Unanimous Craft: Reporting from the Craft and Hobby Association Conference

Next weekend 1/29-2/1 is the Craft and Hobby Association Conference and Trade Show. Donate to my Kickstarter campaign to fund my airfare for the conference. Then, just sit back and relax while I send you valuable info from the conference via the Unanimous Craft blog. You get cool rewards for donating. You get awesome coverage of the conference. You get it all, baby.

What Can Unanimous Craft Do For You

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 tangible things you can do with Unanimous Craft to help your small business (and a few things you and your small business can do to help Unanimous Craft.)


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 Etsy 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 Etsy 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) - they, 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 Etsy 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 Etsy forums, make the list on Unanimous Craft and then link to it from the Etsy 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.


WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR UNANIMOUS CRAFT?



Make Yourself a Resource Owner
Set yourself up as the owner of a resource. This connects your resource with your profile on Unanimous Craft. Your picture will be shown on the resource page under the heading "Resource Owner."


Become a Regional Craftologist
In exchange for reporting on crafty events in your area, you'll get free advertising and other benefits. To apply, fill out this Regional Craftologist application. Get more details about the requirements.


Become a Premium Member
For just $60 for a full year of membership you get access to some special benefits. You get a more robust profile that gives you the option to link to your shops and social networking sites, front page features, discounts on advertising, special attention from yours truly and a shout out several times a year in Twitter #FF posts. Read about all the great stuff you get.


Advertise
Help support Unanimous Craft by advertising your own shop or blog. Rates are recalculated on a monthly basis determined by site traffic. Currently, one month of advertising is $30 for regular members and $20 for Premium Members. Check out the details.


Tell Your Friends
If you have crafty friends, tell them about Unanimous Craft. Recommend our Facebook Fan page to your friends. #FF our twitter handle: @unanimous_craft to your followers. Blog about us (and grab any of the images off our Share the Love page), add a sentence to your follow up email for orders that asks people to review you on Unanimous Craft, post links to lists or resources that you think are great in crafty related forums.


THANK YOU
I think that about covers it. The Intermediate Level at least. Thanks for making this project such a pleasure to work on. It's takes a lot of effort - for sure - but it's also really, really fun.

Unanimous Craft -- It's ALIVE

I made this. I made it good. Oh yeah.


Unanimous Craft is a taggable, searchable index of resources for indie business. 


You can find accounting spreadsheets for your profit and loss statement. You can find inspirational blogs. You can find potential places to sell your products wholesale. It's all in there baby -- and tons more.


Indie business folks can post their own resources too and share them with the Unanimous Craft community. Then, we all vote on which ones are the most useful. Oh heck yes. 


It's not over either. You can even curate lists of your favorite resources that share a common theme and bookmark them -- and then share them with the rest of Unanimous Craft.


If you own a resource - say it's a website that you operate - you can sign up to write little updates that are shown on the same page as your resource.


The site just launched on Monday, but already there has been a huge amount of interest. My lovely EtsyRAIN Beta testers did a great job of finding flaws and providing feedback so this updated version of the site is working great. 


I'm offering a couple of specials to get the ball rolling: 


1. Until the end of March, 2010 - Premium Memberships will be $45 per year (that's $15 off the full price of $60). You get to fill out a fancy profile and one Premium Member is shown on the front page each time the site refreshes. You also get discounts on additional advertising on the site and you get shown on the Premium Member page. It breaks down to $3.75/month for front page exposure on a potentially popular website.


2. Advertising on Unanimous Craft is currently set at an introductory rate. It will stay at this price until I reach 10,000 page views/day. BUT - you can purchase as much advertising as you would like now and lock in the introductory price -- so when other people are paying much more -- your ads only cost $20/month. Awesome Sauce.


In any case, please tell your crafty friends who might be interested in the site. You can also follow Unanimous Craft on Twitter and fan us on Facebook. There is also a forum thread on Etsy where you can post your feedback. 


Many thanks everyone -- and I love your faces.
Rosalie