It's all in the learing curve

OK, so I've written and rewritten this post a few times. The first drafts were all very "woe is me" "everything sucks", you know, the I'm not happy kind of posts.

To be honest I felt a little despondent about the lack of sales at PeanutButterPie this weekend and to be very honest I just wanted to sulk a little bit. Fortunately for you, sulking isn't an activity that I indulge in for very long at any given time and once I was able to type out the "Oh Woes" and the "Alack a days" I got over it. Then I decided to focus on what I did to get ready for my sales event, what was successful and what wasn't. I also want to look at why and what I can do next time around.

Going into this sale weekend I did some groundwork for promoting by writing about the sale in my blog, on my facebook and facebook fanpage and adding my shop link to a few sites that were linking to sales over the weekend. I made use of Etsy on Sale and Etsy Coupons to put my sale on and to promote it as well. During the sale I tweeted*, I facebooked and participated in the Etsy forums and I visited and commented on my own blog lists in the hopes of bringing some more traffic to my shop. (*keep in mind that when I say tweeted I did not blast spam continuously over the course of the weekend but retweeted other artist's sales, carried on tweetversations, posted links to items of interest and posted about my families tradition of giving a new ornament to put on the tree every year in between linking to items in my shop)

To look at GA it all worked to one degree or another. This weekend I had a record number of page views and unique visits. If I compare this month with last months views in PeanutButterPie, my traffic was more than doubled with the bulk of visits made over last weekend. Looking at this last weekend compared to the weekend before, visits were up 80%. That's a big jump in visitors. Enormous, really. Monstrous. When you look at it that way it's something to be proud of.

So out of all the promotion steps I took what worked the best? According to GA the bulk of my page views were made from referring sites. These would be the visits that were made by clicking on the links to my sale on the Blogs that I mentioned above, twitter, facebook, my blog and the Etsy Apps Etsy on Sale and Etsy Coupons. The rest of of the traffic sources were made via what GA classifies as direct traffic which on Etsy could come from visitors clicking on their favourites, visiting treasuries or from the Etsy forums. Overall, the least productive steps I took involved my own blog posts. Traffic sources from this blog and others made up only 1% of all visits. Of course I still need to go into GA and look at the traffic on my blog and the number of clicks the links to the sale received. They could have been lumped into the direct traffic numbers on my shops analytics in which case they may not be as concerning as I think.

What I want to focus on for next time is focusing my promoting on my target market. The question is who is that?

Did you do a promotion this weekend? How did it go? What did you learn. Please feel free to share, if we pool our information and thoughts our next event can be even better right?

Wicked Good Deals

So, I'm checking out the chat room at Etsy and I come across a room titled "The Witching Hour". I'm a little witchy myself and I'm a little intrigued, so I enter to see who's there and to see what's up.

Turns out the room is part of a promotion that agoodwitchtoo is putting together for her online radio show called The Witching Hour on Blockhead Radio, To find out more about the show visit A Good Witch Too's blog The Copper Cauldron, here.

This is a new thing for agoodwitchtoo, her first solo show (She co-hosts two other shows on Blockhead; The Morning BrewHaHa and Artisan for Artisan) was a little choppy to start, but she really caught her groove as she went along. I send props to her and and a standing ovation too, it's not easy to talk into a mic and talk to no one in particular and a whole bunch of people at the same time.

The show features Etsy shops with special sales and deals on Saturday. There is a treasure hunt contest spread throughout a number of Etsy shops with wonderful prizes, last week's prize was a $50 gift certificate to use in her Etsy shop the Copper Cauldron, for some of her luscious soaps. It's not just a talk show, there is also some music featured by some talented independant artists too.

The Witching Hour airs every Saturday Night from 5pm until 7pm EST (Th at's 2pm to 4pm PST where I am) I'll be listening in this week and I believe my shops, TMCPhoto, and PeanutButterPie will be featured in the show this week too. I'll be offering free shipping all day Saturday and Sunday to all destinations worldwide.