Monday, October 25, 2010

Monday Morning

And while I really miss the money I'm kind of glad I didn't have to get up and go to an office job this morning. I really really do miss the money though.

After a rather long dry spell I actually have a few orders to go out in today's mail. I have been working on redoing my pictures YET AGAIN! with just a plain white background but some of the pictures come out kind of gray or blue instead of white so I have to lighten them up a whole lot in picnic, therefore I've been spending a lot of time the past 4 or 5 days sitting here messing around with pictures and editing my listings and wondering if it's all worth it. I was renewing all the etsy listings as I edited, hoping that somebody somewhere would see it and buy my crap already, but that 20c a listing really starts to add up after a while. So, anyway, glad to see a few sales come from my efforts.

There is a website that ranks etsy sellers by items sold into top 100 and top 1000 lists. I'm actually at number 79 in the top 100 jewelry sellers, and at 349 in the top 1000 in all the handmade categories combined. I got to thinking about it, there is something like 200,000 sellers with active shops on etsy and if I'm up in the top 100 in the jewelry category, think how many of those 200,000 sellers are like me and struggling for every sale. I was all ready to close my shop at the end of the year, but then I get a few sales and maybe it's worth it to stay on etsy after all, but it costs me SO MUCH MONEY to try and sell there.

I compared Etsy and Artfire on the Alexis ranking website and Etsy is way up there, but Artfire is not far behind. Etsy gets almost all of their traffic from internal browsing, while Artfire mostly comes from internet searches. So, anyway....don't know what to do so I'll see how the rest of the year goes before deciding for sure whether to go or stay on etsy.

What else is going on around here besides not much?

We went downtown to the home and garden/train show at the fairgrounds Saturday morning. Keith invited our neighbors to meet us there and hang out with us, but the only problem with going with other people is that you kind of have to keep up with them and they weren't all that interested in trains, so Keith got his hand stamped and went back later by himself. I'm not all that interested in trains either, so that worked out for me, too. Keith can spend hours looking at all the displays and stuff for sale and talking with all the train guys while I stand there bored out of my mind. We were hoping to see Joe at the train show but he wasn't there that day. Keith did tell some of his train club buddies to tell him hi for us.
I thought it was pretty ingenious for them to combine the train show with the home show, but the poor train show had to set up in a building that is kind of hidden behind the main commercial building, so I'm sure most of the home show goers didn't even bother to venture back there.

We did see some really big fish, they always have the koi club set up at the home shows and some of those fish are HUGE. Very pretty, too.

Then we went grocery shopping yesterday and now it's back to the work week for poor Keith, and back to whatever for me. It's time to go clean the cat box now.

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