Etsy ,Blogging, and Spiders...What They Have In Common

 I  have a shop on Etsy.

Opening it after family and friends suggested I expand into a larger market.   

I'm happy staying right here in Atlanta but after looking at Etsy thought that this may be a fun way to interact with people in a new and meaningful way.

I am glad that I had no illusions of sales rolling in.  Etsy IS a great place for stretching your reach around the world.  I have "friends" from Maine to California, Australia and Thailand. One of which you have already met.

Since setting up an Etsy shop is a lot of work, I didn't want to let mine go to waste.  I have a website that I am not particularity fond of and really liked the "community" feel of Etsy.  But once you put a price tag on "it"...."it" becomes a business. And "business" becomes work. Something that creative right brained people like myself may have a hard time coming to terms with.  I never felt as though creating my jewelry  was work.  I could, and have done it for over 24 hrs.  Time just fly’s.  One minute it's 9 :00 in the evening and I will start on something that pops into my mind, and the next thing it's 5:00 in the morning.

I finally came to terms with the fact (most grudgingly) that I do have a business and I had better start doing business like things. I had been out of the 'business" world for a number of years and the closest thing to it are my Atlanta clientele who for the majority are professional women.  Busy professional woman who appreciate the "boutique" service I am able to give them.

On Etsy, I was nothing to no one.  One of 200,000 shops with over 2 million items for sale...yikes!  talk about being buried. And in jewelry, I found out that it is the most saturated market on Etsy.

Wake-up call.

At least now if you have an internet business there are internet tools to actualize said business.  I'm feeling my age catch up with me here, because yes, I was alive before there were computers and the internet.  When e-mail was the only "social network" and Yahoo groups were a big thing and you had to actually wait for a phone connection to get you online. Matter of fact I ran out and bought my first computer as soon as Windows came out because I just didn't get DOS.  Those of you who watched Howdy Dottie and Captain Kangaroo know what I'm talking about.

Very simply though the bottom line of what I found out is one magic word called "content." One may have a product that is for people, but an internet business doesn't market to people. The internet markets to spiders that crawl the web looking for content to make sense of, and return viable links through a "search." Over 130 hours of research was done to spout out that sentence.

I found out that my beautiful jewelry had to be "sticky" so that the "spider" would pick it up. And the food that the "spider" was looking for was manufactured by SEO. Now I'm going to be nice and tell those of you who don't know what that is, or maybe I was the last person on the face of the earth who didn't know what that was, because it took me forever to find out that SEO is Search Engine Optimization. Which has to do with content.
Key words, tags, content.
And that's now accomplished through the 4 corner posts (that's what I call them) of "social media."

And they are: Face book, Linked In, Twitter, and a Blog. Oh my.

 I am on Linked In. And it's great because we are establishing "relationships." We're helping each other out. What a generous world this is.

I've got my Face book page
http://www.facebook.com/ontherocksgems

I've re-found a bunch of folks that I lost touch with. I'm Creating and re-establishing relationships. Matter of fact over on another group I'm Linked in to we have a thread going for everyone to post their Face book page so we can all "like" each other. Content.

I Tweet
http://twitter.com/ontherocksgems

Ok, I admit that I have a problem with the tweet. But I can do it if I want to. Up to the second, in your face, this is what I'm doing now.. TWEET! Wow, really relationship driven.

I Blog
http://ontherocksgems.blogspot.com/

Here it is!

If you need a blog all you have to do is go to Google and enter Google blog and it's for free.

It's kind of nice looking at all the internet-real estate my company name has.

That's what created the "content" so I got "sticky" and the "spider" found me so that I would turn up in response to viable searches that people did. Oh my.

And it's all relationship driven. The 1st holy principal in marketing has always been to create a relationship between the brand and the consumer.

It's difficult to sell jewelry that people can't really see, touch and put on.. But it reminds me that something old is new again.

Relationships that are created with the written word.