How many Etsians does it take to change a lightbulb??

Hahaha, I was reading a thread this morning with the same title.

This is a really, really funny read, though it may not be 100% understandable to people who don't visit the forums often :)

How many Etsians does it take to change a lightbulb??

From Karen:

How funny - you beat me to it because I was just coming here to post it. You can thank her for the laugh by visiting her shop at LifeMeetsArt on Etsy. I guess that the forums aren't completely dead and tedious now after all.

Facebook Ads vs. Google Adwords

Now that I've had a chance to use both of them I can safely say that I will never use google adwords again unless I find the magic keyword that attracts the demographic that has always bought my sweaters offline. I have a narrow target market of plus size women from 35-65 who have a significant amount of discretionary income and google ads just scatter-shot at everyone with no targeting. IMO that's a waste of money unless what you sell appeals to a very wide audience. On Facebook I got to use $50 in free ad money and target each version very specifically to people who at least have a chance of being the right targets. They're very fun to use because you can can have several versions of ads running and compare them to each other to see how they're doing. I found that the ads that used product shots did much better than the ads that used my logo and the ads that sent people to my shop generated much more interest than the ones aimed at my FB page. The people that came in from the ads that I specifically targeted to women over 40 that liked luxury goods had a much, much lower bounce rate than I've ever had before and the average person looked at at least 4 sweaters.

On the downside, after rushing around trying to get to 50 likes I needed for more free ad money I found out that only people who had never used them before were eligible. Oh well.

Update: Facebook doesn't seem to keep track of who has already used free ads because they gave me the $50 more anyway. For starters I'm using it as one of those "like this to enter" things with a hefty coupon and I got 6 new likes in 10 minutes. It sure would be nice if this keeps up.


Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com

Facebook ads experience

I recently received some advertising from Facebook to use their ads.

I set up a picture of my mug cozies , and set the target as women who enjoy fashion and/or coffee.

Paying approximately 42¢ per click on average. And sending the traffic to my page, so that I can keep advertising to those people. I've had 243 new likes in a month and a half.

For the purpose of getting more followers on Facebook, and thus more potential buyers, I'd say the advertisement works very well.

I've also used some of my advertising credits to send people to One Stitch Designs where I can better see what is going on with people when they click through.

I did not have any luck with that. the bounce rate seems to be fairly high for that, and I have had no sales from directly advertising.

My search for good advertising continues..........

Learning to Use Google Adwords

Most of us that work on the SEO for our shops are familiar with the free google adword keyword tool and we use it for analysis even if we never pay for an adword campaign. When you sign up for that account (which most people do to avoid that captcha stuff) unless you pay for ads within a few weeks they send you a coupon for $100 to try it out for free and they give you an adviser to help you set up the first one. I decided to take advantage of my free offer before it expired so that I could see how it all works without spending any money. I called their adviser and he more or less took over and walked me though the technical parts of how to set it up. It turns out that you do have to spend a minimum of $10 to use their coupon but it was still worth it to me. Then the guy took a look at my website, checked out some keywords and set up my first campaign. This is where you really need to be careful. These guys are experts at setting up adwords but not experts on what you sell or who you sell it to. He really pushed the keyword "trendy plus size clothing" because it's a popular one but the point isn't just to get views - it's to get the right views. Trendy is the last word that I would use to describe my stuff and people who are spending that kind of money don't want it to be out of style in a year. I decided to take his advice to see what would happen and sure enough - that very expensive keyword phrase was getting the most hits, eating up the most money and had close to a 90% bounce rate. (You find that out by linking your campaign to your analytics account and then you can track it like any other traffic source.) That's just what I expected - kids looking for low-end trendy clothing popping in, getting sticker shock, seeing no young trends and bouncing right back out again. Once I paused that one keyword phrase in the campaign and added a few that were much more targeted my hits dropped down but the bounce rate went way down with it. So, lesson one was to not let the ad guys convince me to use inaccurate but popular keywords and lesson 2 seems to be that Adwords are really, really expensive and I can do almost as well at getting near the front using normal SEO and that's free. I think that from what I've seen my money would be better off spent advertising on high end fashion blogs where my target demographic is than on random google searches.


Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com

Pathetically Begging for Facebook Likes

I normally would be disgusted at myself for doing this because I would really rather that my Facebook likes come from people who like my stuff than those who do it just because I asked them to but this time there is money involved. If I get about a dozen more likes I can get $50 more in free ads and then have a chance to win $100 more. That's a lot of free money. So, anyway, if you haven't rolled your eyes and stopped reading by now could you go like this thing? I don't spam products much because it takes me too long to make them to be able to do it more than a few times a month.

Mirabilis Fashions on Facebook

My Item is in the Etsy Fashion Section!

Quick - go look! I bet that it isn't there for very long. Then get out your woolies because I think that hell just froze over. This just goes to show that the admins that pick stuff don't read the forums. You might have to refresh the page a few times because they're rotating them but there aren't all that many.

http://www.etsy.com/buy/fashion?ref=hp