Throughout our “Etsy Listings Basics” series, we’ve taken a deep dive into knowing your market and ideal customer, using Etsy’s listing tools to effectively present your work, and setting pricing that will make you profitable. For the last piece in the series, let’s look at how you will promote your shop and your work to bring buyers to you.

One of the allures of an Etsy shop is its built-in customer base. People who are looking for handmade, original arts and crafts and supplies know to shop on Etsy. That said, Etsy estimates they have around $2.1M active sellers as of 2018. Once your shop is built and filled with your work ready for sale, how can you increase your chances of getting found in that big pool of artists and crafters?

Etsy has a couple of tools baked-in that can help. You’ll find these tools in the “Marketing” tab of your Shop Manager. Get to know these and use them as they can be really helpful in building your fan base.

The first option offered is “Social Media.” Hopefully when you set up your shop you were able to link it to any social media accounts. Etsy links directly to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter to make sharing easy. They also have pre-populated sharing ideas, such as your newest items, your five-star reviews, or promoting a sale. It literally only takes a few seconds to get and image with a link to your shop or item posted from Etsy to any of your social networks. I can’t stress enough how important it is to get your listings out of Etsy and in front of other audiences to make sales. Facebook Ads also have a separate tab, but clicking that tab just leads back to the “Social Media” module. This feature is free, except for Facebook ads, which are subject to Facebook’s ad rates.

The second option offered is “Promoted Listings.” This is a way to pay to cut through all of the many, many sellers in your niche. Basically, you set a daily threshold for how much you want to spend to bid to have your shop items promoted at the top of Etsy’s search when they are relevant. You can start with a daily bid of just $1 per day. Higher daily budgets may lead to more views, but also may not. Etsy will automatically spread your bids over all the items in your shop, or you can manually turn bidding on and off or set individual thresholds manually for each item. For as little as $30 per month, you can increase the likelihood of your pieces being seen and sold.

Etsy is also connected to Google Ads. This is the third option for advertising your shop and your listings. It works much the same as “Promoted Listings” with a daily bid threshold except it displays your Etsy items in Google Search results.

The last tool that Etsy offers to help you generate sales through your shop are “Sales & Coupons.” The first part allows you to create targeted campaigns to reach back to Etsy shoppers that may have recently interacted with one of your pieces such as clicking “Like” or adding something to their cart that they didn’t finish purchasing. You can choose an enticement such as a discount or free shipping to close the sale.

You can also choose to hold a promotion in your shop. Offer a shop or item sale, create a promotion for free shipping, or generate a coupon code to give to specific customers or for specific items. Make sure to promote your sales on social media to get maximum effect.

Using these tools can help you to make sales. They are completely optional and you will need to decide how much if any investment you want to make in advertising and promoting your shop.