Marketing and Rain

As I said in a previous post, a fellow AREtsian is handing out some AREtsy street team promo bags at Toad Suck Days. I've been waiting on some new business cards from Zazzle.com to come in before I could put together some promos to send down to her. Well, the new cards are in and I'm quite happy. I was kind of hoping for the same quality I found in the Moo cards, these aren't quite the same. BUT they are very nice and perfect for what I'm doing.

Aside from the promo bags, these will be perfect for craft shows. They are unique, show off my product, and aren't so small (like Moo cards) that they will get lost in pockets and purses. I can't wait to start getting them in people's hands and pointing them to my shop.

I'd like to retract what I said about weather in my last post. I'd rather have some colder days than rain drenched ones. I do understand that rain is quite important to my other passion (gardening) but I'm a bit tired of it right now. It's just rained, rained, rained, and rained this spring. No sprinkling, pitiful rain, but RAIN. Ditches are overflowing, rivers are up, creeks are flowing where I didn't even know creeks existed - let me tell you, it's RAINING this spring. It is doing nice things for my herb garden. The parsley is gorgeous, the oregano stunning, catnip and mint as envasive as ever, and chives are coming up where they didn't come up last year. I can't wait to get the basil and other goodies into the ground.

I'm off to do a bit of swimming in the lake that is now my backyard and then off to make promo items.

Satisfied

After a weeks worth of trying new ways to do my Etsy shop photos, I think I've found some I'm satisfied with. One of the rocks I dug up when working on my front flower bed last spring works quite well as a background to my bracelets and my earrings. Some items didn't take as well in this setting, but I hope to have time to play with that this weekend.

Next photo task - take all new photos of all of my current shop items. Ugh.

As I said in my Moo Card posting, I was on my way to purchase a full set of Moos to use as my business cards. Well, I didn't do that right away. I sat on the idea for a couple of days. Tonight I got to work on Photoshop to work on my own business card design, but after an hour, decided that $19.99 was worth it to just buy them and be done with it. I did manage to churn out a new banner on Photoshop instead. It wasn't a wasted hour.

This has been a bit of a crazy week for me. Work has been running me ragged since Monday (it's just a busy week up there), I've been busy each night at home, and tomorrow I have a Leadership function to attend and those are always exhausting. Needless to say, jewelry making came to an abrupt halt on Monday night. I'm hoping to get back at it Friday evening. I still have quite a few items to post for the remainder of the week, but want to have some ready for next week. Do any other Etsians feel that they are either making things or posting things? Is there any down time?!?

Moo Cards

For a few months I've been hearing about some little things (or not so little if you consider their popularity) called Moo Cards. They are cards printed with your pictures or artwork on one side and your contact information on the back. They are smaller than business cards and therefore more interesting (different equals good, right?). While I fell in love with them immediately, I was hesitant to purchase any as I wasn't sure if my pictures would look good on them.

I recently upgraded to Flickr Pro as I had maxed out the amount of free pictures Flickr allowed without the Pro account. Once I had finished upgrading, I was offered something quite exciting - 10 free Moo Cards. Okay, we all know what freebies mean. They mean I'll fall even more in love with the product once I see them with my store name all over them and I'll turn around and spend money on an entire order. I didn't care about that, I just cared about my freebies.

They were shipped on December 19. I waited.

And waited.

They were coming from London, so I continued to wait.

Lucky me, they came in the mail today. I love them... a lot! So now I'm off to order some more because the freebie did its job, I'm sold.