Bitcoin Forum

I design produce and sell bitcoin themed nieche-items (cufflinks, tiepins, lapel pins, money clips and keychains) and I'd like some advice and toughts on how to market them. What I've been doing up to now is:
These are in the order of effectiveness btw, incase someone else is struggling with the same issue of reaching customers. I personally feel very strongly about spamming any media so I try to make posts only when I have something new to show be it prices, promotions or new items.

A forum post here with my goods, pricing, delivery times, pictures and customer reviews.
Posted my goods on bitmit.
[edit] Sold items to a local webshop in bulk.
Posted new items and the occational promotion on reddit.
Donated goods to a mining pool for a promotion mining competition.
Particapated in bitcoinfriday.
Announced a btc-back deal on #bitcoin-otc in an effort to build up my rating.

--Things of which I cant be sure have been effective--
Changed my forum avatar to show images of my goods and added links to where they can be found on my signature.

---the cutoff line, things below this have thus far been ineffective--
[edit] Tried attracting an overseas re-seller.
Made a facebook page for the buisness, did not put much work in to this as I felt it was very likeley to be a waste of time.
Posted my goods on coinpost.
Copied my forum post to bitcointrading.

What I am going to do next:
On my winter vacation I'll be making an attempt at scraping together a webshop, I've done a lot of work on this allready registered a domain, made a few images to use on it, read tons about different templates.. selected the one Im going with and found a payment processor that works with it.

I have also considered, but felt not worth the effort:
Making a youtube video about the goods and promoting it trough cointube.
Paying coinvisitor or similiar a similiar site for traffic to either my forum thread or bitmit auctions.

How would you approach this? Essentially my problem seems to be getting visibility, whitout becoming a spamming moron which I most certainly do not wish to become.

We have been using pretty much the same strategy on our marketing, but there is couple of things that looks like you haven't tried.

Bitcoin subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin)
We got a ton of traffic when we posted on reddit about our site. I think you should try that too, maybe give a reddit discount or something, they love that.

Facebook page can be good, but you have to be really active there for it to be beneficial. Lots of posts, almost once a day.

Paid advertising
You gotta spend money to make money :) So far, we'd had really good success with banner ads in Operation Fabulous and CoinURL.

Been there done that, as I mentioned above :)
Im supprised this accounts to actual sales.. are you sure it does, page loads are worthless imho.

Oops, somehow I skipped through that, sorry!


Sure, page views are SOMETIMES worthless. But it all matters on context. If you advertise on websites which sell other kinds of goods with bitcoins, that means that the visitors are already eager to use bitcoins. If you advertise on google adwords with keywords like "buy X with bitcoins", those users are already searching and willing to use bitcoins to buy your goods!

I like the coinvisitor idea.......but perhaps a little biased...... ;)

This week I've focused on getting my own store online, I suppose trying out paid advertising comes once Im done with it and the banners and such required.

Once you have your store setup find all the bitcoin directories and submit it to them
http://bitcoin.travel/
http://www.bitcoindir.com/
http://www.bitcoindirectory.net/

http://www.bitcoinclassifieds.net/


Good optimization is also important I can help you out with Search Engine Optimization if you need it, at the moment I'm also trying to promote my store so I can share a few tips I have with you I can also help with the webstore and advertising if you need it drop me a PM and we can work out pricing if you're interested

ill sell you some of my signature space =)