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!