Business card challenge

So the business card campaign was a bust. I couldn't find a place to post them. I did donate a bunch of my pendants for a friend's baby's surgery fund and I put business cards in with them, but I don't know how many of them he sold, or if anybody who bought them checked out my site.

I had a campaign going through stumble and it generated a lot of traffic each day, but I wasn't getting any sales. I'm not sure if I'm going to try another ppc advertisement right now.

My next experiment is going to be SEO advertising. Using key words and the like for "search engine optimization". This one is going to be a lot of work, I'm not sure if I should start now or wait until I have passed my tests for school. I should be dedicating my time to study, not business venture. IDK.

I got my kiln working. I bought a new catalytic thermometer for it and I have tested the temps that it goes to. It will get hot enough for annealing. I haven't seen how hot it gets on high, so I don't know if it will get hot enough for fusing, but it got close, so I think it will. I am excited to by glass and start fusing, if I can. I got a laser printer so I can fuse pictures. I have an idea where people send me their little kids drawings in black and white and I fuse them on a pendant. I don't know if that is a good idea or not, but I think it is cute.

I fixed my photos!

I learned how to fix my pictures. I found a great tutorial on setting up the camera. I'll post a link for anybody who is interested when I find it again.

I'm going to take up the overwhelming undertaking of re-photographing all my other pieces. But for now, because my focus is really on selling the lampwork beads so I'm good.

Photo Problems

I'm having trouble with the proper lighting of my photos. I made the recommended light box, but my light source isn't good enough. Right now I'm using a 100 w desk lamp and my pictures come out too dark. I can fix it a little with the photo editing software, but that isn't a good solution. I remember I used to take the pictures outside and that worked a bit better, but that only works in summer when it is cloudless. Which is alright for now, but I intend to continue making beads through the winter and I'm going to want to post them.

I've forgotten in the last few items to tell buyers that it has been properly annealed so I'm going to have to go back and edit. It is important in lampworking because if it isn't annealed the piece could break and buyers are leery of buying improperly annealed pieces because of that.

As for my business card campaign I'm having a hard time finding people and places to pass them out. It was nice in Cali because they had a plethora of art shops that let you place adverts on bulletin boards, but Utah just has Micheal's and it doesn't have and boards. All the people I've seen lately know that I have a shop so I can't give them cards. This campaign is starting to look like a bust. I wish I had started back up in time for craft fair season.

Getting back on track

I let my etsy fall to the wayside. I'm trying to get back to promoting everything. I started doing lampworking and I'm excited how everything is working out. So now on top of my regular pendants I have 3 new glass pendants that I'm selling, with more to come in the next 3 days.

I am also going to start my weekly promotion campaign again. As planned before I'm going to start with business cards.

If you want to view my new lampwork pieces you can go here:
Flying Saucer
Ocean Waves
Purple Dream

Passing out cards

So I've decided that I'll start with the cheapest option first, I have so many busines cards that I'll start passing them out to anybody who will take them. I'll see if I can hang some up in my apartment and find some craft and art stores to post them at. I will post the results in two weeks.

Learning to Etsy: The start

As a relative newb to the Etsy scene I want to jump in with both feet and make the most money I can in the quickest way possible. There are sites everywhere that have suggestions on how to drive traffic to your Etsy site and all of them sound like a good idea, but I want to know what works best. I'm not sure what the right way to test the different suggestions would be, but every two weeks I will try one suggestion and report the results. I will use one week for the suggestion and one week for a buffer, I know it isn't exactly scientific, but it is the closest I can think of today. For each suggestion I will talk about how much time it takes to follow, how easy or hard it is, if there is a change in my traffic, etc. Hopefully this will give other newbs the info they need to pick campains that will work for them.

I have learned something new

So the site I got the original design off of mentioned that they weren't sure if you could use the new aluminum irons to make my kiln and I now have an answer for that:
No, no you can't.

It was a spectacular failure, which doesn't mean it failed spectacularly, or there would have been flames and a fire truck. Instead there was just bubbling melting and splitting aluminum heating elements.

No fear though, I am going to try again when I get back from my trip to Utah which is supposed to happen today, so we can hope. I have to get more ceramic fiber blanket and some donuts and wires. I should be all good to go again. I'm not giving up until I have made my own kiln