Brecho Variedades

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday at hand here are my tips to running a successful sale. Feel free to reply with your own ideas.

ON ETSY OR OTHER SHOP
1. Edit your shop banner to announce the sale. This can be fancy or just adding a line of text in an eye catching color.
2. Also add text describing your sale to your shop announcement AND your Etsy profile
3. Edit your profile image to announce the sale as well.
4. Post in teams announcing your sale (make sure the team rules allow it first)
5. Add relevant tags for your sale, especially any official tags like "Black Friday Etsy"
6. Edit item titles to reflect the sale and put sale information at the very top of your item descriptions, I recommend edit express at craftopolis.com/ to make the process faster

OFF ETSY
1: Blog it, several times. I recommend once a few weeks out, again a week or 3-4 days prior, then finally on the day of the sale.
2: Post it on Facebook as an Event with all the details of the sale then share the event on your Facebook page. Again several time leading up to the sale.
3: Tweet the sale with a link to your shop, again several mentions prior to the sale and while your running the sale. Careful not to flood your feed with announcement tweets, every few hours is good.
4: If you have an email newsletter, send an email to your list announcing the sale
5: Post to deal sites like bigcrumbs.com
6: Run an ad on Google Adwords or Project Wonderful

Before Etsy switched their default search to relevancy you could pay $.20 to renew an item and get bumped to the top of the search results (which benefited larger sellers who could afford to spend the money to renew dozens of times a day). Relevancy search hasn't been a benefit to every seller but it is a much more fair system for sellers of all sizes, the quality of your titles and tags matters more than your budget for renewals.

Renewing items isn't totally useless though. Lets look at a few ways people find items:

• Search: Relevancy is king, if your items aren't relevant to the search you're unlikely to rank highly in results. Your titles and tags are the most important things here, however recency still plays a part so newer items that are highly relevant are more likely to show up at the top of search results.
• Categories: Etsy's category pages are still sorted by recency so people browsing that way will still see the most recent items listed or renewed.
• Your Shop Home Page: Renewed items get pushed to the top of your shop which makes it look fresher for returning visitors. You could also use the rearrange shop tool every day or so to do this as well.
• Etsy Mini: If you use this widget on your blog or other web page it is sorted by newest items (unless you choose to show featured items)
• Facebook Fan Page App: Etsy's official Facebook app puts a tab on your fan page that displays your shop ordered by most recent items.
• RSS Feed: Your shop feed (found at http://www.etsy.com/shop/yourshopname/rss ) can be used for automatically posting new or renewed items to various services like Twitter, Facebook, email newsletters, etc.

As you can see if you rely only on Etsy internal traffic then renewing helps but is limited, the vast majority of people browsing Etsy use the search rather than categories so making sure you have good titles and tags is a better use of your time than renewing items. If you use external tools then the impact of renewing can be greater. Should you rely on renewing to bring you all your sales? Absolutely not. Should it be a part of your overall strategy? Yes, renewing a handful of items regularly that are close to expiring is a good idea.

Renewing Tools
You can save yourself some time by scheduling your renewing using the following tools:

Clockbot - Lets you schedule specific items to renew, this is a free tool (not counting the $.20 listing fee from Etsy). You can schedule for days or weeks in advance but every item and time has to be selected for each scheduled renewal which can be time consuming.
Etsy on Sale - You can buy unlimited renewing options in monthly increments, I use this tool just because I can schedule renewing to occur at set intervals automatically (every 9 hours currently). It costs a small amount of money but I personally find it worthwhile for the convenience.

I originally wrote this as a section of my Squidoo lens "Using Etsy Search Ads to Promote Your Shop" but I think it's so important I want to post it here too. While this is written for the new Etsy Search Ads it applies equally to Google Adwords, Project Wonderful, or any other advertising you run. To get the most for your money and to be the most effective you have to look objectively at the numbers.

Don't be Fooled by Big Numbers
Lots of impressions and clicks doesn't mean a good CTR. 

Here's a perfect example. For 6 days I ran "polymer clay" as a keyword for my ads. This is a term that you would assume would perform well for my items because I make polymer clay jewelry. It also garnered the most impressions and clicks for that time frame.

However when you actually do the math and look at the CTR for this keyword you can see that it wasn't actually a good keyword for me to use with a CTR of under 1%. In contrast, over the same period of time "squid" received 359 impressions and 8 clicks for a CTR of 2.23%, "octopus" had a CTR of 2.36% and my best keyword in terms of click through rate was "halloween jewelry" which had a CTR of 3.64% (though being a seasonal term will be just about useless for most of the year).

