EtsyBloggers: June 18 Blog Carnival

Carnival Topic: What are your goals? Short term, long term? It's up to you. 

Host: RainyDayArt
Blog: http://rainydayart.blogspot.com 

I have a very important short term goal involving my Etsy shop and that is optimizing it. I'm getting the hang of promotion and the whole selling a good online. Now I'm wanting to utilize all the tools that I can that will help me free up some time for myself and fun things and not tied to the computer. I have had a lot of my items that are expiring. Seems to go in spurts for some reason. As I renew, I also take a look at what keywords I have used in the keyword section, item description and title. I've been utilizing the Google Keyword Tool to help me. It's too soon yet to see if I can see a difference since sites aren't crawled everyday, but I can tell my views are up slightly. And I feel good at what I'm doing. It helps that I have a marketing background.  I know in the long run, having optimized listings will do some of the work for me as well. As I list new items, they're going up optimized. I've got under 100 to go. Man oh man!

Another big goal was to figure out how to get my items to tweet and post to Facebook without me having to do it manually. I thought there just has to be something out there that will do it. I know some already figured it out, but I still consider myself new at all this. Hasn't been a year yet. I found Twaitter and finally decided to try Hootsuite. At the time, Twaitter didn't support FB postings, and now it's developed a program to do that. But it has helped free up a lot of time for me and also time to actually tweet with others and check out what other people are doing. Plus, being that I work full time, it was hard to compete. Now it's like I'm working during the day without having to do everything manually except for my RTs of others.  I've made a sale already from the auto tweets and I have wonderful followers who support by RTing as well. If you retweet me, I retweet you back.

The next goal I have for my shop is to try more paid advertising online. I'd like to try some content ads instead of the adwords. I tried some project wonderful ads, and didn't find that I could get it to work for me. I tried it for a month tweaking it everyday.  I'm still trying to figure out where my customers are coming from. I'm getting enough sales now that I'm seeing some trends, but not enough yet to do any moderate investing. I hope by end of the year I'll have found a good online advertising mix.