You are only as good as your word

So you better make it count! I wrote a post about a great little shop, The Sky Ruby Project the other day. I got myself a whole new attitude about running this Etsy shop of ours. I also said as soon as I got another sale I was buying this cool bangle bracelet they had listed. Well, wouldn't you know, I got a sale! And so, a woman of my word, I just bought it! I am super excited, by the way!!!

But that's not what I am here to tell you about. Well, not all of it anyway. The other thing was the difficulty in keeping my word to the person I sold to. Who would have believed that when you allow 3 days to ship something, you would have a hard time? Sheesh. Suddenly, I was short handed at my full time job, leaving me alone all day for the past three days. For the past 2 of those three days, I was not able to leave before the post office closed. Today, I had someone scheduled to come in at 3:30, so at 3:31 I was in my car driving like a maniac to the post office.  I looked like a crazy race commercial, running into the post office, thinking I had only minutes to spare.

Funny thing about post offices. Apparently they stay open 'til 4:30. Good to know. But I got the package shipped. It cost me about $2.60 more than I had estimated. Good thing I had extra money with me. But now, I have sold, I have bought, run the good race, and now I am starving. It's dinner time! Have a great day!

It's All About Attitude!

So I was whiney and mopey about my lack of sales, right? And a lot of others were whiney and mopey about their lack of sales, too. And even more people were sick of reading about us being whiney and mopey about sales. It was becoming a horrible depressing circle, and I just couldn't take that anymore. I knew I had to do something. I just didn't know what, exactly. And then it hit me. If I couldn't sell my own stuff, maybe I could at least help someone else sell theirs. So I started creating Etsy treasuries, for people with little to no sales. Showcasing the talent, showing their stuff, and just giving what little boost I could to help them promote their shops. I met some great people, and now I want you to meet some of them too.

So, allow me to introduce one of those cool shops. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...
 The Sky Ruby Project!!! This shop has an awesome eclectic mix of items inspired by vintage jewelry. The story behind the shop is as inspired as the items it holds within. The Sky Ruby Project  was started back in 2007, and while it had some success to start, the owner had other dreams to pursue as well. A 7 year hiatus from the shop earned a Masters in Anthropology, as well as some pretty awesome work as art instructor and a writing specialist. Talk about well rounded!! But the desire to craft, to create beautiful items remained. And so the shop has reopened, and had a pretty good start if I do say so myself. I chatted with the owner, and learned that success is going to be all about attitude! And The Sky Ruby Project has got the right attitude for sure! The shop owner stressed to me the importance of doing your research!! Don't just expect to throw some pictures on a storefront and watch the cash roll in. Don't even consider defeat for at least a year, as research showed that it takes at least that long to get a good start, a feel for the marketplace, and the ability to gauge how your work is received. Another thing I learned in this chat is that you are going to have doubts, even if you are successful right off the bat. Doubts will haunt most every artist at some point. You just can't let them rule you and your craft. I admit I was totally inspired, and it turned my attitude around. I know we can all make this work! And thanks to The Sky Ruby Project, I have a short term goal. Just one sale this month. Just one. Why, you ask? Quite simply, because I covet a piece in this shop, and I swear out of my very next sale, I am going to buy it!

https://www.etsy.com/listing/185106975/vintage-inspired-bracelet-vintage-floral?ref=shop_home_active_4

 

 

Yes, this is what I want out of my very next sale. But there is more great stuff for you to check out and enjoy too! So drop by the shop and browse. Or better yet, shop! You never know, you just might find the piece that gives you just the right attitude!

Is this an epic fail?

I am starting to think we will, in fact, fail at our Etsycapade. Driving traffic to the site has been successful, for sure. But I have had almost 10, 000 people visit the shop, and only had 1 sale. Think of it as a brick and mortar store. If you had 10, 000 people walk through your store, and only one person bought anything, it would be a little disheartening. Actually, it's more like soul-crushing. I have a couple of more strategies I am going to try, and if they don't work, I will end up closing us down. What I can't figure out is whether or not this is a reflection on the things we create.

Anyway, I am going to try the new search ads Etsy has in place on their site. Well, I will if they get the bugs out. I have activated them, but they only run for a short amount of time before they stop working. Then I have to go back in and restart them. I am also going to try renewing items to keep us up in recency. Like I said, if this fails, I think I will shut it down. I won't stop crafting with my daughter, and may even open another storefront on another site, but I am just flat out running out of ideas for Etsy.

