SEO and Product Testing (which means something free!)

Tweet After that first rush of orders, my sales have pretty much screeched to a halt.  I did have one last night from a friend (hi Kara!), but my pageviews are slipping slowly and I gotta shore up the dam before things get ugly.  I think my experiment with listing at my busy times may be helping a tiny bit, but it's too early to tell.  I REALLY want to be in a good position shop-wise when holiday shoppers start buying, so I'm doing my research now.

I'm going on a tangent here, but the holidays are on my mind today and  I'm obsessed with this holiday fabric.  It's Colorful Christmas by Riley Blake and some is on its way to my house now.  It is rivaling my love for Michael Miller's Funky Christmas, and that says a lot.

Back to business!  I've been reading and reading and reading about search engine optimization, or SEO.  SEO deals with setting up your shop and listings so they show up as high as possible in Google (and other search engine) results.  I'm still so new at how all this works, but I have been changing a few things around in my shop announcement (the message at the top of my shop page) and my item titles to use more common key words that people search for.  This great article on Etsy was a big help, and I thought this blog post on how Google Instant affects SEO was so interesting.  I'm going to work on implementing some changes over the next week or so and see how the shop views situation progresses.

After reading for a while, I tried playing around on Google Adwords.  I'm still thoroughly confused about that whole thing.  If I'm understanding its purpose, I'm supposed to enter an item name (like burp cloth) and see what keywords people searched to get to that sort of item.  I did that.  I got a page of stuff.  What to do with that stuff, I have no clue.  I'll let you know if I get it figured out.  In the meantime, if you have any good articles about AdWords you can point me to, I'll love you forever.

I mentioned in my last post that we just found out our one-year-old is allergic to peanuts.  Now I have to carry an Epi Pen around EVERYWHERE we go, so of course I needed something cute to carry it in.  This little pouch is what I ended up with after a four rejected versions.

Then it occured to me maybe I should sell these in my Etsy shop for other moms like me.  Since I'm new to carrying this bad boy around and could use some other opinions, I'm doing my first round of product testing!  It sounds so official, right?

So here's the deal.  I already posted on Facebook and rounded up four product testers, but I'd like one more.  If you carry an Epi Pen or know someone who does, leave me a comment with your email address so I can contact you.  The first to respond gets a free carrier/pouch in the mail in exchange for a little feedback.  You even get to keep it - hopefully it's so great you won't want to stop carrying it!  Oh, and the pouch needs a name too, so if you've got any suggestions I'm all ears!

Thanks for your help everyone!