Soapmakers and crafters, learn how to grow your online presence! The Soapmaker's Guide to Online Marketing is packed with detailed information on designing, building, and promoting your website.
Soapmakers and crafters, learn how to grow your online presence! “The Soapmaker's Guide to Online Marketing” is packed with detailed information on designing, building, and promoting your website. Learn how to write a press release. Get loads of free and low cost promotional ideas. Attract customers by blogging, making videos, and showing off enticing photos of your soaps and/or other bath and body products. Written by the author of “The Joy of Melt and Pour Soap Crafting” and more than a dozen other soap crafting books.
You'll get:
♦ Successful SEO tips
♦ Free online and offline website promotion tips
♦ Helpful photo guidelines
♦ Video ideas
♦ 100+ updated links
♦ Getting product reviews
♦ Set up your work/crafting area
♦ Wholesaling and labeling guidelines
♦ Avoiding online fraud
♦ Tips on creating your product line
♦ Basic soap recipes
♦ More than 30 resources
♦ Also available in paperback
Excerpt
Introduction
The Soapmaker’s Guide to Online Marketing was written expressly for those of you who wish to make soap and/or other bath and body products. It doesn’t matter what type of soap you make or plan to, this book will help you find an online market for your products.
This new edition was written because so much has changed online since 2013. Not only are more people selling soap online, there are also more outlets available and creative ways to market your business. I’ve made sure that the information is up to date about fees for online shops, website marketing, and the Pinterest section has been expanded to reflect all the new features that are offered.
New book recommendations have been included along with other resources. More importantly, I know what it’s like to be on a tight budget. Therefore, I included many no and low cost tips to help you get the most for your money.
Here are the following people that may find reading this book beneficial.
1. If you sell your soap from a brick and mortar store. Or a kiosk. Maybe you’ve thought about building a website. Perhaps you have one of those freebies made on Wix, Weebly, Webs, or another hosting site. First, decide if you want an informational only website to direct business to your store. Secondly, if you choose to sell soap online then you’ll want to build a website that accepts payments.
2. You sell your soap at craft shows/fairs, festivals, swap meets, flea markets, farmer’s markets, etc. Many soapmakers wholesale their products to hotels, bed & breakfasts, spas, and retail stores/boutiques. You can choose to use a company website to direct customers to your offline locations. To expand your business, having an online presence will help it grow. The choice of also selling online is one you should make carefully.
3. In the third category is the person who wants to sell soap online exclusively. Unless you’ve bought an existing soapmaking business, selling soap online is the most difficult if you have no offline venues in which you sell your soap. On the WWW you’re convincing people to buy a product they can’t touch or smell. You’re also competing against large companies, established but small companies, and countless others in your field. However, it can be done—I launched a business in June 2004 with just a simple website and a press release. Admittedly, sales didn’t roll in right away, but the more I kept building my brand name by utilizing all the website building tactics that I read about online and offline, the more business came my way.
Professional Reviews
Soapmaker’s Guide to Marketing Soap Online
Soapmaking has been one of my favorite past times for over a decade. I first really began selling my homemade soaps online back when Etsy was in beta. Then I moved onto selling full time for a good, solid four years on my local farmer’s market until the economy and my health took a turn. Now I sell my handmade soaps and other bath and body products exclusively online via my own storefront. I’ve learned a lot, but as you know, the world of ecommerce is constantly changing forcing those of us who sell our handmade arts and crafts online, to keep in the loop or fall to the wayside. However, there is basic know how that every soapmaker should have under their belt before they begin their adventure into selling their handmade products to the public. This is where the new ebook from establish author, Lisa Maliga, comes into play.
Selling homemade soaps online is one of the most difficult ways to get your products into the hands of customers. As people enjoy smelling and handling a product – it’s very difficult to describe a scent through words in a way that everyone will get exactly what that fragrance is – homemade soaps can be an especially tough sale outside of farmer’s markets, craft shows and shops. So if you are considering selling your handmade soaps online and are looking for a basic foundation of information to get you started, The Soapmaker’s Guide to Online Marketing is for true beginners who really have no idea how to get started.
The Soapmaker’s Guide to Online Marketing starts you off with a questionnaire that will help you determine if you’re really cut out for selling homemade soap online and also advices against premature selling – with specific instances of mistakes and pitfalls. There’s also a brief section over viewing online marketplaces you can sell your handmade soaps, including self hosting (I currently use and recommend Big Cartel as a shopping cart host for my shop,) creating your website (I’m a fan of the ease of Weebly) and obtaining a domain name. There’s also advice on setting up things like a policy page that covers deliveries and returns and how to handle delivery issues. In addition there’s useful information on SEO, using meta tags, branding, photographing your products, and finally promoting your website using methods from a press release and Pinterest to creating a newsletter and youtube videos to using both paid and free advertising. You’ll also discover useful information on business basics, running a home office, invoicing, shipping, pricing guidelines, labeling, creating your brand and how to avoid online scams.
Finally, The Soapmaker’s Guide to Online Marketing provides a handful of beginner glycerin soap recipes as well as resources and online shops for buying wholesale supplies for soapmaking, fragrances, molds and packaging and information websites, books and forums you can use to research for further information into this wonderful craft.
If you’re interested in learning more about making handmade melt and pour soaps, be sure to check out Lisa’s first soapmaking book, The Joy of Melt and Pour Soap Crafting. You can also now buy her latest book on making homemade shampoo bars, How to Make Handmade Shampoo Bars: The Budget Edition, in paperback. (You’ll love the large, easy to read text!)
Rebecca D. Dillon, Soap Deli News
http://soapdelinews.com/2013/06/soapmakers-guide-to-marketing-soap-online.html
Good Resource
"This book is a good resource for the beginner, and does help me to start thinking about the many issues I will face as I start a soaping business as well as the direction I want to go with it. Although the coverage of some issues did seem rather brief to me, I was pleasantly surprised with the number of links and online resources provided. I think those alone were worth the purchase price." Lisa Jenkins, Amazon review
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