We’re back with the fifth in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.

Your shop is ready, your products look great, so now it’s time to promote yourself! We love the incredible designs that you create on Shapeways and we do what we can to promote you via our blog, the Holiday Gift Guide and our weekly newsletter. To get the most success for your products you can’t just rely on broadcasting, you need to go where your audience is. 

The first step is to tell your friends, using your own social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google + and your own blog or website if you have one.  The next step is to go beyond your social networks, and spread the word to blogs and magazines, people who have a bigger reach than just you.

With your tags and description you already know who might be the best person to buy your product, so it’s time to think about where they lurk. Which blogs do they read? Which blogs cover products similar to yours? For example, if you made something related to gaming or memes, reddit is a great place to feature it. Made something arty and gorgeous? Tumblr’s your best bet. Does your product have moving parts? Making a video helps to bring it to life. Posting it on YouTube exposes it to a whole new community of viewers, and you can link your video back to your shop, and embed it directly into your product page.

Here are two great excerpts of ideas from our community members, read their full posts for more details.

Joaquin Baldwin describes how to make your product go viral in this informative post about his Seed of Ygrassil sculpture. 

Think about which blogs would be interested in your product, and send them a short email tailored to their audience. Save them some time by writing it in the way they would write an article, make it short and to the point and include clear images.  Try to make your text interesting, tell a story with it and explain what you created and why its cool.
Alex Delderfield shares his tips on launching new products in his Designer Spotlight about his Minecraft figures:

I wanted prototypes of the models printed, pictures for galleries ready, videos, various other networking and popular sites covered and a website all ready for the first day of my designs going ‘public’ to the world.

Have any tips to share? Post them in the comments, and let us know what you do to make your holiday season fruitful!