February

February is shaping up to be a fairly decent month. I'm hoping I'll get at least one more sale this month. Ideally, I'd get, like, 15 sales --- because that's how many items are in my shop at the moment. But I'll take 4. That's one a week. Not too shabby... though horribly awful from a business perspective. There is no sustaining on 4 sales a month, like, at all. Doesn't even come close to covering my costs. (I should mention that I currently have 3 sales, so the goal is 1 more for February. YOU can make it happen.)

I've decided to make a semi-decent effort at keeping the store stocked and have declared Monday as listing day. If I'm going to list anything for the week, it'll be on Monday. And only on Monday. With a bit more work on my part, I'll be listing things on Monday morning. Tomorrow, it's gonna have to be Monday afternoon since I still need to take photos of everything. It's dark outside now so I can't exactly take winning shots of product before listing... At least, not photos that I like. The colors come out all wrong when I photograph in faux sun.

I did release a new product in the last week or so: Triple Town Bears. The really exciting part about this new product is that I have approval from Spry Fox, creators of Triple Town, to sell my bears. I think that is the single most awesome part. Even if I only sell one bear, ever, I am completely satisfied with the outcome of these bears. Happy day.

I continue to try and figure out this networking business. I have an Etsy through which I want to sell things, preferably EVERYTHING I list. So, I go through the logical next step of someone who is completely inexperienced at Internet business: set up a Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ page/feed/whatever for people to follow store happenings and to encourage sharing of my business with others. Yay! Except, how do I get people to click the Like/Follow button? And I'm talking about people who honestly want to follow my store happenings. If anyone has the answer to that question, do let me know.

The other thing I need to figure out is how to get on the front page of Etsy. There's an Etsy store that claims they know the secret of being on the front page of Etsy every day and that they have a formula that works every time all the time to guarantee being on the front page. Treasuries seem to be this huge "thing" on Esty now. Get in a treasury list and you're sure to increase your store traffic. Well, yes. If that treasury ends up on the front page of Etsy. Only treasuries appear on the front page of Etsy. Treasuries and recently listed items. But if you listed your item more than 30 seconds ago, it's no longer recent. I'm thinking I should probably find other venues through which to gain visibility. I'm trying out this ShutUpAndTakeMyMoney reddit at the moment. I'm permitted one link a month for personal gain --- ie, my shop. So far, I get about 200 to 600 visits from Reddit if I post a link to my shop on ShutUpAndTakeMyMoney over the course of 2 to 3 days. I'll take that. Maybe someone will pick up my link and blog about it to their 1 MILLION followers. Maybe.

My LiveJournal account is expiring as of Feb 22, 2012. This is a disappointment, but also sort of a good change. I've not been terribly happy with LiveJournal as of late. The nail in the coffin was the "renew your account" payment. They really really REALLY want me to do an automatic annual payment. Last time I renewed, I declined for auto pay. Well, guess what. They enrolled me in auto pay anyway and about a month ago I got a notice that they were going to charge my account renewal to some card or whatever that they had on file. HA. Fat chance. That card had been terminated eons ago. But that's not the point. The point is that I said NO AUTO PAY, and they did it anyway. Bad move, LJ. Bad move.

Blogger wasn't exactly my first choice for a new venue. I looked at DreamWidth first. Alas, same problem exists there that I had with LiveJournal: I want 50 user pics. LiveJournal wants you to pay $10 + whatever the paid account fee is. Dreamwidth wants $35, total, to get more than 5 user pics (paid account.) Maybe its best I went with something that didn't have user pics. For the uninformed, user pics are little images that appear with each blog entry. LJ & DW also have "mood" options for each post. You know, both have on order of several hundred moods to choose from. I can't say that I've used more than 5 or 6 of them. And the reality is that they're terribly unnecessary.

All those "other features", like video and photo uploads from your computer, I've already moved to services like Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa. LJ offered too little space up front when I was using it --- about 20 MB. And their interface for photos is the worst interface in the universe. It crashed, all the time. It's difficult to navigate and understand. And I hated it. I have no idea what DW offers, but it's probably best I don't step in that.

Over the next couple of days, between new listings and madness, I'm going to migrate all of my pattern posts to Blogger, probably with backdating if I can do that. I'll maintain my LJ account, free version, until I decide yea or nay to keeping every blog post I've ever written since I started blogging in college. Most all of them are hidden from public & friend view now, partly because I've grown out of that, but mostly because Mom and Dad are on the Internet now, and seriously, I don't want them reading my old blog posts. Sorry, Mom & Dad. It is what it is. You'd probably feel the same way if you're parents gained access to your "blog", aka "diary". When I was young & stupid, I was not so awares of the publicness of the Internets. We are more cautious now. No. There are no drug & sex escapades in my old blog entries. Just a lot of... old me. What does one do with nearly 10 years of personal logs? What does one do with 10 years of paper journals? Is it really worth holding on to, even in digital form? Meh.

K.Thx.Bye.