And now for something completely different, I give you the musical stylings of my best friend, Alexandria Gillespie:

And now onto other things…

Blake & I had a pretty wicked fight last night where he called me a “bigot” due to a misunderstanding about whether or not I accepted people who identify as gender neutral as valid (I do) and we were up until about 3am talking about it. There are 2 things you never ever call me, ever: 1. A “cunt”, unless you’re being playful and 2. A bigot because I accept everyone for whoever or whatever they are or say they are. I am very much a live and let live kinda person and it killed me last night that the person in the world who knows me best and loves me the most would call me such a thing when they should know me better than to think that was true in any capacity.

But everything’s okay now and the misunderstanding has been cleared up.

Yesterday was a pretty rough day emotionally between that situation, thinking earlier in the day that Blake was mad at me and ignoring me for reasons I couldn’t fathom and because I watched the series finale of Six Feet Under which utterly destroyed me for most of the afternoon. Not to mention the fact that I’m not the most emotionally stable person these days and I’ve been “bleeding brown” for the last week & a half despite only being halfway through my last month of birth control pills. (For those not in the know, I take them for 3 months non-stop, without a period, then have a period and repeat because of my endometriosis. The last month and the period following it is always brutal and requires lots and lots of drugs.)

I think when I see my shrink on the 8th, I’m going to ask her to up my medication because clearly I’m not stable right now. The normal dose for my mood stabilizer is 4 pills a day (I forget the mg dosage) and I currently take 3. I’m thinking I should probably be at 4. I’m also going to ask her for a new anti-anxiety medication because the clonazepam doesn’t seem to be cutting it these days. I usually take 2 before I go to sleep to curb “racing thoughts” and I can take it during the day if I’m having anxiety, but lately I’ve been having to take 3 or 4 just to get to sleep and some days I need to take 2 of them, plus Ativan (lorazepam) to keep my anxiety somewhat under control. I’ve heard good things about Xanax so maybe she’ll put me on that. She’s no doubt going to ask me what I think is causing the anxiety and I honest to god have no idea. I mean, normally I’m good at pinpointing things like that, but this is just coming straight out of left field. Yeah, I’m really stressed out about Wes’ birthday party, but I’ve been at that level of stress before and I’ve never had a problem with keeping things under control with the medications available to me. So I dunno.

And I haven’t been depressed, necessarily, but sad and unmotivated. Kinda numb and neutral. I have two paintings I should be working on right now, one that’s been in the works for over a year now, and while they sit on my coffee table waiting to be completed, I don’t seem to have the drive right now to work on them.

And Etsy…holy shit, Etsy. At the suggestion of my internet buddy, Ashley, whose grandmother sells aprons on Etsy and has for quite some time, I spent most of this week in the Etsy forums (and chat) talking to people and learning as much as I can and really, selling on Etsy has about as many tricks and rules as selling on eBay, which is a site I completely hate. Now, I’m not going to abandon Etsy, I still think it’s the best venue for my work at this time, but the suggestions as far as getting sales are VAST and there’s a lot more marketing involved than I’d previously anticipated. Naively, I figured I’d just list stuff and walk away, but oh ho ho, that is so not how Etsy works.

First, there’s the renewing game. With how Etsy’s search results work, which they’re actually in the process of tweaking but that’s kind of besides the point, it’s easy for your items to get buried if they haven’t been recently put up so what people do is they “renew” items, which pretty much means relisting them again so they show up at the top of the search results and stay on the main page and thus, more visible, longer. This of course costs $0.20, the same as listing an item to begin with. Most people, or at least the successful ones, renew several items per day, every single day. This week I’ve been doing that myself with mixed results, yes my hearts and views have gone up, but no sales have come from it.

Everyone on Etsy says to be patient, some people go 6 months to a year before making their first sale. That’s not exactly encouraging, but at least I know it’s not just me or what I’m selling. In fact a lot of the threads in the Etsy forums are about how sales are down for just about everyone due to the economy taking a giant shit.

But back to promotion. So Etsy gives you a couple of tools for promoting your shop. One is the “Etsy mini”, which you can see in my shop here on my site because I added it the other day. You can add this to various blogs and websites etc. but really, the only venue I have for this item is here on my site. The other tool they give you is a Facebook app that adds a tab to your profile or fan page (another reason to go the fan page route rather than a group) that basically shows your entire shop. It’s actually pretty cool and you can see it in action on my fan page. (I added it to my personal profile as well.) But that’s really the only tools Etsy gives you for promoting your shop.