Be willing to waste a little bit of money to run ads for one week to determine click through rates then mercilessly eliminate those with low click through percentages. Those with low impressions (less than 100) and no clicks be willing to let run a bit longer to see if they do, a keyword that only get 30 views in 2 weeks but get 1 click may not be getting much visibility but when it does it's effective.

NOTE: Since the changes eliminating low performing keywords went into effect this morning the overall CTR for my ads today has improved dramatically. Next week I'll do another follow up with data from a longer time frame.

Search Ads on Etsy started this morning. The grand experiment has begun and I hope it's a grand success as well.

I've put together a tutorial lens on Squidoo all about Search Ads including a lot of how to set them up and my personal thoughts on choosing keywords and evaluating your ad results (seriously, I put a lot of thought into the evaluation section and I think it's a good method for a more objective evaluation).

Since Search Ads have only begun this is a work in progress and it will be refined over the coming weeks.

Note: I was hoping so be busy evaluating the first day and posting live updated on @HandmadeBizBlog and @Noadi on Twitter but I've had a minor emergency involving a smoking light socket and will be dealing with repairs going on in my living room today. Updates will be sporadic.

When I first posted about looking at Etsy Relevancy objectively it was about a week later. It's now 45 days out and how is my shop doing? Well sales are up over this time period last year but there were things going on last year that affected my ability to make, list, and relist items so it's hard to tell how badly that affected my sales over this time frame last year. My sales are also up over the 45 days immediately prior to the relevancy switch which I think is a better gauge of how things are going. The big payoff though is looking at site search stats:
The blue line is the last 45 days since relevancy, the green line is the 45 prior to the switch.
Visits with search: +60.74%
Total Unique Searches: +59.36%
If something is hurting my sales right now it certainly isn't the new search. Of course some sellers are doing worse with this change and I am sorry this change is hard for them, anyone who wants me to help them improve their shop is welcome to contact me with any questions. However the people making sweeping statements about how Etsy is killing their business and no one is making sales or getting traffic is just outright wrong (Etsy's own statistics show sales in August were way up over both last year and July).

Etsy is launching their new search ad program but there seems to be a lot of confusion about some basics on online advertising so here are some definitions of common ad terms. Etsy's new ad program works a lot like Google's Adwords search ads so you can apply a lot of information about Adwords to Etsy Search Ads.


Impression - When your ad is seen. So 5,000 impressions means your ad is seen 5,000 times.
Click - When someone clicks on your ad. 5 clicks means 5 people have clicked on your ad and viewed the page it is linked to. Etsy uses the term view for this on your shop stats page.
CTR - This stands for Click Through Rate it's a percentage arrived by dividing the number of ad clicks by the number of impressions. If an ad is clicked 8 times and has 300 impressions it has a CTR of 2.6%. Generally a CTR of >1% is considered good.

How Search Ads Work
When someone searches using a keyword (say "silver necklace") ads using that term are displayed. The price of that ad depends on several factors: frequency it is searched and competition for the search term. So a term that is searched 500 times a day and is being bid on by 30 ads will have a higher price than a term with 1000 searches and 30 bidders. Likewise a a term that is searched 500 times with 5 bidders is going to be less than a term with 1000 searches and 50 bidders. Thus a popular term can actually be quite cheap because it searched thousands of times a day and even though it has a lot of bidders there's enough rotation for everyone.

Etsy has a list of estimated prices per 1000 impressions for keyword on this page but expect it to change once the ads go live based on demand for keywords and changes in what people are searching for.

Etsy Ads or Google Adwords
This isn't an either/or question, nor should it be. The fact is that Etsy Search Ads, Google Adwords, and Project Wonderful (another fantastic ad network) all serve different audiences and can all be part of an overall advertising plan. Adding a new advertising option may require that you shift your advertising budget around a little bit to make room for the new expense (though if you were a frequent relister on Etsy you can put some of the money you are now saving on listing fees towards advertising now that relisting isn't as useful a strategy). If you don't currently have an advertising budget you really should have one, marketing is a vital part of business and as much as I'm a fan of marketing that costs time not money (blogging, social media, etc) traditional advertising is still important.

The helpful folks at Handmadeology (another great resource for handmade business owners) have ut together a free report on Etsy Relevancy. You do need to give them your email address for their mailing list but you can unsubscribe after getting the report if you really don't want it.

