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!

Product Photography and Renewing on Etsy

Tweet Another great blog linked to my Fancy Burp Cloth tutorial this weekend.  Go check out Crafts and Deals when you get a chance - there are lots of links to great projects and tutorials!

I got a lot of sewing and picture-taking done on Saturday.  I redesigned my lunch bags and made a stack for the craft fair.  What do you guys think?  On the left is the previous version, on the right is the new version.  I think the newer one looks cleaner, but I do love the contrast strap on the original.

I also made a few more crayon aprons.  Those crayon aprons confuse me - they are getting tons of views and hearts on Etsy, but they aren't selling.  I'm wondering if they're one of those things you need to see in person?  I also REALLY need to get pictures of a lot of the products being used, kind of like this picture I took for the apron set.  I think it helps to see the product being used in order for a buyer to visualize using it themselves.  I'm debating taking some pictures of the products in action to use on the Etsy store and to make into posters for the Rocky Ripple Festival.

Speaking of Etsy, I've developed a renewing/listing plan for the next month or so to see if it helps my lagging sales.  For those of you unfamiliar with Etsy, when a product is newly listed or the listing is freshly renewed, it pops to the top of search results.  The theory goes that the more you renew, the more people will see your product, which means more sales.  I was kinda on the fence about this until I read this excellent post about a very detailed renewing experiment.  It's hard to argue with that kind of results.

According to Google Analytics, I have the most visitors to my Etsy shop around 9 am and 6 pm (that first big spike in the graph is 9 am and the little spike farther to the right is 6 pm).  I'm planning on renewing an item or listing a new item every day at those times.  I'm not sure my visitor timing is all that accurate - the shop's only been open for a couple of weeks, and that front page feature probably skewed my visitor data.  Also, I typically list around 9 am anyway, so it's very possible that's why the views are high at that time.  I guess time will tell - I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.

If all goes well I'll have a huge pile of inventory for the Rocky Ripple Festival to show you later this week, but we'll see.  Our household is increasing by two kids for the weekend and I'm making a wedding cake for a friend of my mom's on Friday.

Also, we just found out Graham's allergic to peanuts.  Anybody have any good websites or books for me?  I have zero experience with food allergies so this is all new to me.  Thanks!