I have noticed that Etsy picks some favorite shops of their own, and they promote the heck out of them. Always listing items on the front page, showing them off in emails etc. I wonder if without them backing these artists, if their sales would be as phenomenal. Maybe they would. I don't know. I am just feeling the negativity today, and the impending doom of what I hoped would be a great idea. Good thing I didn't quit my day job. Which is where I am headed now. Have a great Friday everyone!

Adsense is pissing me off.

I know I started this to tell about how we do on our Etsy shop, but since this is a blog, and I have YET to see a blog without ads on it, I applied for adsense to monetize my blog.  And applied. And applied. And was denied, and denied, and denied. It keeps saying I don't have enough content for the crawler to pick up or their specialist to review. What the what???
Ok I know I have some pictures and links but it has plenty of words in it too. And not just random words either. Actual sentences, which flow into paragraphs, and ohmygosh, all that creates a little story on each post. What a freaking concept!!! I tried to find a way to contact them to find out what EXACTLY they expect to see before they approve an account, and so far I have not found a way to do that. I can't use the contact button, because it pops up a message that my account has been disapproved. The exact words, cut and pasted from yet another email denial  are as follows:

We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below.

Issues:

Insufficient content
---------------------

Further detail:

Insufficient content: To be approved for AdSense and show relevant ads on your site, your pages need to have enough text on them for our specialists to review and for our crawler to be able to determine what your pages are about.
Now seriously. If you have read any of my posts so far, you know WHAT MY PAGES ARE ABOUT.  But apparently, when I resubmit, I always manage to get the brain damaged crawler, that crawled headlong into a concrete Matrix wall, and can't tell this freaking blog is about starting a shop online in a forum that caters to mostly handcrafted items. Even if the crawler can't figure this out, surely the "specialists" can? Or not. So pardon me for a moment while I get remedial for google here.

This blog is about working from home, art, crafting, starting a business, sales, frustration, success, failure, and any other descriptor you can think of. These are keywords for the crawler.

Keywords for the "specialist" will also include hooked on phonics. Maybe if they learn to read and comprehend, they can snap to the other keywords here. Sheesh.

I am going to resubmit this damn blog one more time. After that, I will just repost this particular blog post to every public online forum out there. If they can't figure out that good ads for this blog would be art related, craft related, promotion of business related, then entrepreneurs everywhere need to know so they don't waste time with it either.

End rant.

I am not a team player...

Another way Etsy suggests to promote a shop is to join teams. After you join, you participate in the games and discussions they have to help promote yourself. So of course, I decided  to join a few right off the bat, because I really want to get our brand out there. (Branding is another biggie that I am not sure about, but it sounds good occasionally thrown into a random sentence here and there) The first thing I discovered about teams is that they are very time consuming. And many of them demand that you participate on a daily basis. Since I am still trying to build my inventory, AND work roughly 60-70 hours a week at my full-time job, this was starting to present a major problem for me. My first attempt with teams was an unqualified bust. I just didn't have the time to participate, as many of the games are very complex. After I got over 20 items listed in my shop, I decided to give it another try. After all, thousands of Etsy sellers recommend this, so I figured by the law of averages, it had to be beneficial. So I joined a team for helping with SEO and promotion. One of the games was to get 100 favorites for your item. Sounded like a great deal to me. I had to post an item, go favorite all the items listed before mine (over 200 pages worth) and wait for the magic. I took my latest masterpiece...

https://www.etsy.com/listing/183398003/recycled-multi-use-candle-holders?ref=shop_home_active_1

 

Listed it, click my way through all those other pages and gleefully watched as my favorites added up.

 

Now generally I am not dumb, but I fell for this hook, line, and sinker. The game did as promised. I currently have 91 favorites on this item. Yea me! But it still wasn't coming up in searches. I was stumped. It's totally unique, for sure. In hundreds of pages I never found another candle holder that would hold all types of candles. So WHY couldn't I find this in a search??? Page views. The people that run Etsy are not suckers, like me. They know things. Like my 91 favorites HAD to come from a team game, because I only have 39 page views of the item. Now if I had 100 page views, and 91 favorites, that would be a different story altogether.