I put off writing this article for a couple weeks to see how relevancy is working and work out what I think works and doesn't work. First of all I want everyone who hasn't read it yet to go read my posts SEO and Your Customers and Being Seen is Not Enough for some more background on my thoughts on how your writing effects your customers and why ranking well in search shouldn't be your only goal.  

This article is going to have a lot of images so I'm posting them scaled down, click to enlarge if you're having trouble reading them.

Determining Relevancy
Factors Etsy uses in determining relevancy according to their article on the subject.
Titles - In particular Etsy is weighting the words at the beginning of a title more than the words at the end. In particular the first 3 words are the most important.


Tags - Tags in this case also include the categories you pick when you list an item. I'm not positive on this but my own experiments seem to imply that those tags weight a little higher than the ones you type in. Keep in mind that Materials do not count as tags and are not factored into search (I tested this, using a material listed that I am not using as a tag and it did not show up in the search at all) so if the material is an important selling point of the item you must have it in the tags.

Recency - This is how newly listed or renewed your item is. In the past all of Etsy's searches defaulted to just the most recent, now it is just one factor in the search. This means you don't need to renew items all the time to be higher in the search but it's probably still a good idea to have items spread out in how recently they have been listed. If you previously renewed multiple items every day you can now just renew an item or two that are close to expiring. This of course is going to save you money in listing fees that you can better use on other advertising.

Attributes - These new options for recipient, occasion, and style. Etsy has stated that they will be used in search eventually but right now they do not factor into search (as proven by the fact that "unisex adult jewelry" has almost no results). So until these attributes are included in the search if they are an important selling point for your item they must be included in tags.
From my own experiments this is how I think the level of importance for relevancy goes:

1. First 3 words of the title
2. Categories (possibly the same or nearly the same weight as #1)
3. Tags 
4. Remaining words in the title (possibly the same or nearly the same weight as #3)
5. Recency

I haven't been able to determine the exact weight of these factors but let's for the sake of simplicity give them point values (I am sure the algorithm is more complex than this but it gives you the idea):

• First 3 words = 4 pts
• Category = 3pts
• Tags = 2pts
• Other title words = 1pts

Okay so if I search "Octopus Necklace" we would have:

(Category -> Necklace)+(First 3 words -> Octopus)+(Tag -> Octopus)+(Title words -> Necklace) = 4+3+2+1 = 10

but if I searched "Octopus Pendant" I would instead have

(First 3 words -> Octopus)+(Tag -> Pendant)+(Tag -> Octopus) = 4+2+2 = 6. 

Thus I would expect that even though there are far fewer results for "Octopus Pendant" than "Octopus Necklace" that I would rank lower in the search results for "Octopus Pendant" (and I do, in fact when I just ran this search "Octopus Pendant" didn't return one of my items until page 16 while the same necklace was near the top of page 2 for "Octopus Necklace"). So where does recency play into this? I think Etsy uses recency to rank items that otherwise have "equal" scores with the newer one being higher ranked than the older one.

Improving your Relevancy
In many ways improving relevancy is the same as improving your onsite SEO (one of the reasons I've had to make very few changes in order to rank well in relevancy). Use good keywords that shoppers are going to think of in search, if you need a little help use a keyword tool like Google Keyword Tool. Also use the keyword tool to make sure the words and phrases you come up with are ones that people search for while still being closely related to what your product is.

Make sure you use all your tag spaces and select all 3 categories if you can. Don't waste any tag spaces. For example if your items colors have name variations (for example a deep purple could be tagged both "purple" and "plum") and you have a space to fill use the color variation. If you item has a number of different names for the style make for you use them (for example a woman's tank top could also be tagged with "camisole").

Write good descriptive titles with important words at the beginning. You don't have to sacrifice your cute item names either! For example if you are a baby clothing maker and you have a item currently called "Joshua" that is a blue corduroy jacket a title like this would have good relevancy: "Blue Baby Jacket "Joshua" in Soft Warm Corduroy for Age 16 Months". Now the title "Blue baby jacket corduroy 16 months" would be just as relevant for the keywords "blue", "baby", "jacket", "corduroy", and "16 months" but the first title has more consumer appeal. You have a 140 character limit for titles, that first title looks long but it's only 65 characters so don't be afraid to write longer descriptive titles if you need to.

Remember the "long tail" while a lot of people will search popular but general terms like "red dress" a person searching for "red polka dot retro dress" is more likely to be interested in and buy your item if it's a red polka dotted 40s inspired dress. This is why it's important to write descriptive titles and use all your tags, to make sure people using those long tail search terms find your items because they are more likely to buy.

