Store milestone

I'm very excited because sales have picked up for the holidays. It makes me wish I'd worked harder on new designs before now. I will make sure to be ready next year with lots of new stuff and an off-store website promoting it. My store did have a new milestone. I had my first repeat customer today. Someone actually ordered one of my shirts, got it and like it enough to order another one a week later. How freaking cool is that!?! This gives me hope that the store wasn't a dumb idea or a waste of time. My designs are better than I'm willing to give myself credit for. If I'd listened to my friend Rivercrow to start with I could've saved myself loads of self-doubt about my CafePress store.

On the writing front, as the meter on the side of the blog shows, I never got close to the 50k goal for NaNoWriMo. But the 13.5k I did get was at least two-thirds of first draft of my story. I won't stop writing just because the contest is over. I want to have the story finished to post on fanfiction.net by the end of the year.

Long time gone

I've been so sidetracked by so much that Artist's Way has been impossible. But at least the biggest thing requiring my attention is an artistic endeavor. I signed on to participate in NaNoWriMo. It is much more work than I originally anticipated. Completely enjoyable work, but still work. For anyone wanting to keep up with my progress, small compared to others but good for a rookie author, my profile is here. Next month, I plan to get some new designs uploaded to my store and start work on the website I keep threatening to create to help boost sales. As far as next year, I have no idea what it holds in store for me.

More new designs

Thanks to special requests from co-workers and a slight obsession with the show "Supernatural", I've added not just one but 3 (well, 4 as of tomorrow) new designs. I have several other requests that haven't made it to my Photoshop yet. I've been struggling to come up with ideas that might actually sell and my co-workers are all trying their best to help. The first design shown here was really just for me. I am such a Dean fangirl. The second, one of the special requests, is a birthday gift for someone who's turning 30 and understands the "Logan's Run" reference.


Ok, with that bit of guilt out of my system, I can go work on my fan fiction some more. I always feel a bit guilty when I let my store go without regular updates. I think the new designs make up for some of the lost time. And after the fan fiction, I will get my website up so my designs can be found on Google. My monitor has become a minefield of Post-it notes to keep me focused and on track. And so I don't lose the great ideas from my co-workers. I am a Post-it kinda girl. :D

Finally some inspiration

It's been a while since I've been able to come up with a new design for my store. It took actually wearing one of them to help me with a new one. I think I might have to make a whole series. Check out how it looks on the shirts and let me know what you think. :D

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

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.

Advertising

Here's a link to my squidoo lens, the first of many places I will request or create for free advertising for the Pagan designs in my (and Rivercrow's) Cafe Press store. I am determined to get people to see what great designs we've created. Until I can afford the web hosting for my own site, I will find whatever free options I can. If I have to create free accounts on every site available, I will. Pagans have to know there are quality design options available. No clip art and no tacky lines like "Want a taste of Religion? Lick a Witch." My most successful Pagan design so far is this one: