Magickal Realism

While I don’t say much about it while in Etsy Forums, I do see a complaint reiterated about the promo forum ad nauseum. While the person differs, the complaint is always the same, “I posted there but it was buried in a minute!”

Sorry to sound unsympathetic, but yeah, that’s the way it happens, so if you want to succeed, you’d better adjust to it - all the whining isn’t going to force the promos forums to adjust to you. I view the requests to disassemble promos very annoying because to me, it reads as a tacit demand that Etsy do something to make marketing “easier” for the complainer, when the fact of the matter is that dicing up promos will only result in the rest of Etsy forums getting spammy.

Look at it this way: There’s around 60,000 sellers on Etsy.  Even if only 10% of them are on the forums at any given time, that’s around 6,000 people. Of that sample, 60-100 are trying to make a living at their craft, and another 20% just don’t have anything better to do at that moment in time. You are just one person in that flood.

It’s a marketing gaffe I see in a lot of newbies: they expect !RESULTS! from one single action, like making a single post in forums, or by simply listing an item and then sitting back and waiting. While sure, results are possible from the list-and-wait, post-once-and-boom corner of the universe, they’re unlikely. Very unlikely. So unlikely, that it’s safest to assume these magical things don’t actually happen. All marketing is cumulative - it takes repetition, heavy visual connection, and the establishment of a solid reputation in order to succeed.

So here’s how you make promos work for you: jump in. Leverage the other posts that are already established. Pick one or two items to promote at a given time. You can either spread wildly through several pages, or you can make use of your “topics I posted in” button to track responses and bump the already established threads. If you do a lone posting, don’t bump it more than once or twice, and do NOT complain about lack of response. If there’s a lack of response, there’s a lack of response; complaining just turns buyers off to you.

So the key is simple: use established long-running threads. Be magnanimous; it’s almost impossible NOT to post and run in promotions, so let that behavior go (it’s when you see that in other sections of forums that the behavior is unacceptable). When someone posts to your threads, continue to be generous - there is no such thing as a thread hijack in promos. What gets you bumped gets you back to the front, and that’s a good thing.