Posted by Carrie Keplinger
The following is a guest post by Rosalie Gale of Unanimous Craft
The question I am asked most often is, "What the heck is Unanimous Craft?" My best short answer is that Unanimous Craft is like Yelp for the crafty community.
I thought I would identify some very tangible (and also very easy) things you can do with Unanimous Craft to help your small business.
THE BASICS
What is Unanimous Craft?
Unanimous Craft is a directory of resources for indie business. People can create listings for resources that they find useful -- and that they think others would find useful. These resources are tagged and organized on Unanimous Craft to make them easy to find and discover.
What are Resources?
Resources can be lots of things: a video tutorial, an excellent blog post, websites for suppliers, indie shops, your own IndieMade shop, your blog and your friend's blog. Anything that is related to the crafty community or that might help you run a small indie business.
WHAT CAN UNANIMOUS CRAFT DO FOR YOU?
Increase Your Google Ranking
You know how people are always telling you that you need inbound links - Unanimous Craft is great for that. What's an inbound link? Any link from an external website that points to your website. Inbound links help to increase your ranking in Google searches. If you have a bunch of credible sites linking to your site - you move up in the search result list. Hot damn!
How do you do it? Add your IndieMade shop as a resource. Add your blog as a resource. Add your Facebook Fan page as a resource. Add your Twitter account as a resource.
Review these tutorials on how to create a user account (you'll need one to create resources) and then create resources if you need help.
Get Feedback from customers
Ask your customers to review you on Unanimous Craft. They will need a user account (to prevent people from stuffing the ballot box) - when they visit your page they will see a button that says, "Review this resource." After clicking on that, they rate you from 1-5 stars and then write a review. These reviews move your resource up and down in the popularity contest. The five most popular resources are shown on most pages of the site - including the front page.
Promote Your Individual Blog Posts
When you write a blog post that others might find especially useful, add it as a resource on Unanimous Craft.
Use Tags to Group Stuff
Use tags on your resources to group them together. If you have a street team, ask all your members to add their shop and include a specific tag that identifies your street team. Then, you can give everyone the url for that tag and you'll be able to see everyone's resources in a big list. For example, our Seattle street team is EtsyRAIN. We had our members create listings that included the tag: etsyrain. Now, when you click on the tag "etsyrain" on any listing, you see the entire list.
You can do the same thing with everyone's Facebook fan pages and blogs - and use the resulting list to follow everyone in your group. It's a great way to get organized without YOU having to update a million documents.
Write Reviews
Each time you write a review, your profile picture shows up in the upper right corner of the Popularity Contest page. This links to your profile on Unanimous Craft. This is especially good if you are a Premium Member and have an expanded profile.
Make Lists
Make a list of your favorite resources, or resources that share a common theme. You could make a list of all the yarn shops in your town, supply stores in your area, shops that buy handmade items on consignment, members in your area's Etsy Street Team or vendors in an upcoming craft show. The options are pretty much endless. Once you have created your list - share it with others by posting a link to it in forums or sending it to friends who might be interested.
If you create a list of awesome websites that you want to post in the IndieMade forums, make the list on Unanimous Craft and then link to it from the IndieMade forum post. That way you can tag your list to be found in Google searches and add a paragraph or two about you and your shop to the description of the list. Check out this great list of places to advertise and promote your shop as an example.
I'm always looking for new ideas and ways to improve the site. Please - if you have a suggestion - shoot me an email at info@unanimouscraft.com.
Supah Hearts,
Rosalie a.k.a. Unanimous Craft
