Choosing and Setting Goals with your Crafts Site

Ok, we all know the goal of your crafts site to share your crafts and get people to read it right? That's everyone!
But now we need to really break it down: what really are your goals for your craft site? And if you haven't gone beyond "to get more comments," you need to read this post!

First off, are you trying to turn a profit with your site? Maybe bring in a few dollars with affiliate marketing? Score some free stuff to blog about? Sell your crafts? Take Martha out? Whatever it is, don't be shy about it! Select your overall arching goal and stick with it.

Supposedly you've already selected the keywords that you're using to better target not only your style but how search engines will find you. Use those keywords to achieve your goals.

• Start by being realistic. If you get 200 visits a month now, is 200,000 for next month reasonable? Probably not. Try something like doubling your traffic and having a bigger overall number as a year long goal.
• Write your goals down. Do it.
• Be able to track your goals. I'll be writing more an analytics later, but for now, do you have some way of being able to tell what's going on?
• Choose one goal for each type of action. For example- if you want more people to come and comment and click your link to your sister's site, set separate goal amounts for each of those.
• Enable visitors to help you attain your goals. So if you want more comments but require users to be logged in or a member to comment, that's a roadblock. If the "comment" link or button is tiny and gray, how are they supposed to find it?
• Add social sharing buttons and features- like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Mixx etc; Depending on your CMS (content management system- the place that holds your site) you might be able to download a widget, plugin or paste in code for the social sharing platform of your choice.
• If you're selling your crafts, can people easily add items to your shopping cart and checkout? Or is it confusing? Have a friend try and checkout and see what confuses or hangs them up.
• Also if you're selling, where is the "add to cart" or "buy now" button? Is it prominently placed?

Choose your goals to be in line with the kind of visitors you're trying to attract and the kind actions you want them to take. Easier said than done, I know.

But in the next post....now that you've got your keywords and written down SPECIFICALLY what you want to do with your site, I am going to tell you how to achieve those goals.

Stay tuned, we're going to follow three different paths in the next post- one will be the craft site who just wants people to come visit and comment, two is the crafts site that wants visits and is doing a little affiliate marketing on the site and three is the crafts site that is looking to turn a profit.