What exactly is IShopIndie.com?
I Shop Indie is an advetising co-operative. That means it is a site that enables its members to pool their advertising dollars to purchase advertising they could not afford on their own. Every month, our members contribute membership dues to participate in IShopIndie.com.

What do these membership dues pay for?
First and foremost, these dues pay for advertising the site. Each month, the membership dues collected are mostly spent on the purchase of online banner advertisements for the website. These banner advertisements link to I Shop Indie, which links to our members' websites. Shoppers find out about our members' fabulous products by clicking ads for I Shop Indie and then shoppers are forwarded to our members' sites to make their purchases. In addition to funding our ad campaigns, a small portion of the member dues also pay for administrative expenses such as web hosting, banner design and mailing list management/distribution.

Where does I Shop Indie advertise?
I Shop Indie was created to market to the alternative culture demographic, so it mostly advertises on indie music-oriented websites, like stereogum.com and insound.com. We also advertise on other indie culture oriented sites such as Questionable Content, A Softer World and Diesel Sweeties. These ad venues make I Shop Indie the ideal place to market products with an indie aesthetic.

So, how much are these membership dues?
Membership is $100/month. You can sign up for as little as one month just to see if this will be successful for you. Most of our members stick with us for much longer than a month since most members have found their membership with I Shop Indie very successful. Some of our members have been with us since the site's inception. Three and six month memberships come with a 10 and 15 percent discount respectively.

If you catch us when we do not have any immediate openings and you want to advertise right away or $100 is out of your budget, we also offer mailing list only advertising. Our opt-in "discounts and deals" newsletter is sent to over 1000 indie shopping fans each month. To advertise on the mailing list we'll need a discount code or a deal to share for your site. You can share a discount code or deal on our mailing list for $10.00. All submissions for mailing list ads must be approved. To advertise this way please contact us. Please note that I Shop Indie members are able to share deals and sales on our newsletter free of charge, this is a perk of I Shop Indie membership.

Wow! $100 seems like a lot of money!
Although $100 might seem like a lot of money, you have to consider what you are getting for $100. To begin with, major blogs and websites, such as those with hundreds of thousands or even thousands of visitors each day (meaning the sites we advertise on) are not cheap to advertise on. At the very least, you are looking at spending around $400/month for an ad on a site with any considerable amount of traffic and a lot of these sites charge much more. We do not just promote within the handmade community; we mostly promote in places that larger companies with bigger budgets advertise, and usually our ads are seen right along side ads for companies like XM Radio and American Apparel. This type of advertising brings our members a large and diverse customer base. When you spend $100 to participate in our co-op, you are essentially getting an advertising and promotional campaign with $1,200 behind it. Also, because we are an established co-op, we can purchase several advertisements from an ad venue at once and get reduced rates on our ad purchases.

It is also worth considering that your average craft show will end up costing you over $100 to participate in (probably even more if you pay yourself for the man hours you will spend sitting there) and probably won't bring nearly as many people to view your products as advertising with I Shop Indie. (I Shop Indie averages about 12,000 visitors per month and about 40,000 page views.) This is not to say that craft shows aren't great; the difference is that I Shop Indie allows designers to advertise to a larger, more targeted audience over a longer period of time, with less effort involved on the designer's part. In terms of views per dollars spent, $100 is not a whole lot to spend compared to other more time-consuming and inconvenient means of promoting your brand.

Hmm, I found another website that has 1000 visitors/day and an ad there is only $75 per month. I am not so sure I Shop Indie is a good deal.
Participating in I Shop Indie is a little different than running a banner advertisement on a blog or website. When you run a banner ad on a website, your ad is secondary to the site's content and usually off to the side of the page. People visiting the site you're advertising on have come to view the content on the site and your ad is not the center of attention. The average click-through rate on most banner advertisements is less than 1%, so the site offering you a $75 ad that promises you 1000 readers per day is likely to deliver an average of 300 click-throughs per month or less. With I Shop Indie, site visitors have come specifically to view our members' products and our members' products comprise all of our site's content. Our members always have a product right on the home page of the site and additional products listed on I Shop Indie's category pages. On average, each of our members receives about 900 click-throughs per month as a result of their I Shop Indie membership.

Why should I trust you guys with my advertising dollars? How do you know what you're doing?
I Shop Indie has been around since February of 2006. In that time we've advertised with Venus, Mighty Goods, Pitchfork, Insound, Large Hearted Boy, Design Sponge, Style Bytes, Cool Hunting, Boing Boing, You Ain't No Picasso, Drawn!, Gorilla Vs. Bear, NotCot, Crown Dozen, Catbird Seat, Stereogum, and many others. All of this has given us excellent experience with media buying and determining which sites do and do not deliver customers to our members. I Shop Indie is owned and operated by indie designers, and we use this site to promote our own brand, too, so we genuinely care about getting great results for this site and the other sites in our network.

What makes I Shop Indie different than all the other sites out there?
We understand that the indie designer has many options when promoting his or her brand online. There are lots of great marketplaces, like Etsy and blogs geared to indie designers with affordable rates. We certainly do not aim to replace these outlets for promotion. I Shop Indie was designed to work in tandem with your other promotional efforts by increasing your brand's visibility to an audience you might not be able to afford to market to on your own. Our goal is to make consumers aware that buying from our independent designers is an alternative to buying from large chains like Hot Topic or Urban Outfitters. In order to make that happen, a well-funded, highly visible advertising and promotional campaign for our co-op is essential.

The perks of participation in I Shop Indie are

• Our ads are targeted to a specific demographic.
  We bring together designers with products that complement each other. The designer selling handmade vegan purses is an ideal advertising partner for the artist making pendants out of recycled bottle caps. We bring designers like this together on I Shop Indie and then advertise to consumers who are most likely to be interested in products such as these.
• Our website membership is limited.
  Your products won't get lost in a sea of thousands of products on our sites because we only allow 12 designers to participate at once. This limited membership increases the value of your membership to our site. Our members always get 1 product right on the home page of each of our sites to maximize visibility.
• Our advertising and promotional efforts reach out to a large audience.
  Because we pool together advertising dollars from our membership, we are able to put together a well-funded promotion and advertising campaign. We also have experience with both, since we've been at this a while and know what produces results.
• We enforce quality control on our sites.
  I Shop Indie and the other sites in our network exist to help indie business people succeed. We do not accept members with unprofessional product photos or products that are a poor match for our website.
• Self-service, real time management of your own content.
  You post your own product images and descriptions and make changes at your convenience. There's no waiting for help from a web developer to get the job done. Our account management tool is user friendly, so you can manage your site membership day or night with ease.
• We offer performance data.
  You will always know how many click-throughs your products and website have received, and you will even be able to keep track of the number of sales you've received as a result of your membership with each site.
• We correspond with our fans via newsletter.
  Each month I Shop Indie sends a newsletter out to over 1000 of our website's newsletter subscribers. As a member of I Shop Indie you will be able to submit news about your products to this newsletter. This feature is just another way we help you promote your business.

OK, maybe I'll give this a shot. How do I sign up?
Visit our parent website's sign-up page and fill out all the requested information. Once you've created your account, log in and click the link on the top right that allows you to add websites to your account. Choose Alternative Culture from the first menu and I Shop Indie from the second one. Then click the "add me" button. If you try to join, I Shop Indie and find that the site is full you can join the site's waiting list and we'll add you as soon as we have room.

This is great information but I have a few more questions.
We'd be happy to chat with you, drop us a line using our contact form.