SEO, Social Media, and advertising challenges

With my niche of printing miniatures for tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, Pathfinder, Frostgrave, Fallout, and Star Wars, gaining movement or ranking on search engines can be incredibly difficult. Advertising is one way to increase ranking and gain traffic, but it becomes incredibly expensive, especially with the way Etsy left me.

I had paid for Etsy marketing for the better part of a year, and that budget was directly deducted from my earnings. If you look at Reddit, you'll always see that Etsy's marketing was designed to take as much money out of your pockets instead of increasing your revenue. You have no control over your pay-per-click, keywords, time-of-day advertising, etc. The one thing I disliked about it was that on a daily basis, I'd have to go into my well-performing listings and deactivate all the unrelated keywords they continuously added to my ads. This was a daily occurrence. As much as it was a terrible tool, it had its merits, like paying directly from your earnings instead of paying out of pocket.

Well, Google Ads, Facebook ads, Pinterest ads, TikTok ads, and the list goes on and on. I currently have Facebook and Google ads running. Let me tell you, the more money you feed into the budget, your optimization score drops and says you need more. Currently, as I'm trying to pull in traffic to the shop, the shop is running lean on orders. Kind of like a double-edged sword. The term "you spend money to make money" is extremely true. With limited funds, it's hard to find your audience.

The other option is learning SEO and, my god, for me, it's extremely complicated. To rank, there are so many things you need. Firstly, building the correct keywords throughout your pages, listings, blogs (see what I did in the first paragraph?). Another option that helps you rank is building backlinks. With my niche, am I supposed to go to Wizards of the Coast, DNDMinis (owned by Wizard), MyMinifactory and ask them to add my link to their competing shops? Relevancy is key, but where to begin? Well, one of the last options is building amazing content. There are also paid professionals and podcasts like The Grumpy SEO Guy to help you learn. Well, podcasts say that most SEO professionals are crooks.

On a good note, I had my first natural (found on a search engine) miniature order this past week instead of one of my regulars on Etsy. I know it's just the beginning of a journey, but we keep moving forward.

In a few months, you may be reading a blog from the next Tik Tok star. LOL.