Marketing Your Work

[Lorien]

A very interesting thread about a subect that matters to most of us.
I have seen sites become the best way to sell knives then the discussion forums then Facebook and most recently nstagram but all this nonsense about not allowing knives to be advertised seems to be driving people back to the good old discussion forums (the ones that srvived the exodus) and specific groupd on facebook.
Today, I have a page on FB but do most of my sales on the groups where I post. IG used to be interesting - I have over 3.000 followers there but not a retrn of 5% in likes nowadays but still post daily anyway - and the discussion forums are becoming hot again it seems. I also keep two Whatsapp groups of customers - one with interaction and one silened for those who only want to know news about knives - and these are becoming kind of slow but have been very good over the last few years. I also still have my website but at this point it only points people to my IG and Face and Whatsapp (whatsapp is very popular over here).
I am very interested in seeing where this discussion will lead and think adapting to this changing environment will be a matter of survival to all of us.

you make a fascinating point- the pendulum does seem to be swinging back to forums from general social media. I wonder if anyone else is noticing that, or maybe we're just weirdo outliers

funny thing I just found out; I've kept my business FB page separate from my personal one. Up til recently, I haven't shown my cutlery work on the personal page. Once I did, local folk are starting to contact me for sharpening and a few requests for knives. Thinking about having a table at the town 'night market'- do some knife sharpening and have some work on display, or whatever. Not this season though, next season. Gotta start learning to dial in efficiencies so I can increase volume a little bit and have consistent stuff to sell.

 

[Ivan Campos]

I once tried to swap my Whatsap group for a Telegram channel. It didn't work because Brazilian dont care much about Telegram and I have to go back to Whatsapp but maybe it is a good idea for a more global public. Has anyone tried it?

 

[timos-]

you make a fascinating point- the pendulum does seem to be swinging back to forums from general social media. I wonder if anyone else is noticing that, or maybe we're just weirdo outliers

funny thing I just found out; I've kept my business FB page separate from my personal one. Up til recently, I haven't shown my cutlery work on the personal page. Once I did, local folk are starting to contact me for sharpening and a few requests for knives. Thinking about having a table at the town 'night market'- do some knife sharpening and have some work on display, or whatever. Not this season though, next season. Gotta start learning to dial in efficiencies so I can increase volume a little bit and have consistent stuff to sell.

I agree, once the instagram adopted the short form video format I started noticing the landscape changing. I think we will find in a few years this short format videos are actually pretty damaging to our brains and changes will be made, but until then well, thats what we have. I think the mental health care community is starting to identify this as a major problem, I am finding the need to get rid of it myself just to keep sane...lol.

These forums are really refreshing. We don't have to contend with weird algorithms and shadow banning. What a concept.