For the past 3 years I have been running my own brick and mortar store where I sold my designs. Though my online business was active as well, my store was the main focus of my business and took most of my time and effort. A few months ago, due to my relocating to another part of the country, I decided to close my store and made a strategic decision to focus on my online business.
Etsy was good place to start because there is so much helpful information going around. So I started reading the forums and finding various advise and recommendations and later on trying to implement all that good advise. I started this blog, joined twitter and facebook, did some project wonderful ads, joined a team, made treasuries etc. After a few weeks of doing that the only result was that I got exhausted!!
Even as a full time crafter I could not find enough time to do all these things and do them well. At this point someone gave me a really good advise - focus!
So I took a few days to evaluate all the activities I was doing, trying to figure out which ones I should focus on. What I decided is to stop most of my off-etsy activities for now. I've read so many forum threads saying that you can't make it on etsy without some outside promotion. I decided I wanted to test this belief. After all, I did join etsy for the added value of belonging to a place where people come to buy handmade goods. If I have to bring the buyers with me I might just as well lead them to my own site.
So I started my own personal experiment of how to turn my store into a success. In my next posts I will write about what I have done so far and what results I got from it. Anyone who is interested is welcome to follow my blog and see how it goes.