Are you panicking over Etsy's change to make relevancy search the default? Should you be? Visits can fluctuate widely from day to day for reasons that have nothing to do with Etsy's internal search. To really see what's going on you need to look at only visits coming from Etsy's internal search. Here's a quick way to check if it has helped or hurt you. For this you need Site Search tracking set up on Google Analytics (if you don't go here to see how, but I'm not sure if it will give you site search stats retroactively). You could also do this with Etsy's new shop stats but I prefer Analytics for it's ability to do direct comparison of date ranges.

Log into Analytics and go down to Content->Site Search. Set your date range to August 9, 2011 - Yesterday's date (because we want stats for whole days not partial we don't want to include today's date). Then check the box that says "Compare to past" and it should select an equal number of days right before August 9th then click "Apply".In my case the number of searches on Etsy leading to my items increased by 31.85%

Now I don't think this change has been around long enough to get really meaningful results yet, my increases could just be a fluke or because I've added new items, but it's a start and if I had found I was doing worse I'd be in changing my listings to improve them.

There's recently been a lot of stress in the Etsy community over the search being switched from Recency to Relevency. I'm not stressing. Why? Because the same things that help you in the Etsy relevancy search are also the things that help you in Google searches and if you've read this blog enough you know that I think Google is what you should be focusing on.

The first page of any Etsy search is 40 items, that means that you can't be on the first page of every search that would be relevant for your items. It's impossible. What you should be striving for is a well rounded listing that isn't trying to be at the top for only one or two searches, but a listing that ranks well if not at the very top for a wide range of related searches.

There's a concept called the "long tail" that is very important whenever you are talking about search engine rankings. The idea behind the long tail is that many search terms are only search for rarely but if you rank well for enough of these little searches you will get a lot of traffic. So stop worrying that you aren't on the first page for "dress" and start making sure you are titling, tagging, and writing descriptions so you will rank well for "blue cotton seashell print dress" in either Etsy or Google.



Wish all you want but Etsy, Google, and any other search engine is never going to tell you exactly what will put you at the top. The best you can do is write as relevant and accurate listings as you can that use good keywords that describe your items (and for Google build good backlinks). Don't pull your hair out trying to rank best for one narrow term in one search engine as your main way to get traffic, a broad approach to SEO and promotion will give you more consistent results that will protect you from major changes in just one area.  I would rather have 50 small traffic streams bringing me 5 visits each than one source sending me 250 visits because if one out of fifty disappears I'm not going to be devastated, I can just roll with the changes.

Users come first. That should be your number one rule whether you use Etsy, Artfire, or a self-hosted webstore. What this means is that while you should be using important keywords in your titles and descriptions, those are useless if your customers are turned off by the way your titles and descriptions are written or how your photos look they aren't going to buy no matter how well you rank in search.

This concept is called "conversions", you want the highest conversion rate you can get (for a web store that the % of visitors who make a purchase). If you have 5000 visitors a month with a conversion rate of 1% you are doing the same amount of business as a shop with 1000 visitors but a 5% conversion rate (50 sales per month). If you have 10,000 visitors a month but no one buys anything you might as well have had no visitors at all.

Here are three fictional titles for the same fictional product:
"Marvin the Robot"
"Soap robot lavender scented blue soy moisturizing handmade vegan"
"Marvin the Robot soap, moisturizing lavender scented soy soap"

The first is terrible, it doesn't even tell you what the item is. You can have creative names for your product, a memorable name may stick in a visitors head better than something descriptive but generic. However if the not having many clues, or misleading clues, about what the item is will hurt you as well. If visitors are clicking on "Marvin the Robot" expecting a toy or artwork not soap then that's not going to help your sales.

The second is better but a visitor is going to see it as either boring at best and spammy at worst. Why? because it's just a list of attributes of the product. People react to language in certain ways and if words don't read like a meaningful statement people aren't going to perceive it as valuable. Try reading your titles out loud and see how they sound.

The third title strikes the right balance. It both is descriptive, telling you a lot about the product (that it is a robot shaped soap, made of soy, moisturizes the skin, and is lavender scented) while also giving you product personality. If you don't know about the importance of telling a story about your business please go read All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin he describes the concept far better than I can but the gist of it is that people respond far more to being told a good authentic story than they do just being given the bare facts.

