Promoting My Shop, Guide to How I Got It All Going

I have managed to open up a new Facebook account for my selling and have made a Fan Page and also managed to have my shop showing on my page.  I have managed to get links for both the shop and the fan page on to this blog so I am going to try to make a sort of tutorial of how I did it as others have said they want to know,

The first thing is to make up your shop.  It was quite easy to do on Folksy, you just register with them and it gives you a lot of questions to add in.  One of them was to choose your header for your shop.  They have some already on there you can use but I made up my own one in Paint Shop Pro.  You should be able to use any photo editing kind of software but I have always used Paint Shop Pro 5 since way back when I did cards and find it easy to do.

It tells you this on the page - "Your image will need to be 100pixels high by 920pixels wide, otherwise it'll get stretched " so make sure you can get this size picture in your editing software.   It has a template on the page you can download.  I just opened a new file the size it was saying and then coloured over it with a pattern and put my name over it.  Have a play about and see if you can do it, if not you will have to use one of theirs.

I will add here that the photos of your items that you add to your shop have to be square not normal rectangular shape.  This was a bit of a pain as I had taken all my photos as I would normally take them.  I had to go into my Paint Shop Pro and crop all the photos so it cut off the edges.  There were some photos that I could not do this for so if you have photo editing software that lets you open a new file with a certain shape then open up a new square shaped file, doesnt matter how big but I made mine 8" x 8" then copy and paste your photo into the square, you might need to reduce the size to get it to fit.  Then you have blank edges either  across top and bottom or down the two sides depending on whether your picture was landscape or portrait.  I just filled these edges with a colour that closely matched the background of the photo and saved it all as a jpg.

Once your shop is up and running then the next thing is to do the Facebook Page.

For this I opened up a brand new account.  I made myself a new Facebook account.  I made myself a new email address which I could use, luckily I managed to get one with rufusdog in it to tie in with my shop and blog.  Once you have your new Facebook account then you need to make a Page.

To do this go to the top right hand corner and click on Account and go down to Help Center.  When this page comes up type Create A Page in the search box and you will see some options come up, go to the one that says How Can I Create A Page.  Then it says create a page HERE and you click on the word HERE.  It will open up a new page with some large icons on it.  I used the first one which is labelled Local Business or Place.  Then when you click on this it opens up a form to fill in with your shop name and your address and phone number.  You have to put these details in to have a fan page.  On the pull down menu I chose shopping/retail for mine but you can choose anything.  Then once you have filled in your details click on agree terms and Get Started.  Then follow the instructions.  I cant get any further without making a new page up and I dont really want to do that but I dont think there was much more to it after this.

If everything has gone well you should now have a Facebook Page.  I made up a logo to put on mine which was similar to the one I have on my shop only it is square and not oblong in shape.

To get your fan page on your blog go to account and help center again and type in Make a Badge and go to the option How Do I Create a Badge?  Then on this new page click where its says click here and then go to the bottom right option which is Page Badge.  If you have made up your own logo it will then show you the logo on the next page and give you options to choose which blog you want to add your badge to.  I chose blogger as I wanted it to appear on here.  Just click on blogger and it will ask you to log into your blogger account and then your design page will come up in blogger and it will say at the top its been added, just save it and then when you view your blogger it will be on your page.  Mine came up on the right hand side where I have my about me details etc, this is where it put it so I left it there.

Now to get your shop on your blog.

Go to your Folksy Shop and click on Support at the top of the page.  Type in Badge in the search box and then go to Do You Have a Blog Badges.  Then click on BLOG BADGES and choose a badge.  When you click on the one you want it will open a small window with some HTML in it.  Copy all this HTML and then go to your blog.

Go to design in your blog and where ever you want to add the badge to click on ADD GADGET and then go down the list to HTML/JAVASCRIPT.  Click on this and type in a Title and then paste the html into the big box.  I added my badge to the top and the title didnt show up but it might if you add it to the side so make the title something like visit my shop or something.  Now when you save it all and view your blog you should have a link to your shop on there.

Next is to link your shop to your Facebook Page.

Click on this link http://blog.folksy.com/2010/07/15/facebook-promoting-your-folksy-shop  and it will open up a page telling you how to do it.  What I did was to click on the bit where it says ADD YOURS TODAY in the second paragraph.  MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR FAN PAGE MADE UP ALREADY AS OTHERWISE IT MIGHT GO WRONG HERE.  Go down the page to where it says How Do I Add It and then click on the link which says http:// apps.facebook etc etc.  It will open up a new window which is in Facebook and it will say Add Your Folksy Shop to Facebook.  Click on the ADD TO MY FAN PAGE link, dont click on the other link instead.  Once you have clicked on this it will install the app, just follow the instructions.  I dont want to click on the link again in case it messes up what I have already done.

Now when you go to Profile on Facebook you will have two different things you can be on either your personal profile or your fan page.  To change between the two go two if you are in your personal profile go to account and click on Use Facebook as Page and then it will show you the pages you have (in case you have more than one) click on your page and it will change it to your page.  Now on the left hand side it should have FOLKSY SHOP listed under where it says Wall, Info etc.  If you click on this it will go to your Folksy Shop. Shop.

If you want to go back to your profile page click on Account again and it will have your profile under it, and switch back to whatever your profile name is.

Have a play around with the settings and make sure you are letting who you want to see your profile etc.  As I dont have much information on this new profile I have some of it set to show friends of friends and some to show just friends.

If you need any more help just let me know either by commenting or by adding me on Facebook and leaving me a message on there or PM me on MSE if you are one of us on there.  There might be some other tweaks to do to get it to run smoothly but I cant remember anything else I did but if you cant get it to work let me know and I will see if I can remember what I did.