 

When you list your item in a team forum, it places the item page in a convenient little box right there on the forum. It comes complete with a little heart icon for you to click on. You. Never. Have. To. Leave. The. Forum. So I shot myself in the foot big time on this one. I have a bunch of useless favorites now, with no way of knowing how many of the 39 people that actually went to my shop and looked at it really liked the damn thing. I think until I am MUCH better established, team time is in a time out for me.

 

But hey, if you like it, go buy it! It's still for sale, and I'll throw in the 91 useless favorites completely free of charge!

 

 

I'm a Twit, He's a Twit, She's a Twit, We're a Twit, Wouldn't you like to be a Twitter too?

If you sell on Etsy, one thing you have to do is promotion. Etsy will not promote your shop, no matter how fabulous you think it is. They give you tips on promoting though, so I started a little checklist of things I needed to do to promote the shop. Today, I'll tell you about Twitter. I am starting here simply because that is where I have gotten the vast majority of my views.  We are, by the way, @AislingsNeedful Come twit us!

So we started a Twitter account. I know exactly zero about Twitter, so I just started following people. Random people, celebrity people, art people, craft people, boring people,  funny people, it-had-a-pulse-and-a-twitter-account-people, all of them. I wasn't picky. Then I started tweeting links to my stuff. Constantly tweeting. Yep, I am a Twitter spammer. And suddenly I was getting hundreds of views a day in the shop. I was stoked!

And then I wasn't. Lots of page views but still not selling. Well, it seems you need to pick a target audience to spam, errr tweet, to. I confess I am still trying to figure out how to find my target audience. I was so disheartened, I quit the twit for about 5 days. I found out there were bots.
Things in the Matrix that were just scanning my pages without a real person behind them. I was pissed.

Ultimately though, I went back to being a Twit, because some views were better than NO views. And even if it is a bot, it still makes it look like your page is really popular to other bots that keep track of that sort of thing. And some people were actually looking. I get favorites. I get retweeted. I get my ego stroked. So being a Twit may not make me any sales yet, but once I figure out how to hashtag my target audience, I have faith the sales will come.

Are you my target audience? Well, spread some love! And cash. We love cash. Or credit. Or paypal. Go here and spend!!!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/AislingsNeedfulThing?ref=si_shop

For Natural Lighting, Fire is NOT Recommended. Seriously.

So I warned you I had tales of the light box. And I do. Natural light is recommended for pictures on Etsy. Sadly, Mother Nature has not been very cooperative on that front. Hence, the true light bulbs. True light bulbs have the faintest blue tint, rather than the white tint of a soft white light bulb. And just so you know, those suckers are HOT. I am getting our shop going on a shoe string budget. Enter a couple of $5 gooseneck desk lamps from Walmart. A pack of white tissue paper, and a couple of pieces of white poster board later, I was all set to create a light box.

I tried out a few boxes for this, but in some of my displays, I have lit candles. So I was thinking cardboard may not be the best idea. I was THINKING THIS THROUGH. At least, at that particular time I was. So here I am, flaming objects like this...
https://www.etsy.com/listing/182604592/aperitif-tealight-candle-holder?ref=shop_home_active_4

And no box to put it in. What I do have is an end table. And white poster board. And tissue paper. So, I slide the poster board under the legs of the table and up the wall behind it. I taped the tissue paper to either side the make light filters. I put my new bulbs in my new cheap lamps, turned them on, and started taking pictures like a madwoman.

I did mention those bulbs get hot, didn't I?

About halfway through all the items that needed new pictures, I decided to take a break, upload the ones I had, and get them into my shop pages.

The bulbs are also very, very bright.

So I sit here at my laptop, transferring pictures, while sweating and squinting in all that bright, glorious light. Which gets less glorious the more I sweat and squint. Finally, I looked up, annoyed at all that brightness and heat, ready to turn the lamps off for a moment. And that's when I saw it.

Don't use cheap $5 lamps for true light bulbs. I am now the not-so-proud owner of two desk lamps in the modern-art-meets-Picasso style. The globes of the lamps had melted, warped, twisted, and swirled into...well I don't know WHAT to compare it to, but I know I am never putting those damn light bulbs in them again. From the squishy feel of them at that time, I can only assume I was mere minutes away from a dandy little fire, in stereo.

I need better light fixtures to finish getting good pictures for my shop. But in order to get fixtures, I need to get sales. So go here...
https://www.etsy.com/shop/AislingsNeedfulThing?ref=si_shop and buy stuff. So I don't burn the house down in pursuit of better pictures. Please. Thank you.

