Changing Direction - More Online Presence

All this will fit inside, and it's only half full! See the image below!

Being new to the Craft Fair circuit, I asked around and learned that many who had been participating for a while, were not seeing the same results this year as in the past.

In fact, since October, one vendor shared that she hadn't seen sales on any weekend above $50. In many cases, that's what it costs to take part, so that is not a sustainable as a life-style, and would not support me, but actually cost more. Maybe good if I were a weekend crafter, but when would I have time to sew, and participate, assuming I wanted to keep working full-time, too?

Giving it some thought, it would seem that the answer would be advertising online. I had dabbled in Facebook advertising, and that had lead to more views, but no sales. I was only going in small, because my very exclusive product has a very finite inventory. Yes, I can make more, but they can take the better part of a day to make one, so, there will never been a big inventory. This is what allows my product to be unique, distinctive, and special.

I decided to advertise on Google, through Etsy, as that's where my 'store' is. I had found the Etsy/Google a week before, and put out a very modest $1. a day advertising, to see how it might affect my views / sales, but now I went back and upped that amount, to see if I could make a difference with Google. It's December, my product would make great gifts, it seemed like the right decision. I couldn't go a lot bigger (Etsy has strict limits on what you can spend a day) but I hoped for great things. Getting traffic, interest and sales.

The Etsy site advised it would take a week or so to ramp up, and they advised not looking at the results for a month. I couldn't do that, I kept a watch on what was happening, and it seemed to be happening pretty slowly. Coming back to check around Christmas, when I expected to see that I owed a debt to Google, I found that in fact I didn't. It didn't look like my product had been sent to Google often to be advertised there.

Which suggested to me that I needed to get my own web site up and running. I would still use Etsy to process sales, but I needed to be able to advertise, to get myself out there, to be found by folks looking to buy. Which is why I pushed out this site, before it was really ready to go, to start sharing my journey and these experiences along that journey with you.

All that is now inside, and look at all the room that's left!