Where else are you ladies advertising, for starters? Do you all have Facebook fan pages? Twitters? Printerests, Tumblrs and Instagrams? Webpages? Are you a part of any other online communities or craft forums, networks, clubs, etc? Are you printing flyers and pasting your cities and towns to get the word out, and attending local craft fairs in your area? How about offering tutorials, or blogging? Or if not, sending your products out to popular blogs involving your niche and asking them for honest reviews? Have you tried doing contests for small but free merchandise, or creating an email list of potential clients and fans and keeping them updated on your newsst products or sales? Has anyone considered wholesale pricing, or offering discounts to other businesses in exchange for good old word-of-mouth-advertising? Business alliances don't tend to hurt either - advertising space for advertising space and what have you.
There's plenty of ways for you to be getting the word out, but a big part of it is just looking at your target audience. You're all online stores. You're all selling handmade products, and you're all from Etsy. So really, what you all need to try and reach for is stay-at-home parents, older teens and artsy, "indie" people, plus whoever applies to you specifically. Which means that yes, you should have all the social media I listed above and yes, you should do your damnedest to both make friends with your customers, and make your friends your customers. Don't have any friends? Network and make some new ones, and call in favors. Etsy tends to be a very close-knit community; we like to share and marvel and ooh and aww over eachother's work, so as long as you actually put in the hard work and ask for help once in a while, things should go well for you here. Don't be afraid to barter with the graphic designers here if you need help with a banner, and don't be afraid to ask a bigger store how they got to where they are. People are surprisingly nice here, but don't forget - everyone's trying to run a business. Don't ask for freebies.
Also, consider leaving your business card/flyers at bus stations. You'd be surprised at how much work my mother's gotten that way.
