A friend is seeking help

Here's my advice

1: Your best bet would be to hire someone that's good at SEO if you are pressed on time.

2: Since she has received a bit of success in your local area, I would suggest that a Instagram and a Tumblr post are made to help grow her online branding. Building an online following/brand will help ensure that more people will recognize her art and buy more of her prints!

3: Lastly, get into the habit of reading blog and forum posts about online marketing. You'll start to pick up

As I was saying in my previous post, once you read more posts on online marketing, you'll pick up on what needs to be done and what needs to be avoided.

No Hat Digital is a great blog to start learning more about SEO/online marketing.

If you need any help, just let me know!

My number one marketing tool for a site like that would be Etsy. The pay per click cost is minimal compared to Google or Bing and cost per conversions are considerable lower on Etsy. Hopefully, she's already on Etsy but if not, that would be my very first move.

Also, please take this as constructive instead of harsh criticism, but you'll get better traction on forum questions if you create a more specific title for your post. Lots of people ignore generic things like "a friend seeking help" which could be about anything.

Have you sat down and worked out the profitability and the scalability of what your friend does? What happens if she starts getting 5-10 orders a day? Can she keep up? Will the added issues outweigh the increased visibility? (Shipping problems, broken art, refunds, postage, COGS) I would figure this out first before developing an online strategy, especially with hand made crafts

It's quite simple but a little bit tricky.

She should put together all her relevant keywords from Google Keyword Planner.
Add them to the tool and select the country she wants to explore and see the result
of the queries as they come up. That should give her an idea of the number of people
that search for her product at a given time and place.

Knowing the right keywords will also help her not to waste resources on market
that have traffic but no value.

Hi Ya'll!

Okay, I'll try to answer as many of your concerns and questions as I am able to in one post!

First things first, since I am normally working in marketing, I've got some contacts. And through a co-worker I've found a guy who could help me with a Keyword Reserach and KW strategy. He'll do it as a favor, so I got that covered!

@Rosca: I've taken some time to think about what you wrote about growing her brand through social media. At first I found this website, talking about how to utilize facebook as a great marketing device. Tips on how to do it sucessfully. However, since I actually know some things about this, I realized that I've read somewhere else that the organic traffic through Facebook more or less has disappeared.

I understand that paid advertising is the way to go, and the possibilities that comes with segmenting the market also helps us gradually expand my friends business. But is there anything in particular that you think I should be focusing on when it comes to social media advertising? I'm thinking about finding other shops and influencers that could help her reach new audiences, as well as helping her produce rich content like videos.

@ John Kirby: Thank you for your input. Her current profitability-rate is quite good. I don't want to give away any specific numbers, but she has quite a healthy mark-up, which people seem to accept. I've explained to her that with a bigger business comes more costs, and she is well aware of this. Fortunately she's okay with cutting the profit per sold item in order to facilitate delivery and potential waste.

After looking into different possible expansion strategies, we have decided to gradually expand the business, expanding the shipping distance over time. Initially we just want to see if there's a market outside our local area.

That is all for now. I thank you guys for your help, and if you have any thoughts about what I wrote above, just ask me and I'll try to answer!

I would definately suggest for your friend to set up a eCommerce store and also ensure her social media channels are up and running and updated with fresh content. If she is creating hand made goods, I definately think Etsy is a great idea and also Instagram. I know a few people that sell majority of their handmade goods via Instagram alone. I would also set up a blog on the website and upload fresh content regularly to ensure that this is humming along and getting picked up on Google. The keyword strategy you can find out some good options on Google too. When you get the content written, a good copywriter will ask for your SEO keywords and weave these into the copy and also write your meta descriptions and title tags for you too so that they flow.

I agree with the others about selling on eBay or Etsy. That would be her best avenue. Trying to do SEO on a national level is much more difficult than local (unless it's an extremely niche specific item that she is selling).

At the very least, she should set up an Etsy shop and an Instagram account. Then create a website/blog to tell more about her business, share her products, etc. She can grow more of a following through Etsy and Instagram and direct traffic to her website that way.