If you are looking for a quick and easy way to get more people looking at your designs, an effective way to direct traffic towards your pages are with social bookmarking aggregators such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook and Twitter.

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.


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