How to get exposure?

I've been struggling with this issue every waking moment (o.k., I AM exaggerating here :). But it takes some time and work and brainstorming.


If you are an Etsy seller you surely know what I am talking about. There are million trillion sellers out there, all desperately trying to get customers to look at their items. Because of this crowd, it's bloody hard to get noticed. Unless, of course, you are willing to spend a fortune on constant renewing. But that goes rather against the whole idea of a business, am I right?


So, back to the always-surfacing question - how to get exposure? I can speak only from my own experience, and so far what I found out is:


- Blog does not really work ( :( ). Not this, anyway. I have a funny feeling that if I started writing on something having nothing to do with my Etsy shop, it would work better. Just to give you some statistics - I have days with 60-80 blog views, but only few, if any, translate to Etsy view. Tough.

- www.plaincraft.com - I've already written about it here. No rush in the shop either. Maybe one, two extra views, but that's it. Still, it's always an outlet and you never know.

- Etsy forums. This is my main reason for writing this post. I did some experiments yesterday and I'm astonished by the results. I spend half the night yesterday on Etsy forums. Not being serious, not trying to give any decent advise, just blabbing my heart away and mostly adding a touch of humour to oh-so-serious posts. It was... well, I wouldn't call it inspiring or a pleasure, but it was kinda fun. Especially a long, long thread on How to Make Money When You're Deadly Broke :). But let's have a look at numbers. Usually I get an average of 5 visitors a day, with 20-something pageviews. Yesterday - 50 and 132 accordingly. An absolute record! Now, I'm not sure if it's the target audience I'm looking for, but at least I'm SEEN. Which, with the Web more crowded by day, is getting more and more difficult to achieve.


I guess I did not invent gunpowder with the above. But my aim is not to be an all-knowing expert, I want to tell you what WORKS based on my very specific experience instead. Fresh reports will be delivered as my adventure progresses :).

Surprise, surprise!

Let me bore you with some stats today.


Until yesterday, my total blog pageviews for this month equalled 104.
Then the surprise arrived - 80 (!) visits within one day.


I AM not only surprised, I am positively shocked.


I am also wrecking my head trying to find an explanation for this phenomenon.


Do I have a good fairy out there who corralled some readers and kicked them in direction of this blog? If so, hell, I'm grateful, dear Fairy :)


Or does it have something to do with the subject of my last post? I'm wondering - is it maybe that there are more people out there who are tormented (:P) by some metaphysical questions and stumbled here in search for answers? I find it quite hard to believe, but as long as I don't have any intelligence on the subject, I can let the imagination soar.


I would very much appreciate some feedback, though. Can I ask you a favour, dear Reader? Could you let me know, in comments or otherwise, what paths brought you here, on this website? What were you looking for to find my humble persona? I'm not being nosy, just curious :). Well, I can offer something in exchange - if you tell me what you liked, I can promise to write more about this subject. Does it sound like a good deal?


All this is also to say hi to all who travelled here, even if by accident. It's more 'cool' to pretend indifference, but I'll be brave enough to say that I DO care, that it feels pleasant to be read and that I feel grateful.

Observations

Behold the outcome of a month or so of my work.

It's a middle stage, they still need some finishing before they are turned into actual jewellery, but the main, most time consuming part is done.

I feel bloody proud.

I thought some maths would be interesting here.

Every pendant is made of 361 cross stitches and approx. 152 edging stitches. That together makes 513 stitches, each and every single one hand sewn.

With earrings the figures are 242, 176 and 418 accordingly (per pair).

Pictured above are 16 future pendants and 14 pairs of future earrings.

So what you're actually looking at consists of 14,060 stitches and is equal to hours (HOURS!!) of my work.

All together it wouldn't fill a jam jar.

I guess this proves that the size doesn't matter after all :)