Advice from other people though, well, there’s plenty. Some suggest that your personal avatar (your user icon) should be a picture of something you sell because if you post in the forums and they like the item in your avatar, they’re more likely to visit your shop. And buyers DO read the forums apparently. On the same token however, if they don’t like the item in your avatar, they may pass your shop over. That’s why I’ve chosen to stick with the picture of myself that I’ve had on Etsy since I opened my account a few years ago. Well that and Etsy won’t seem to let me change it. Using a picture of yourself, especially an interesting one, was also recommended in several threads.

Other  buts of advice were to make sure your spelling and grammar are impeccable, which I absolutely agree with, and to make your shop announcement interesting but not too long. Honestly, mine is probably too long. The other bit of advice to do with this was to make sure you fill out your shop’s policies in full and be as clear (and as entertaining) as possible. Also, filling out your personal profile is something you want to do as well because apparently people actually read those. (I haven’t really filled mine out yet, but I plan on it.) Some people suggested that in your personal profile or in the first section of your shop policies, you discuss your creative process and how each item is made. I still have to do that too, but as some people pointed out after that piece of advice popped up in the forums, you don’t want to give away too much because that can lead to copycats.

Then comes other forms of marketing that you do off-site. The main gist of most of these promotional topics was that you shouldn’t rely on Etsy’s current market to make your sales, you should concentrate on bringing outside people from your world into your Etsy shop and there are literally a million ways to do this. One suggestion, which I’d already planned on, was to register a domain name and have it point to your Etsy shop so people can find you easier and your Googlability goes up. Another suggestion was to create bookmarks or postcards or other small items with the url to your shop and give a stack of whatever those items are to your family, friends and co-workers to hand out for you. Most people can do this with whatever kind of printer they have at home. I don’t have a printer (well, not one that really works anyway) so this isn’t an option for me yet, but it’s something that I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to.

More suggestions came in the form of advertising on the internet, like with Facebook ads and advertising on blogs. That’s too rich for my blood, so I’m not going to do that, but apparently it works. One woman said that she makes postcard-sized business cards with her Etsy shop’s url on them and she goes to Barnes & Noble once a month to insert these cards into all of the craft magazines. She swears this works. (I’m skeptical, but it’s still an interesting idea.)

There is just this whole world of Etsy that I never knew existed until I started reading the forums and while a lot of it is really just good common sense marketing, there are levels to it I’d  never even considered, like advertising outside of the internet or playing the “renewing” game. My brain is pretty fried from absorbing all of this information, but I’m determined to put some of it into practice over the weekend, especially simple things like coming up with a wicked bio for my personal profile page.

Oh and more things to consider is your “relevancy”, which is part of Etsy’s new, experimental search system. LIke, for your titles, you should say what the thing is and then what it’s called. For example my titles for items were originally just what I called them, like “just like honey”, but after readong more about it, I changed them to “Original Painting – just like honey” because people search for original paintings, they don’t search for “just like honey”. And then there’s also your tags, which you have two sets of. One is categorical as far as what your item is and one is based on the materials used in the item. There’s like, a whole science to using tags, which I understand due to using tags and metatags for search engine optimization on websites, but when my mom starts selling on Etsy, I may have to help her with that.

And Etsy even has RULES on tags. For example, you can’t tag something “valentines day” because it would make a nice Valentine’s Day gift, you can only tag it with that if it’s something Valentine’s related like a heart-shaped soap or a hand-made V-Day card. There’s even a similar rule pertaining to tagging your items by colour, which admittedly I don’t fully understand but I’ll look into it more when I start selling my ACEOs by colour.

Isn’t all this shit crazy though? I mean, who knew Etsy was this complicated? I certainly didn’t. I gotta say, my inner ad geek is kinda loving it though and I can’t wait to have a little bit of capital to spend on things like advertising.

And speaking of Etsy, I still need a banner! E-mail me your 760 x 100 px submissions by February 20th and if I like yours enough to use it, I’ll PayPal you $20! Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com!

Anyway, that’s what’s been on my mind this week. Blake’s going to be here any minute with our lunch, so I better wrap this up, but chances are I’ll write more later because my brain’s been all over the place and I have shit to say!