How to get exposure?

I've been struggling with this issue every waking moment (o.k., I AM exaggerating here :). But it takes some time and work and brainstorming.


If you are an Etsy seller you surely know what I am talking about. There are million trillion sellers out there, all desperately trying to get customers to look at their items. Because of this crowd, it's bloody hard to get noticed. Unless, of course, you are willing to spend a fortune on constant renewing. But that goes rather against the whole idea of a business, am I right?


So, back to the always-surfacing question - how to get exposure? I can speak only from my own experience, and so far what I found out is:


- Blog does not really work ( :( ). Not this, anyway. I have a funny feeling that if I started writing on something having nothing to do with my Etsy shop, it would work better. Just to give you some statistics - I have days with 60-80 blog views, but only few, if any, translate to Etsy view. Tough.

- www.plaincraft.com - I've already written about it here. No rush in the shop either. Maybe one, two extra views, but that's it. Still, it's always an outlet and you never know.

- Etsy forums. This is my main reason for writing this post. I did some experiments yesterday and I'm astonished by the results. I spend half the night yesterday on Etsy forums. Not being serious, not trying to give any decent advise, just blabbing my heart away and mostly adding a touch of humour to oh-so-serious posts. It was... well, I wouldn't call it inspiring or a pleasure, but it was kinda fun. Especially a long, long thread on How to Make Money When You're Deadly Broke :). But let's have a look at numbers. Usually I get an average of 5 visitors a day, with 20-something pageviews. Yesterday - 50 and 132 accordingly. An absolute record! Now, I'm not sure if it's the target audience I'm looking for, but at least I'm SEEN. Which, with the Web more crowded by day, is getting more and more difficult to achieve.


I guess I did not invent gunpowder with the above. But my aim is not to be an all-knowing expert, I want to tell you what WORKS based on my very specific experience instead. Fresh reports will be delivered as my adventure progresses :).