Here at Customized Girl, we are happy to say our storefront platform is growing rapidly, with hundreds of new designs being submitted every day. With so many great designs, we now want to give our storefronts the tools and marketing tips to help get your products out and seen.
First up in our series of blog posts to marketing your storefront is Tumblr! Tumblr is a free blogging website that allows users to share their content with millions of viewers and in their own words “lets you effortlessly share anything.” What makes Tumblr so awesome is that it’s free, easy to use, and with the right keywords anything can go viral. Tumblr is also a great resource to find what is trending online right at this very moment. By clicking on the trending tab you can see what posts are getting the most likes and reblogs. With this information you can take one of your existing designs or create a new design specifically targeting a trending topic or keyword.
When you launch your Tumblr blog, you are launching a brand. So think carefully about how you want to represent and showcase your brand. No one likes spam so make sure to reblog other interesting images or posts that directly relate to your theme or niche. For example if you only create cheerleading related designs on your storefront then it’s ideal to follow other cheerleading blogs and reblog what your customers are excited about.
Important things to include in your post are hashtags, click through picture link, and a keyword or title comment hyperlink. Here’s a general break down of how to use Tumblr but we’ll dig a little deeper to make sure you are optimizing your images to the fullest. For example, take Customized Girl’s Best Friends For Life Tank Tops:
These shirts are targeted towards best friends so we want to makes sure to include hashtags “best friends,” “best friend shirts,” and the name of our design “best friends for life tank tops.” Those are only a few but it’s important to include as many descriptive hashtags because it will give your products a better chance of being seen.
More importantly, you want viewers to be able to find your products and purchase them. Make sure to include a click through picture link and a hyperlink. Keep it short and sweet like TeesandTanks did – “Customized Best Friend Tanks at Customized Girl. Tag your best friend!” By making “Best Friends Tanks” a hyperlink, we are giving the viewers a name and a way to find your product plus this great for search optimization.
What makes a great image on Tumblr? Two words: SUPER. TRENDY. Here are three ideas to go with those two words:
1. Grab the main the image from the design details page. Just go to your store, click on a design, right click on the main image, and choose Copy Image URL. Then on your Tumblr dashboard, choose post photo, choose post from web, and paste the Image URL. Boom done.
Ask yourself, how trendy is this design? Have I maximized it’s trendiness? What does that even mean? Well, that’s the challenge to be honest. Trends are constantly changing. Right now, I would say a trendy design probably has big, bold, and easily readable text. It probably has an element of humor. Maybe a rhyme. It’s probably fun, a little clever, and easily understandable at a glance.
2. Take a picture of a cute person wearing your cute design at a cute place. These types of photos are always trendy. Maybe there is a sunset involved. Maybe a Starbucks cup.
3. If you have a trendy photo of the blank garment, you can always photoshop your design onto it! That’s what the Tees & Tanks tumblr blog is doing with their simple wooden-hanger images. And guess, what? Those wooden-hanger images are available to everyone! Check out this blog post on how to use photoshop to add your own images to pictures of tees and tanks (which includes downloadable jpeg and photoshop files featuring those blank garment images).
Bonus idea: once you’ve created these wonderful marketing images, you can then add them to your design details page using the upload image feature.
Need some easy tips on editing images and adding images to your custom apparel in general? This blog post contains some helpful information about finding and using free photo editing websites. Check out the step by step screenshots in this post on how to add your photos to your custom apparel.
Let us know about your efforts to market your storefront and what Customized Girl can do to help get your products seen!