The Shapeways Blog: 3D Printing News & Innovation
Shapeways Blog
Wednesday, June 2. 2010
StumbleUpon Digg and Tweet your Designs.
For example, at about 8:15 pm today I submitted Dizingof's Kitchen Stand for iPad to StumbleUpon and by 10pm the page has had 62 views.
This alone is enough to drive traffic to your shop, but if you did the same thing with every object in your shop you could conceivably build up quite a lot of visitors (and hopefully sales). It is important to tag the page appropriately otherwise you will simply be bringing the wrong people onto your pages. By tagging your page you also make it easier for others to tag that they also like the site, and thereby raising your popularity and ranking.
To take this a step further I then submitted the same page of the Kitchen Stand for iPad to a design blog and again submitted this blog entry to StumbleUpon, this now creates a secondary and tertiary bookmark back to the original design creating a kind of triangulation. Within 2 hours this blog (by StumbleUpon alone) has exposed the design to another 45 people.I have seen pages get over 3500 hits in a week using this method, not every time, but enough to make it worth trying.If you are a Firefox user you can install a StumbleUpon toolbar that makes it easy to submit and tag pages. Similar things also exist for Digg and Reddit & I assume other sites and browsers.
It also seems to help if you write a brief description when you submit your design as you can see the other two examples have no description and fewer hits. This is also relevant to the Shapeways stores, the more you write about the product, the better chance that people will be able to find your work using search engines, and understand your design with a description.
Now if you were to do the same thing with Digg (which also can share instantly with Facebook) and/or Reddit etc you may see similar results. Take decent pictures and submit them to It's Arrived on the Shapeways forum and post a link to your page on Twitter and you are on your way to exposing your designs to more potential customers.
And of course you can follow Shapeways on Twitter & join the Shapeways Facebook community, a perfect place to share your success and promotion tips.
Comments
Thank you ! I think you just made me a sale from that StumbleUpon traffic !
Kind regards,
Dizingof
hopefully there are more to come,
You should do the same thing to all your designs that are for sale, as well as submitting to your video on Youtube. Youtube is the second biggest search engine at the moment...
Keep up the great work (I say with iPad envy)
Duann
http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/kitchen-tech/easily-use-your-ipad-in-the-kitchen-with-3d-printed-stand-118461