I used titles in this example because Etsy's new CEO just released an update on improvements to relevancy search and how to make titles better for search. I applaud the Etsy team for making much needed improvements to the search engine but I think it gave people the wrong idea. Ranking higher in search will not do any good if your customers aren't enticed by what they see.

I've written before about how important it is to keep reevaluating what you are doing and keeping your business fresh. I like to go through my shop every 3 months and make sure everything it as good as it can be and see if anything needs changing. I generally do this at the end of March, June, September, and December (after the holiday rush). Well I got a little behind so I'm just now working on freshening up my Etsy shop.

Here's what I did:

• Made sure all listings had up to date information and tags.
• Moved the short little stories for my cephalopod jewelry to after the main description instead of before.
• Added new custom order listings.
• Changed some categories. I completely got rid of the "Clearance" section, changed "Gifts and More" to "Seasonal Gifts" and added an "Everything Else" category (right now it just has my decorated tins which were moved out of "Gifts and More" but will have other stuff soon).

 Of course I've also been working on other things, more videos of my products for my YouTube Channel, updating the Noadi.net website, updating my Squidoo lenses, getting my presence on Google+, and updating and ordering new business cards.

So what could you do right now to freshen up your online presence?

This trick is something I just set up on my own site and is specific to blogs and sites running self-hosted Wordpress. Unfortunately I don't have an alternative for other platforms or wordpress.com hosted blogs. However if you have wordpress installed on your own hosting read on for a very cool trick to get more people to click from your site to your etsy shop.

I've been using a widget here on this blog called LinkWithin for quite a long time, at the bottom of each post it links to related posts here on the blog. I thought that it would be great to have something like this on my website but linking to my Etsy items. I searched through a lot of related post wordpress plugins before finally finding one that will pull items from an external site. The plugin is called nrelate and it lets you pull related posts not just from your blog but from any site in your blogroll. I have the links I want displayed in a separate link list and only my Etsy shop in the blogroll. I set the plugin to show 0 posts from site and 5 from my blogroll and now I have Etsy items beneath every posts on my site.

Etsy recently broadcast the Etsy Success Symposium Writing Workshop. This is good stuff regardless of where you sell so give it a view.

I've written before about Etsy Hacks and how useful they are but today I want to talk about digging into Etsy's options that you may not know about that make running your shop much easier.

Your Etsy
By default clicking the "Your Etsy" link takes you to your currently listed items if you're a seller. If you go to the Account link and click the Preferences tab you can change this to go to your Sold Items instead.
Message to Buyer
A thank you note is always nice to send your buyer but you can do so much more with this message. I include a link to my newsletter which is simply using Feedburner to turn an RSS feed into an email. You can use your shop RSS to do this, I went a step further and used RSSMix to combine both my shop feed and my studio blog.
Download Shop Data
I use spreadsheets for all my accounting including tracking inventory. Etsy added this option fairly recently and it makes inventory much easier. I download my entire shop as a .csv at the beginning of each month which combined with the data from the beginning of the previous month and my sold items I have most of the inventory data that I need with a minimum of fuss. You can find your shop data under Shop Settings -> Options and click the Download Data tab.
Download Sold Items
At the beginning of each month when it's time to do my accounting for the previous month I download the .csv file for my sold items form the previous month. This file has a wealth of information about your sold items that you can use, price, shipping, sales tax, coupon codes used, customer names and addresses, and more.


Download Etsy Bill
Another useful accounting download on Etsy is your Bill. It has a breakdown of every fee and payment you've made for a month. You can find it under the Your Bill link then click the month you want and scroll to the bottom of the page.

So you have some business goals for the new year. How are you going to keep yourself on track to complete them? Here are a few ideas for managing your goals.

Time: Say your goal is to blog 3 times a week but you're good at forgetting. Google Calender to set up recurring event reminders that are sent to your email a set time before you want it done (e.g. 2 hours).

Sales: Tim Adams of Handmadeology has created a free sales goal tracking spreadsheet. It's aimed at Etsy sellers but will work whatever venue (or multiple venues) you use.

Shop: Overhaul your shop for 2011 with this article from Handmade Spark that compile a great list of ideas for improving your shop and sales for the new year.

Recently Etsy replaced the old "Relist" option for sold items with two new options, "Renew" and "Copy". These new options both have their own pros and cons and you need to choose wisely which to use for each of your items.

