Why is posting every day not growing my shop?

Because posting doesn't accumulate anything. Each post gets shown to whoever it gets shown to, and then it's spent, and the next morning you start again from nothing.

I sold handmade for years before I taught any of this. Feathers on eBay in my late teens, then Swarovski jewellery, then quilts and bags made from cotton I imported from America, and glitter hairbows made in a stretch where there was no money coming in and going back to work early was the alternative. For a long run of that I was making content for Instagram on a fast beat rhythm, hoping people saw it, and I should be honest that it wasn't miserable. I was learning and I was earning something at the time. It was just taking a lot of hours, and I had a newborn and a toddler in the house while it took them.

One thing goes out, then the next thing has to go out, and sitting underneath the whole arrangement is the hoping.

So is the algorithm hiding my posts?

It doesn't need to hide anything. It just stops choosing you, and it doesn't have to tell you when it's changed its mind.

Somebody can watch everything you make for months and then never see you again, and neither of you would ever know. She likes the thing you posted, she watches the next one, she's genuinely interested in what you're making, and then she quietly stops being shown you.

She doesn't come looking. She hasn't gone off your work and she isn't annoyed with you, she just stops seeing you, and you never find out she's gone.

That's the part that took me longest to understand, and it isn't really about the algorithm at all. None of that attention was ever mine. It was sat on somebody else's platform, the platform decides who sees you every single day, and it makes that decision without telling either of us.

So when the views drop, the instinct is to go back through the week looking for what you did wrong. Usually you didn't do anything.

The same thing is happening in the shop, and it's quieter there so it's easier to miss. Somebody types a search, lands on your listing, has a proper look through your photos and leaves. She'd never heard of you before that minute and she won't remember your name tomorrow, and Etsy knows exactly who she is while you don't and never will.

What am I actually building when I post?

Nothing that stays, and I know how bleak that sounds when posting feels so much like building.

You put the hours in, the post goes out, some people see it, and the counter resets overnight. There's no pile getting bigger in the background where you can't see it. Posting more feels like building something and isn't, and the reason that's such a convincing feeling is that the work is genuinely hard, so it ought to be buying you something.

It takes the hours while it does it, too. The rhythm never slows down because you've had a good one, it just wants the next thing, and it wants it whether or not the baby slept.

You'll have been told to be consistent, and to be patient, and that the algorithm finds you in the end. Consistency isn't bad advice and I won't pretend it is. What I'd want somebody to have said to me is that patience only pays off when something is quietly building while you wait, and on a platform nothing is. You can be consistent into a machine that empties itself every morning and come out the other end with the same nothing you went in with, only tireder.

It's easy to decide at that point that the products are the problem. Usually the products are fine and nobody is seeing them.

What do I do instead of posting more?

Get her somewhere you own, and for people like us that means an email address.

I'd rather be straight about what that is and what it isn't, because it doesn't need overselling. An email still has to get past a spam folder and a promotions tab. She can stop opening them whenever she likes and there's nothing you can do to make her, and no clever subject line gets round that. What changes is that whether she hears from you again is at least yours to decide

What it costs you is the asking, and the asking is the awkward bit. A follow is free and takes her half a second, where an email address is a real thing to hand over, and she knows perfectly well what she's handing it over for. So far fewer people will do it. You build it slowly, one at a time, and at first it'll look small sat next to a follower count you already have.

It doesn't look like nothing though. You can see who opened it, and the platform never told you that about a single one of the people watching you.

What happens once I've actually got the addresses?

This is the half nobody talks about, and it's where the whole thing can fail properly rather than just slowly.

A list you never write to is a slower version of the same silence. The addresses sit there getting older, and the woman who handed hers over because she loved something you made in the spring hasn't the faintest idea who you are by the time you turn up in the autumn wanting something from her.

I wrote to mine at least once a week and sometimes more than that, and it was always something worth having rather than me selling at them, because otherwise they'd have got exhausted by me. That's the whole of it, and it's less of a strategy than it sounds. Getting the address is the start of the job rather than the end of it.

What changed for me was that once there were people I could reach directly, I started launching to them instead of hoping, and suddenly I was in control of when people knew about me, which meant I got to pick the day rather than waiting to be picked.

I still made content. It just stopped having to go out on that fast beat rhythm.

And I got an hour back.

Go and look at whoever liked the last thing you made, and count how many of them you could reach tomorrow if the platform decided today was the day it stopped showing you