Do you have a blog?  If so, have you ever used it to promote another CAST Team member?


Promoting your team mates is a win/win situation for many reasons. Sure, you give them a little bit, or a lot, of exposure depending on how much traffic your blog gets. You also give them links to their Etsy shop and hopefully other links to their twitter, facebook, blog or other sales venues where your friends and followers can find them. Providing links is also a great way for Search Engines to find them. The more quality links to a shop the higher it will rate with Search Engines. One blog feature can have long lasting benefits.

We feature a CAST artist every Wednesday on our blog. Thanks Cindy of cksilver and Joy of JoyfulHandKnits for the great features they do. We are also very diligent in promoting and linking to many CAST shops in other features throughout the entire week.

But did you realize that promoting someone else can also have great, long lasting benefits for you too? Most likely someone that you have featured will go out and tell their friends and followers that they have been featured and bring new traffic to your blog and maybe even to your shop. It can bring fresh, new traffic to your own shop. Frequently, the blogs that feature a lot of artist have the highest number of followers.

Our volunteer blog authors love reading your comments!  Many of them take hours to prepare carefully considered posts. Your comments really make their day.



We've tried to make it very easy for you to leave comments. For now, there is not one of those annoying word verification boxes. We monitor the posts for a couple of days and any post left after that has to await approval before it is posted. Blog comments are notoriously glitchy, but I hope there haven't been too many problems with that on our team blog.

Thanks!

by Sue of SueRunyonDesigns

Cast Team hasn't been in the blogging business very long. This blog was really only started at the beginning of this year. Many of those on our team have never blogged prior to this or have only done very basic blogging. We've been stumbling along behind the scenes helping each other out. Those who figure out how to do something new share with the rest of us. From that collaboration, I've put together a few basic How-To's for our blog team and I thought that I'd share them with the rest of the CAST team too. And I've scattered some great CAST team items through the post to show you that you can get lots of help to dress up your blog from fellow team mates.




Blogger How To's:

1. Make links. Copy the url you want to link to. On your blog post type in whatever you want the text of the link to say and highlight it with the cursor (or highlight a photo for a photo link). Then on the edit bar for your blog post you will click the "Link" icon. That will bring up a pop up with a space for you to paste the url. Click "OK." Ta Da, you have a link.

2. Add photos from Etsy listings. You'll want to go to the item you want a photo of on Etsy and right click on it. Be sure and  right click on the large version and not just a thumbnail. From the list choose "Save Image As" in order to save it as a file on your computer. You'll get a pop up on how to save the image on your computer (I created a new folder on my computer just for CAST to keep things separate and you don't need to save them there once your post is complete). Save the image as a jpg file on your computer where you can find it again.

To insert the photo into your post, place your cursor where you wish to insert the photo and then click on the little icon that looks like a landscape photo. Browse your computer and find the image that you saved there and open it. You then have the choice to load more photos from your computer if you want. You will then have thumbnails of those photos in the pop-up window. When you are ready, click the photo you wish to insert and then click "OK."  To choose how you want the photos to appear in your blog, click on the photo in the blog edit window and it will give you a bar at the bottom with options right, left or center AND large, medium, small or remove. 




3. Add an Etsy Mini. Note down the Shop ID# of the shop you wish an Etsy mini for by clicking on their "policies" page. You will find the number in the url for their shop on that page. Or click on their "profile" page and look near the bottom of the side column. Then go to "Your Etsy" and click "Etsy Mini" in the side column. Then configure and copy the code for the appropriate style of Etsy mini for your own shop.

In your blog draft, click the " Edit html" tab at the top which will show you the hidden html coding for the post. Scroll to where you want to insert the Etsy mini and paste the code for your Etsy mini. Replace the ID# of your shop which is embedded in the code with the ID# for the shop you wish to feature.

Here's Julie's as an example:
4. Schedule a post to publish automatically. At the bottom of your draft you will see a link for "post options." Click on that and then at the left click on "Scheduled at," change the date and time to the time you wish your post to be published. After that you MUST hit the "publish" button to have the post actually scheduled to publish automatically. If you just hit "save" it will not work. It's good to get into the habit of doing this in case you get busy and forget to publish your post.



Do you know other helpful blogger tips? Share them with us on the comments!


Thanks,
Sue of SueRunyonDesigns