Copy
The new Copy option works just like Relist did, it makes a copy of your listing which you can then edit. This is a brand new listing with a new URL, no hearts, and no views.
Pros

•  No views, it's a fresh start
• Save time listing a similar item (example: different color but price, shipping, description, most tags are the same)
• Create multiples of the same item type

Cons

• Different URL so links won't lead to the new item
• No hearts, someone who has marked the item as a favorite will see it as sold in their list.
• Search engine results may lead to the sold item not the active item.

Thoughts
I think copy is a great feature to save time listing similar items where you only need to edit the item a little bit rather than having to do everything over. Also great if you want to list multiple items of the same style in your shop.

Renew
This new feature is something completely different than what Etsy has offered before. This essentially lets you reuse a sold listing, the URL is the same (so any links to it will bring you to the item for sale not the sold item listing), and all hearts and views will remain.
Pros

• Keep the same URL so links to the items on other websites will still work instead of going to the sold item listing.
• Keep hearts so they remain in favorites lists and aren't marked as sold
• Search engines will be link to your active item not the sold item in search results
  

Cons

• Not as useful for one of a kind items.
• Views don't reset
  

Thoughts
I think Renew is fantastic, keeping the same URL and hearts is going to be great for sellers. If an item gets featured on a blog now the link will lead to an active item if it's been renewed. Frequently Google and other search engines will return sold items in search results which it likely to result in teh searcher hitting the back button out of your shop.

So what if you sell one of a kind items? If they are truly one of a kind, like the only painting you've ever done of a location, then renew isn't going to be useful for you. If on the other hand you make the same item frequently but your process means they are all one of a kind, in that case I think it's perfectly okay to use renew and replace the photos with the new item. If it's still a blue teacup that uses the same clay and glaze but because you hand throw them on a wheel they're all a little bit different, I think that's close enough to use this feature. Just always replace the photo so buyers will see the exact item they'll be receiving.


The Views Issue
I know some people are concerned about the views not going back to zero when you renew, I think any possible downside to this is overshadowed by the benefit of keeping hearts and the same URL. I think the concern that people will think the item is unloved or unwanted if it has a high view count is probably unwarranted, I don't think many buyers look at that and if they do they may perceive it as a sign of popularity. Only time will tell but I'm not worried.

If your concern about the view counts is that you can't easily see how many new views a recently renewed item receives go to Craftcult immediately after renewing and under Item Hearts you can click the button that says "Reset Views" and that will reset the New Views count to 0.

Now I'm not privy to how Etsy codes their site but for those wondering why the views don't reset here's my theory: Etsy is pulling the views from their visitor logs, since the URL is the same they are pulling all views the page has ever had. To reset the views they would probably have to note the time of renewal and only show views since that time which would be a lot of work for a pretty minor issue. Personally I'd prefer Etsy to only show the shop owner view counts since I don't think it's that useful for buyers and may have some small impact on buying habits.

Etsy has finally released the long awaited coupon codes. As of the time I'm writing this they haven't been rolled out to everyone but I was one of the lucky people who got it. This is also why I'm posting twice in one day, I already have posts for Monday and Wednesday next week and didn't want to wait to post this.  I did a quick test run of coupon code yesterday and it seems to work great.

There are a few additions to the coupon codes I hope Etsy makes in the future such as options to limit the code to one use only or to one use per user and to limit the coupon to just one section and not the whole shop. Right now a coupon can be used any number of times until you make it inactive and applies to the whole shop. It's a great start for the feature but I hope to see it expanded in the future.

Now on the the fun: How to promote your coupons! Here's a short list, please add your own suggestions in the comments I'd love to see them.

• Post on Twitter, your website, blog, or facebook fan page.
• Post in the Promotions section of Etsy's forum
• Post on coupon code sites like RetailMeNot
• Host a contest on your blog or social network of choice and email/message the winner with the coupon code. Personally I like trivia contests, I've done them before for giveaways as well.
• Include a Thank You note in orders with a coupon code for repeat customers
• Hand out your business cards with a code on them for new customers

Couple other thoughts: I'd put a short time limit on most coupon codes you advertise online, 3 days for example. This will help prevent someone turning up with a 15% off coupon when you already have your prices marked down for a sale.

Always include an expiration date for coupons you hand out or include with orders (even if you plan to use the code for a long time you should do this, change over your codes every 6 months or so) you never want an angry customer saying her code doesn't work because you've inactivated it with no warning.

I just created the Handmade Business Team on Etsy. It's a place for Etsy sellers to discuss business topics in a place other than the Etsy forums which have a tendency to get a bit off topic.

6.Here's another great new tool using Etsy's API from Craftopolis. It lets you do a number of bulk editing tasks like change prices or titles.