Come See Me on Artfire!

So, Artfire has been around for a few years, and I've tried it out a few times without a whole lot of luck, spending most of my efforts on my Etsy shop. Now, my Etsy shop has been fairly successful, but lately I'm spending so much money on listing and renewing fees in the struggle to get the sales that I'm not making any profit at all. I just spent about $5.00 in renewal fees the other day to get my Halloween gift boxes back up front in the search. Did I get a sale from it? Yes, but that $5.00 really cut into the profits on that sale, so was it worth it? Mmm...maybe not so much.

Well, when I found out that Artfire was coming out of beta mode with a new front page and a special deal for everyone who signed up by the end of September with a $5.95 per month fee for a Pro shop with all the perks and privileges of said Pro shop, I just couldn't resist. $5.95 a month for unlimited listings, no final sales fee, submission to google shopping and The Find, global editing, and lots of other features is well worth giving it another go. My Etsy bill for September alone is well over $80.00. Yes, I may get more sales on Etsy, but the sales I do get on Artfire are going to cost me a whole lot less, meaning more money in my pocket.

So, new shops on Artfire! One for my jewelry and gift boxes, and one for supplies.

And, since it is way cheaper to sell on Artfire, I'm taking the chance of double listing all my Etsy stuff so that everything is on both Etsy and Artfire. I just have to check my email frequently and remove any sold stuff from the other site. I did get one sale on Artfire the other day and actually remembered to go remove it from Etsy.

Another thing I really like about the new front page on Artfire is that you can make a 'collection', much like a treasury on Etsy, with your favorites or a specific theme, and your collection can be submitted by you for front page consideration. In the effort to reduce the rampant favoritism on Etsy with the same sellers being promoted on the front page Artfire has a program that will not let you include a seller in your collection who has already been featured recently. How about that? Why can't Etsy do the same thing? Because they don't care, that's why.

Anyway, come on over to Artfire and check out my shops!

SEO and CIA and CSI and whatever the heck they are talking about!

So, today I find out from the Artfire forums that google is once again changing their whatever picks up on your shop listings, making it harder and harder for your products to make it into google search. One of the tips that Artfire admin had for us is to link back to your Artfire products on your blog with hypertext links. Well.

I haven't yet learned how to do hypertext links but am going to try today. I found an online tutorial and while I learn much better by being shown in real life how to do something I will attempt to follow the tutorial and see if I can figure out how to do this.

So here goes.

Here is a new listing on Artfire

Now lets see if it worked.

Well, son of a gun, it worked and it was way way easier than I thought it would be. The listing is for new pins that I've been working on made with paper and cardboard and resin. Fun and inexpensive to make and hopefully somebody somewhere will want to buy them. I got some great collage sheets from a shop on Artfire with retro robot and mechanical toy images and will be listing those as soon as they are all dry and ready to go.

So, bear with me because I'm going to post each day as to what's new in my shops. You don't have to read them if you don't want to, I'm just trying to get google to notice me. Because I need to make some money here.