"Handmade in New Brunswick"

I'm always looking for ways to get more traffic to my etsy store and my artfire store.  The handmade jewelry industry is colossal and the competition is fierce.  Trying to get my handmade, wire jewelry noticed is very difficult.  Since I've been on Etsy (a couple of months), I've noticed the shop local section and that gave me the idea of targeting these as my potential clients.  Shipping is cheaper versus shipping national, and plus I'm supporting artisans in my area.  With this in mind, I just learned something very interesting that I never thought about before.  If you want to be noticed by local customers, it's a good idea to mention in your title "Made in New Brunswick" or wherever you come from.  Isn't that a neat little trick??

I am going to try this in both my etsy baysidewiredesigns and my artfire baysidewiredesigns2 stores.  We'll see what happens.  I'll add a comment in this blog as to what the outcome is.  I'll give it a couple of weeks to see if I generate more local traffic.

Another thing I also learned is to add unique content for each post.  Google robot likes unique content.  This little bit of information really hit me because I make a collection of glass, housewares items out of recycled glass bottles and my introduction always remains the same.  I'm not too sure if this affects the robot or not, but I will experiment to see what happens. 

I also noticed something interesting:  while I was listing some of my recycled glass items.  I could not include the word "wine" in my title or my description.  Then I realized, if google doesn't accept this on artfire, it doesn't on Etsy either, and I'm probably sabotaging my own business by not knowing these things.  Then it struck me that perhaps there are many types of words that aren't very friendly to google... I'm going to research that area as well.  It really would be too bad to put so much effort into building a store and adding all of your items and not have anyone find you or not be selling to your fullest potential.  It's most discouraging to do all this work in vain and I'm determined not to work in vain!!
If you know of any other tips and tricks to bring more traffic, please add your comments.  I would love to hear from you and how you succeed.