Never Thought I would be doing Marketing

I thought I would talk about Marketing a little.  Was I naive!!!!

Originally, I thought I would add my fused glass art pieces to Etsy to sell them and that would be that.  People would easily see my work and buy it.  Hoorah!  But alas, it is so much more than that.

Yes, Etsy is a great place to sell your handmade works and yes, the site makes it easy for you to list your items.  But you are not done there.  You have to continually work to ensure that your items stay relevent and are seen among all the other millions of items that are listed on Etsy.

How do you do that?  Well, here is the list which I have discovered needs to be done regularly:

1. Keep increasing the items in your store until you have at least 100 (people say that is the magic number for people to be able to find you and get regular sales) – Working on it
2. Learn about SEO and ensure you have good tags and descriptions so more people can find you from a search – I have tried
3. Participate in Etsy teams and forums as then people see your comments and may follow the link to your shop – I do as much as I have time for
4. Have a Facebook page where you discuss, advertise, communicate with others about your product – I do but mostly to communicate, I am not so good on the advertising 🙂
5. Recently Google+ business pages were added similar to the Facebook page and you should participate similarly – Not gotten there yet
6. Use Twitter daily both tweeting from your account and comments on others tweets, retweeting and so forth – Sorry, twitter still baffles me, so definitely not there yet although I did snag the Idle Creativity name
7. Here is a new one, Pinterest.  Etsy team members swear this gets them a lot of views and say that it is addicting.  –  It is kind of fun to have a place where you accumulate all of your interest and share with others, but so far hasn’t brought my store any views.   You need an invite to join so if any of you reading this want an invite, let me know.

One benefit of participating in the Etsy Forums is that every once in a while you will see an offer to list one of the items in your Etsy store on their blog.  This actually has brought views to my Etsy store.  Thanks to everyone who offers this!

An interesting Marketing discussion on Etsy has been people’s opinions on sales.  Some say that sales have not worked for them at all and others say they really help; some say that free shipping is psychologically more appealing to people as people just hate paying for shipping.

So I decided to try my hand at some sales.  For the week before Black Friday, I did a 25% off sale.  Then for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, I did a 20% off sale.  Between then and the of the year I offered free shipping.  For me, free shipping was much more successful even though I didn’t really advertised it but you could see when you looked at an item that shipping was free.  Good to know!

I did finally get my official business cards and have gotten braver about handing them out.  I gave one recently to my eye doctor!

Last challenge that I know of (I am sure there are millions more that I don’t know of) – my website.  My sister has been helping me learn web design by sending me small lessons which is so very cool and helpful.  So one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to tackle designing a new website!

When I worked in high-tech, Marketing was just not my thing.  But now, I will have to admit, it is challenging and kind of fun.   Maybe I still need some left brain things to go with the right brain glass fusing.  🙂

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Learning Never Ends

I knew you learned a lot when you were in school.  And then again when you had a good and challenging job.  But I never imagined that I would learn so much from a hobby.  Yes, I have learned a lot about glass and that has been great.

This time I am talking about Design, Social Media and Marketing!  This is mostly due to my choice to try to sell my glass.  In order to do this you need propaganda and customers!!!  This blog I will focus on Design and later I will tell you all that I have learned about Social Media and Marketing (which will forever be ongoing).

First, I needed a good logo.  I bypassed this one initially because a great friend and graphical designer, Sharon Liu, created a wonderful logo for me.  And then sent me the instructions on how I could do this on my own in the future (assuming I had the eye for design like she does!)

My Banner/Logo

Success #1:  With a great logo, I was now able to create my store on Etsy.  There are many fields to fill in such as about me, policies and packaging and shipping, but those are one time things.  Believe it or not, the item descriptions are the hardest as it is better if you don’t just literally describe the item, but rather explain what inspired you to make it.

Then I wanted business cards, mailing labels, post cards and so forth, so I decided to learn gimp.  My first few weeks were frustrating as I felt totally incompetent.  Eventually I read enough tutorials and just started plowing through it enough to feel comfortable using it.  I still need to learn how to take better pictures as gimp can only fix things up so much, but I am on the path of discovery here and no longer totally incompetent.

A friend pointed me to a wonderful company for your propaganda, moo.com.  They allow you to put a different design on each business card if you are so inclined.  I was a little overwhelmed, so for now, I have made 2 designs for my business cards:  a red theme with red pieces of glass and a blue theme with blue pieces of glass.   At the moment, I have business cards, mailing labels and small stickers all on order.  Yeah!!  I am starting to feel like a real business.

What is my next big hurdle?  My website.  My initial site was an easy to throw together site using iWeb on the mac.  But it had limitations such as not being able to add an RSS feed to the whole site and adding a feedback form.  I then got trial software of 5 different programs for web design on the mac and tried them all.  Eventually I decided that programs which are made based on templates just weren’t going to work for me as I couldn’t do enough customizing.  So my next big purchase will be Dreamweaver and then I am on the road to creating a new website.  But honestly, the tool is the easy part.  The hard part is the design because it is not that easy for me to sit back and visualize what looks cool.  As I said, my next big hurdle!  Stay tuned.

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