thing - you do not need to guess at what people are searching for any longer! These are the words to choose from and nothing else.
2. It also tells you how popular each of these keyword is - in other words, how many times has that specific word or phrase been searched for! This helps you pick the very best of the best.
3. And it tells you how many times the word is used on competitor websites. This helps you pick the ultimate words possible.

Now what you do next is choose the words that have the following 3 important characteristics:

1. It is a key phrase that will work best to drive buyers to your webpage to buy your specific stuff;
2. It is a key phrase that has a lot of people searching for it; AND
3. It is a keyword that has very little competition.

(Note that I use the term ‘key phrase’ - you want to find 2+ word phrases people are using to search for what you have. This is because this is far more descriptive of what they want than someone entering in a single keyword - eg, if someone enters in ‘apple’ I can only guess at what they want - but if they enter in ‘buy apple laptop’ I am much more confident to suggest what I think they want).

Ok, so what does all of this mean? Here’s an example:

Let’s say you are selling “XYZ” - here’s what to do:

Enter this keyword into Wordtracker. Select the best key phrases people are using based on the 3 criteria immediately above. Use these phrases in your product name, keywords and description within your Showroom.

The very best key phrase you can find after you enter “XYZ” into Wordtracker will be one that looks something like this:

Search phrase - “buy XYZ now”
Number of searches - 1,000,000
Number of competing web pages - 1

This is the very best because the searcher’s intentions are clear, there are 1 million of them looking to buy XYZ and there is only one competitor - wow!

If you use these words in your Showroom, then you will be the #1 ranking in the search engines for this phrase and this means you will get about 99% of the 1,000,000 searches. And when people click through to your site from the search engines (for free, because this is natural search, not paid search), they are likely to have a high sales conversion rate given the specific nature of their search (and the fact that you actually supply a great quality XYZ).

So go to it - and here’s the free version of Word Tracker to get you started (it does not show you how many competitors each search phrase has, but its a good start in finding out what the most popular search phrases people are using to find what you have to sell.

Check it out now then come back and get your Showroom setup so search engines will love you —> http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Hmmmm - this is much longer than I expected, so I’ll save #2 ‘Popularity’ to another blog post in this series. And this will give you some time to get the content in your Showroom updated, shiny, new and improved and all that.

So check back soon for our post about ‘Popularity’ - you don’t want to miss it because it’s critical just as soon as you have got your content nailed.

So go get your content done now - and remember, simply adding lots of descriptive and useful information to your Showroom even without reference to Wordtracker data will put you a mile ahead, so go do that now.

And feel free to share this blog post with others by clicking on the ‘Share This’ tool below.