Product update: Maker portfolios

Every month on CustomMade we have thousands of Buyers (literally, last month we had over 750k unique visitors) searching for custom creations. As such, our latest product update is for you, CustomMade Maker, because your work appearing at the top of a Buyer search = more jobs and the opportunity to make more visions a reality.

The CustomMade Development team has been hard at work implementing vast improvements to our search engine to 1) help Buyers find just what they’re looking for and 2) make it easier and more natural for you to be found by them.  Here’s what you need to know:

Say good-bye to tags
We highly doubt that if someone came into your shop or studio you’d talk in snippets of “table,” “brass,” “quartz.” No, you would talk to them like an old friend. We’re asking you to do the same on CustomMade. Simply give a thorough project description and we’ll take care of the rest with our awesome technology.  (Find some more tips on that here and find a great example, here.)

Engage with Buyers
We like to reward Makers that regularly log on and respond to Buyer messages. Regularly interacting helps the Buyer feel secure and confident in working with you. Just think of every message you send through CustomMade like a token, working your way up to the first page jackpot.

Britta Ambauen is extremely thorough with all of her Buyer messaging. She goes into great detail to ensure the Buyer is happy with all aspects of the Creation. (Click to view screenshot).

Win those projects
A sure way to rise up through the CustomMade search ranks is to send proposals when applicable to your work and win projects. We’re confident you’ll make the Buyer happy with your work, so when you get a positive review we’ll bump you up up some more. For example, Ashley Cunningham & Co. has gotten a positive review for almost every Creation.

Beef up your Portfolio
The more projects you have, the more visible you’ll be. We recommend uploading at least 10 projects to your CustomMade Portfolio, but the most successful Makers have over 50 (hint, hint). Rolf Hoppe of R J Hoppe Inc. has 50 projects uploaded to his Portfolio, all complete with quality photos and robust descriptions. This makes him a hot ticket in the search world.

To sum it up, the more you add new projects, express interest on the Job Board and interact with Buyers, the more we can learn about you and help you connect with the right Buyers on CustomMade.

And just in case that’s not enough for you:

To help us take care of our rapidly growing community, we have added a new feature that empowers you to help us make our community better. If you see a new job that is mis-categorized (or looks like it might be inappropriate), you can click “Report this project.” (See the below screenshot). We will take care of if from there.

“Report this project” appears in light blue lettering under each posting on the Job Board.

Stay tuned…
Coming soon we will be releasing an easier, more efficient image upload process that will allow you to grab directly from Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox and Flickr so be on the lookout!