Treasury Love, Part II

If you build it, they will come.
NOT QUITE. THIS IS ETSY, NOT FIELD OF DREAMS :)
 
Honestly, there are better ways to increase your shop's views than building treasuries. Just look at other shops: look at their massive number of sales, and then see how many treasuries they are creating, and how often. In many cases, they haven't created a single treasury!

Now look at these mind-boggling stats from Etsy's February 2013 "Weather Report:"
• 1.49 BILLION page views  • 1,988,713 new items listed  • 1,025,124 new members

Those staggering numbers, while down from January's numbers, mean two things to me:
#1. There's a lot of competition out there. #2. It's easy to get overlooked

Don't be discouraged. Go ahead and create a treasury, because YOU need views. Yes, building a treasury is not a purely altruistic effort. I check my shop stats, and views quintuple when I post a new treasury.

A GREATER NUMBER OF TREASURY VIEWS = GREATER POTENTIAL SALES for YOU
You can't list a new item and expect a chunk of those 1.49 billion page views to be YOUR shop page, right? Well, the same goes for treasuries. Ya gotta PROMOTE.

PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE!
Once you've published your treasury to "everyone," get to promoting. Take a gander at this recent screengrab and those 4-digit views (I added the green circles):

Promoting, step-by-step:

1. "Favorite" each of the 16 items you've treasured. This step is often overlooked. If I favorite one of your items, for example, that means your item will potentially be seen by my 700-and-some followers. If your list of followers is wimpy, I would gently suggest that you get to working on that.

2. Publish your treasury on Facebook, Pinterest, your website, your blog, Tweet it, etc. Use social media to your advantage!

3. Notify each of the 16 shop owners that they've been treasured. Another step that's often overlooked. The copy and paste function makes this process more efficient. Compose a message to send to each of the 16 shop owners, click the item you've treasured, and contact the owner. Write something like: "You've been treasured! (copy and paste the URL of the treasury page here). No need to reply to this message, but favoriting the treasury and leaving a comment are appreciated. This treasury has also been promoted on (copy and paste the URL to your Facebook shop page and anywhere else you've promoted the treasury). Sign off with a friendly "Thank You" or whatever you deem friendly. NOTE: Your featured shop owners don't always respond. DO NOT SEND THEM A REMINDER CONVO. Yes, I am shouting. Spamming via convos is a major no-no on Etsy.

3. Promote the treasury on Etsy. My best guess is that the curators in the above screengrab are very busy promoting their treasuries on Etsy.

You belong to teams. Those teams have dedicated threads for treasuries, but follow their rules. Some require favoriting and commenting on x-number of treasuries above you. This means anyone posting treasury links after yours will be doing the same for you! Some team captains threaten a wrist slap if you don't follow their game rules.

4. Repeat Step 3. The web is a 24-hour operation and there are people browsing Etsy who live in other time zones. Re-post your treasury link at other times of the day, but again, follow the treasury rules posted: you might be required to wait until 10 others have posted before you can re-post.

Speaking of promoting in team threads, there are Etsy teams focused primarily on treasuries! Search teams, and join Avid Treasurers, Click and Comment, or any others that strike your fancy.

New-ish! An easier way to curate treasuries!
When you click on an item that you want to add to a treasury, there's now an "Add to treasury" option right above the social media icons on the right. This means you don't have to manually copy and paste the URL of each item into those 16 boxes. There's also Schmetsy, but I haven't taken it for a test drive yet.

Happy treasuring... see you next week!  - Carla
http://www.etsy.com/shop/716Buffalos