Free promotional flyers!

After a small delay (damn you UK postal service!) our promotional flyers have finally arrived! Woohoo! :)

Love Handmade Promo Flyers

These flyers are meant as completely free promotional material, available to all, so if you want to grab yourself a pack or two head over to my Coriandr shop and put an order in, we’ll even cover the postage costs. There are two designs to choose from, sorted into packs of 20 and 50. The “www” prefix has even been left off of the coriandr.com link so that sellers can write their shop url in there. :)

Love Handmade

Buy Handmade Or...

During the course of designing these flyers, we came up with a few alternatives that didn’t make it to the printers for various reasons. We’ll be making those extra designs (plus the two above) available for download soon in our Promotional Materials section.

Coriandr Express pt.2

Here’s my final round-up this week of my favourite items from the remaining Coriandr Express featured sellers. If you missed the first part of the post, you can find it here. Remember, I’ve chosen one favourite item from each Coriandr Express shop…if you like what you see just click the images for more details!

Fine Silver Heart Charm Earrings – CeeGeeJewellery

Sea shore – lej jewellery

Delicate Flower Necklace – BlueFishHandmade

Christine earrings – Sweet Treat

Shopping Basket, made from willow – HeartandSoilBaskets

Overture Necklace in Amethyst – Ruby Spirit Designs

Furry Hood - Crochet Pattern – TomatoTea

Button Necklace TRUE BLUE – jellybellyjellybrain

Triangles Card – digtheearth

Kev

Coriandr Express pt.1

Seen as though everyone is talking about Coriandr Express I thought I’d skip my usual Featured Seller post this week and bring you twenty one Featured Sellers!

Coriandr Express has indeed left the station, and it’s mission is to promote Coriandr and the diversity of the handmade goods that you can find here. You can read what MatW had to say about Coriandr Express here.

Today I’m showing you ten shops (with the rest to follow later in the week), I’ve chosen one favourite item from each…if you like what you see just click the images for more details! Enjoy!

Dinky spotty knitted purse – juliemillsdesign

Rainbow heart pendant – Kitty Ballistic

Baby Pirate Pixie Skullcap with Earflaps – PiratePixieCrew

Blue Flower Handmade Bookmark – Creativesque

Diddy 'Lucy' child's red fish tote bag – nicsknots

Set of Three Little Felt Cakes – mrs.toad.designs

Dotty dichroic pendant – Debbs Elliman

My flexible furoshiki bag – myfuroshiki

Turquoise & Red Hair Clip – snapdragonbeads

If that hasn’t inspired you to buy Coriandr handmade, nothing will! Check back here on Wednesday for my favourite items from the rest of the Coriandr Express shops.

Kev

Working together to boost handmade sales

I wanted to blog about a few exciting happenings that are making a huge difference to visitor traffic and sales on Coriandr. Is it a brand new marketing campaign? Or some cunning web-wizardry that auto-submits a seller’s listings to every blog in existence? Have we invented a perpetual motion machine that also makes a perfect cup of tea?! Nope. The answer is much simpler than that, and Coriandr itself has absolutely nothing to do with it!

The beginning of May saw PiratePixieCrew get busy with promotion. She’s organised an excellent promotional idea which has since been dubbed “The Coriandr Express“. The basic idea is that sellers can sign-up to ride on the Coriandr Express, and once it has left the station they each take it in turn to be a VIP for a certain number of days. For those days, it’s the job of everyone else on the train to promote the VIP and their products in whatever way possible; Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc. The response has been great, as the first VIP Digtheearth has shown with a recent post. If you’re interested in joining the Coriandr Express then visit the blog or catch up on how the whole thing is developing on this forum thread.

The second development I wanted to share was a phenomenon that took me totally by suprise. Most of you may have seen the “share” button on right-hand side of item pages. This button is an easy way of sharing that item page using whatever method you fancy; email, Twitter, Stylehive, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc… Having shared items via Twitter and Facebook before now, I knew how good this button was at getting an (almost) instant boost to item views, but BlueFishHandmade got her timing spot-on the other day when she submitted her Black Lace Gloves to StumbleUpon.

In less than a day her listing had attracted 300 views! Compared to some of the more established craft marketplaces that may not seem huge, but given how young Coriandr is that number is massive, and really highlights how effective social media can be in promoting your creations. If you’ve not used the share button before, I strongly suggest you try it out!

The results of all these efforts is that Coriandr’s visitor traffic is up by over 42.5% on the same time last month, and climbing every day. So a big thank-you to everyone in the community who has been involved in recent promotional ideas, especially those behind the helm.