My big fat list of useful links for crafters

  
A list of useful links for crafters

You want your craft blogs and shops to be successful, so it's a good idea to try and get consistent with your daily promotional activities and get networking and promoting your posts and listings. Cue a big list of useful craft links!

Find those that you like and then be consistent about updating them, get a routine going.  Bouncing around cyberspace randomly adding links here and there will make you dizzy. Writing a list of daily, weekly and monthly online networking and promotional activities can help you save time (marketing types might call this a social media strategy document).   There's no way on earth you could manage to be active (post updates and links) on every site mentioned, but there's no harm in setting up a profile and adding your links.

Oh, one more thing before you start clicking the links... you might want to make yourself a nice cuppa or maybe pour yourself a glass of wine (just to get you into a friendly social networking mentality!)


General Social Media
Make friends, fans and followers, share blog posts, pictures and videos, update your status or add to discussions. Real people and real connections, get involved and start up some interesting conversations. 
THE BIG 6!
https://plus.google.com/
http://www.linkedin.com
http://youtube.com  
http://pinterest.com

The best fun is trying to connect them all up and then working out which order to post to them in! 

Picture and Video Sharing
Make a habit of uploading a daily image of your work to a photo sharing site - my favourite's are Flickr and Tumblr.  Here's a post all about how crafters can make the most of Flickr .
http://instagram.com
 
Online Craft Communities and Forums
These crafty communities and websites make a point of trying to bring the crafting community together and promote handmade goods and blogs.  Forums are friendly places to meet up with crafters and add to discussions about all sorts of issues both craft and non craft related.

That's probably enough to be getting along with...  I'll try and find some more, let me know any great forums and communities I've missed and don't forget to find communities outside of the crafty world to network with too!  You may find those mummy sites or gardening nings are full of potential blog readers!

Free Craft Directories
Lists and ranked lists of craft sites and blogs - you have nothing to lose.  Beware directories that charge - make sure you are going to get a good return on your investment by asking for stats.

http://www.craftsitedirectory.com/index.html
http://coolcraftsites.com/directory/

Bookmarking 
"Social bookmarking can introduce the sites that you own or you like to others with relevant tastes, can drive traffic to your site, and valuable backlinks" via www.searchenginejournal.com which also lists another 125 bookmarking sites (altogether too mindblowing!) These ones are my favourites, although to be honest I find Pinterest a great bookmarking site too so it could be in both categories.


http://www.digg.com/
http://www.squidoo.com/
 
Search Engine Submissions, pinging and blog directories
Make sure your blogs, shops and websites have been added - just a little extra push to make sure the search engines find you! It's usually just a case of setting up an account and adding a few keywords and pasting in your blog or shop address.
http://technorati.com/ 

...and if you have lots of time on your hands take a look at this mega list of blog directories I found - I might try a one a day approach :)

Hope these links help - please let me know of any links you think are missing and I'll add them tout suite!