Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Getting my crap together

I've followed one piece of advice and ignored another. Too bad I got it backwards. I've recently been reading up on how to make a CafePress store successful. Almost everywhere I found information, the person said that the shopkeeper should always charge the premium mark-up. The reasoning behind it was the people shopping see the higher price and figure it is higher quality. That is a load of excrement. I was averaging at least one sale a week, sometimes even two. I know, not that much in the scheme of things, but it paid for the store. On the advice of the "experts", I changed the mark-up on all of my designs to premium. No sale for almost two weeks, also not a huge deal. But I changed my prices back to what I'd had before and the same day I made another sale. It could be a coincidence, but I see it as a sign. The "experts" are probably just other shopkeepers who figure the best way to get rid of competition is give lame advice. We newbies, trusting they know what they are talking about, follow like sheep. Well not anymore. Like I told my friend Rivercrow, I'd rather make $2 per shirt and sell 2 or 3 than make $4 a shirt and not sell any.

The first bit of advice still doesn't explain why my Pagan designs don't sell. I believe it's because I didn't follow the second, more helpful, information. I have several very nice designs. But no one sees them. That's because I added them to my store without bothering with a description. Having tags for each design is all well and good. But the description increases the number of times the target keywords appear on the page. Not only does it help in searches on CP, but searches on the major search engines as well. If we can get our designs to show up on Google, maybe we can reach the audience we are targeting. I posted this info on my main blog almost a month ago and blew it off. I plan to spend the next few days correcting that oversight. I will post here if it has any effect on my sales. :D

Friday, August 17, 2007

Milestone


As of about two hours ago, and thanks to a few friends and even more total strangers, I've sold 30 items through my Cafe Press store. My Naruto design is still my best seller. I've let my store sit on the back burner the last few weeks. I still need to add descriptions to my current designs. I need to come up with some new stuff. And need to put content on the website I finally forked out web hosting money for. Though that will all have to wait a few days until I get my first fan fiction story beta read, edited and posted. I know it won't bring any income, but I'm excited to get feedback from other fanfic authors. I've never written before and didn't realize how fun it would be.