Craigslist

After reading more in the forums, I decided to list on Craigslist and see how that goes. 

I heard a lot of people saying there stuff had been taken off because they gave a link to their Etsy shop though.  But then others talked about having a Craigslist listing that basically gave shop info and what they sell with links and wasn't for a specific item at all and had been doing it for months without having it taken down. 

I made my listings for 2 specific items.  One for a diaper cake and one for the animal name sign.  The sign was done first and hours ago, but I still can't find it in searches, even when I type in exactly what my title was.  The diaper cake shows up just fine now.  Wonder what's going on there.  Maybe the sign has to be reviewed before being posted?  It was the first thing I've ever listed on there, so maybe.

Ebay is definitely not working out how I had hoped.  I've only had 21 or so views so far.  And I'm pretty sure at least 4 or 5 are me.  That's alright though, because the fees on there are completely crazy!  I also haven't had any traffic come to my shop from there yet according to Google Analytics.

I'll update with how Craigslist is going once I have some more information!  Wish me luck!

Sara
http://sarashandmades.etsy.com/

A Break From Creating

In the last few days I haven't had a specific order to work on, so I've been working on other aspects of the business, like making my shop easier to find with search engines, some hard core price analysis, and other things like that.  I've also worked on a sample of a flower themed name sign which should be finished sometime tomorrow.  I'm excited to see the finished product!

Today I decided to list one item on eBay to see what happens.  I've never used eBay before, so that was an interesting experience for me.  It's been up for several hours now and has only had 2 views, but it's scheduled to be up for 30 days and eBay says listings don't usually show up in item searches for a few hours.

Another potential business building thing I did was sign up for Google Analytics.  It's a free service and it will tell me where my business is coming from.  I only have one day of data so far, but it looks like a promising tool.  It tells me how my visitors got to my shop, so I can see if they're just using search engines, coming from within Etsy, or from other places like my Twitter or Facebook pages, or the new eBay listing I put up!

I think Google Analytics is going to be my new favorite tool!

On another note, I'm going to the craft store tomorrow to pick up the supplies I need for another animal themed sign for Karter!  So I'll be starting on that tomorrow night!  I'm also getting some 10" letters to paint when I have some time so I can list those too!  I'll be selling those as individual letters hung by ribbon, and I'll probably do some of the same designs I've used on the other signs.  Of course I'll be able to do many other things as well, but I feel like that will be a good starting point.  That will be something for me to do with the next lull in paid painting projects!

I hope there's someone out there reading this!  Follow my blog to continue to hear about my journey running my new business!

Sara
http://sarashandmades.etsy.com/