The good, the bad, and the hideous

So the other thing that gets you noticed on Etsy is your pictures. Since people can't pick up your items to see them, they have to be very detailed. This also saves you from getting a charge back for a claim that the items was not as described or represented. Or so I've heard. I only have the one sale, so every bit of this is a learning experience for me. But I do see the point about good pictures. When I first opened my shop, I took a few pictures with my phone, posted them to my shop, and sat back waiting for the sales to roll in. Every so often, someone would walk by and brush the cobwebs off the top of my head. It was that bad. For example, here is the first picture posted of one of my items...

 

I thought it was vibrant, and totally eye catching. I felt like a nonconformist, leading the charge away from the dull white background.





Turns out a dull white background is what just about everyone wants to see. And not just ANY dull white background. I was using drapes of material as a background. Ok, drapes is a bit of a stretch. I was using uniform shirts from my brother's old job with a disreputable car dealer. But I thought it was working out pretty well.  Right? Right? OR not so much, actually.

The amended picture looks like this...

https://www.etsy.com/listing/181976176/gilded-accent-bottles?ref=shop_home_active_6

 

Huge difference, right? A little redneck ingenuity goes a long way. But the tales of the lightbox pictures are for tomorrow. I have work to do, and you have some shopping, don't you? Yes, I thought so! Happy spending!

 



So I made a sale on Etsy

I made a sale, I made a sale, I made a sale!!!!! Just one. And now I am hungry for more. If you ask for advice on how to boost sales, there are things you will learn to hate hearing. Like SEO. Everybody is an SEO critic. If you don't know what it means, don't feel bad. Neither did I. So I did what any nerd would do. I googled it.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - by any other name, is keywords. Or tags. Or descriptors. It's those words you reasonably expect to be used by the average person in the google (or bing, or whatever) search bar. Let's say you sell fabulous trinket boxes. Like this...

https://www.etsy.com/listing/181651952/celestial-bodies-trinket-box?ref=shop_home_feat_2

You have 13 tags to use for this work of art. How many two-word phrases can you come up with to direct traffic to your trinket box, rather than Betty Sue GottaShop's trinket box? I mean, seriously, there are only so many ways to search for a trinket box. Don't believe me? Try it and see. So I confess I am struggling with SEO in my little Etsy shop. And by struggle, what I really mean is I loathe dealing with SEO. I use google adwords keyword helper to help me, but apparently so does every other trinket box seller in the world. Anyway, I am still struggling with SEO. And don't even get me started on pictures. Or linkbacks. Or teams, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter......

Here's a thought. Go shopping. In my shop. Go. Now. Right now. You are still here. Why? Fine, I am leaving, and you will be here alone. In the dark. Bye bye!

To succeed or fail on Etsy

Did you ever think you had what it takes to make money selling your crafts? So did I. Almost a month in, and zero sales. But I have faith. I know I can sell this stuff, I just have to figure out how. So I decided to start keeping this online journal, to document my path to either success or failure. And also to stop anyone else from making the same mistakes I did. Because in the past month I am sure I have made a lot!

I started my little online shop in January of this year. I posted a few items, set up a facebook page, established a pinterest page, and waited for the magic to happen. And waited. And waited. I know my stuff is fabulous, and very affordably priced. It should be FLYING off the shelves so to speak, right? Yeah, uh, not so much. So where did I go wrong?? Ummm, well, everywhere!

A few beginning pointers for you here. Avoid the word "decorative". I used that for damn near everything I posted. Buy a freakin' thesaurus if you have to. I apparently really, really need to. You have to be as creative with your words as you are with your art. Seriously.  Paint a picture with words. It's not as easy as it sounds. I was worried about being too wordy with my descriptions. It seems that people who shop for handcrafted items love the stories that go along with them.
So a good description would not be "upcycled decorative vase". Yes, that is one of my items. No, I am not kidding. So, here is a new and improved description that I am toying with.

"Upcycled Butterfly Tattoo Vase". Or maybe "Upcycled Butterfly Design Vase". Or even "The-I-dug-it-out-from-under-the-sink-and-sparkled-it-up-vase". Obviously I am still working on descriptive, yet catchy, names for my items. But one thing I know for sure, it will not have the word decorative anywhere on the damn page!

More trials, tribulations, and really lame item names tomorrow! I'll wish you luck if you wish it back to me! Now go and conquer the world!