A Renewed Effort!

This weekend I decided to seriously try and promote my Buttons By Robin etsy store. http://www.buttonsbyrobin.com. I have been doing pretty well but have not done any promoting at all. I lurk in the Etsy forums and sometimes make a comment or two and I signed up for twitter http://twitter.com/ a while ago but never really figured it out. For those of you who don't know what twitter is it's a sort of business/social networking sight but you only have 140 characters or so which means you can't say a whole lot. I couldn't figure out what I would have to say in so few characters that anyone would find interesting. I've also heard that people who only post link to the items they sell are considered spamming and aren't appreciated all that much. Honestly though that's really all I have to say at this point. I'm not sure if people are interested if I say I'm going to the grocery store. I've decided I'll post my items to twitter and if people aren't interested they don't have to look and/or they can decide not to follow my posts. I'm trying to find people with similar interests to follow myself and I know I am seriously interested in seeing what they have for sale and what they're up to. I won't follow people who I don't feel share a common interest though. We'll see how it goes. I must say that when I post a link to twitter (even though I only have about 17 people following me) that I do get quite a lot of views on my items listed on Etsy. I don't seem to have anywhere near the same number of views when I haven't posted to twitter. Views,of course, don't necessarily lead to sales and I haven't had any sales from these views this weekend but I'm hoping that a few people who might be interested in my items have found me. I know I've looked at quite a few people's stores and while I haven't bought anything through my twitter views this weekend either I have marked a few people as favourites in Etys and will go back another time.

In addition to the twitter linking, I posted a few pictures to flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/15684302@N04/ and have joined a couple more flickr groups that I feel are of interest. In other words, I'm only doing things that I think are relevant and not just to get sales (hopefully) but because I am genuninely interested in the groups/topics. We'll see what happens.

I am also very much for giving credit to others and am going to try to use my blog to promote other talented sellers. I haven't done much in that regard and I think I'm going to try and work really hard to promote the work of others as well. I have purchased some wonderful graphics from Etsy sellers over the months (and even some this weekend). The squirrel buttons listed here are from a great new Etsy seller called Bayin http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=7258818&ga_search_query=bayin&ga_search_type=seller_usernames I love the graphics she creates and she has been super friendly and provided great customer service which is all part of the overall Etsy experience. If you have a moment drop by and check out her work.

OK. Enough blogging for today but I'll keep you all posted on how the promoting is working out for me and if I come up with any really super wonderful ideas that work wonders I'll be sure to share them here.