Make great Treasuries fast

With the November CreateCrochet challenge being all about creating treasuries it seemed like a good idea to write an article on creating Etsy treasuries. There are many articles out there on creating good treasuries (yes, we all know – use good photos), how to get into more treasuries (yes, we all know – use good photos), and how to get your treasury on the front page (ok, ok, it’s all about the photo’s again)! But the most frustrating part about creating treasuries is how long it takes to do. The fact is, making a treasury is a lot of work! I cut down the time it takes to make a treasury and hope that you can do the same. This treasury took a total of 15 minutes from start to finish – not including sending convo’s to the featured artists.

The secret? Don’t start with Etsy; use a search engine image search. I prefer using Bing and have good results with it; you can try Google too and use what works best for you – the steps are the same for either.

1. Go to www.bing.com

2. Click on Images

3. Type a search term and then type “site:etsy.com” and then click enter

• For this example I am making a treasury for modern gift ideas and I typed

“modern site:etsy.com” into the search box

Try to be broad with your search terms and this will yield more results.

• You will be presented with hundreds of images from Etsy that use the tag “modern.” You can now scroll through the images quickly and easily to find what you are looking for.

 

4. Find an image that you like, right click and select Open link in new tab. By opening the link to the item in a new tab you can easily get the item number without losing your original image search. 

                             Select the new tab to go to the item page.

5. Scroll to the bottom right side of the page to copy the Listing number. You can paste the listing number directly into the poster sketch tool http://www.etsy.com/poster_sketch.php or treasury list.

In the case of this item that I selected, it already sold. No need to worry about that, simply go into the shop and find the item again, (most shops relist sold items) to get the new listing number or you may even find a similar item that has a better photo!

 

6. Continue entering all of the listing numbers into the treasury and arrange the items until you find a configuration that you are happy with.

This is what my treasury looked like once it was complete

The search engine image search tool does not always work for every search you perform, a lot of it has to do with a pesky thing called Search Engine Optimization which is how webpages are ranked according to algorithms. For example, if you try the image search and use CreateCrochet as your search term, the results are not as good as the above example, only a few team members are shown, some of which are no longer on the team.

Image searches can be fun and are also very useful for finding other things too, try using them to find a new crochet pattern. It is much nicer to look through a series of images when looking for a new pattern than a list of links that may or may not have a pattern you want.

Here is a sample of what I found when doing a Bing image search for “crochet hat pattern.”