Cross Promoting with a Gift Guide

My tip for today is for artisans to band together to improve your marketing efforts with a gift guide collaboration!

We have a group of jewelry and bead artists on Facebook who use the web host Indiemade.com. Because most of us are crossing over from Etsy to have our own independent websites, we are always trying to find creative ways to promote our jewelry on our stand along websites. It's a little scary out there on the internet all alone. We are smart designers and know there is strength in numbers. Our group helps with advice, technical issues and promotional efforts.

Our latest effort is a Mother's Day Gift Guide. We had a designer put the booklet together for us and each of us have a two-page spread in the guide featuring our top picks for Mother's Day. We are now reaching out to our social media and online groups sharing our gift guide, providing us with much more exposure than any of us could get on our own.

While we are a collective of jewelry designers, I would also recommend creating a gift guide with artists who work in different mediums. They can be local artists that you know or start collaborating online with artists who you've met in our social media circles.

You may only think of gift guides for the holiday shopping season but you can do gift guides for anytime of the year based on a theme, occassion or product. You could do a Bridal Gift Guide, a gift guide for grads, a summer style gift guide, a hostess gift guide if you create home goods. Get creative and then find your tribe to start the process.

A few tips:
1. Use Issuu to create and publish your gift guide. This is our lesson learned, Joomag doesn't enable mobile viewing without paying a hefty price.

2. Find a designer on Odesk to put together your booklet, share the expense with your fellow gift guide participants.

3. Use a Facebook group to coordinate the participants. We had a file for the links, ways to share and now we are keeping track of where we have shared the gift guide.

4. Give everyone the assignment to reach out to 2-3 blogs, media outlets or groups to share the gift guide once it's published.

Take a look at our Mother's Day Gift Guide!

Click on the arrow in the upper right corner below to see the booklet full size - you don't want to miss out on all the beauty!