Thursday

Found Handmade and Other Ways to Promote

Happy New Year to everyone! Hoping you all had a wonderful, peaceful time bringing in the New Year! I spent it with my family and it was peaceful!

I have plans to completely redo my website: Lee's Candles and rename it Homespun Alley to cover everything I like to make and sell. Lee's Candles is where I started over 15 years ago with handmade ear candles. Since then I have added my Grandma Betty's line of Body Butters, Lip Butter and Bug Away, plus gift sets.

About a year ago I opened shops on Etsy, Grandma Betty's for the Body Butter items and Renewed Resources - which is my supply shop items, vintage, collectibles, fabric and much more. These Etsy shops have not done well financially. I think Etsy has gotten so big my shops just got lost in the crowd, plus I don't think Etsy grew the site to meet the demands and needs such as stats (I know they are working on it) and more advertising.

I recently opened a shop on Artfire under the name Country Lady, which is titled Homespun Alley and will be listing items from Grandma Betty's and Renewed Resources there and eventually eliminate the Etsy shops. Artfire only cost $7 a month with no additional fees and the cost is for a lifetime so no increase in fees in the future. They are offering this promotion for the first 5000 folks that sign up.

Today I signed up with Found Handmade - Supplies . Vintage. My daughter told me about them since they are promoting five free listings until January 15th, 2009. It is really an interesting site the way they set it up and I really like it. There main catergories are Handmade, Supplies, Vintage with lots of sub-catergories. Plus they have stats.

Here's the cost after the free trial period:

After January 15, 2009, we will be wiping the slate clean and deleting all blocks.
After January 15th, we will be charging $5 for each block per month, $30 for Four merged blocks (larger image) per month, and $8 and up for the Featured Item blocks.

Here is the link for more info: Found Handmade Pricing Info

I also recommend that everyone read Timothy Adams article and watch his video about Social Bookmarking. Tim shares another free way to promote. Thanks to Tim for all he has done and is doing to help all home based businesses.

Believing we can all have a very prosperous 2009. Stay positive and continue to work hard and don't forget that God is our sufficiency not the world.

5 comments:

Swapna said...

Good luck..hope u have great success with this new venture...

Live, Love, Laugh, Write! said...

Good luck with your new selling venues! And thanks for the info on Found Handmade - I've been doing research into stuff like this and that's one I didn't have :)

Unknown said...

Really great blog post!! Thanks for sharing and best of luck to you in 2009!!! Kelly http://kreatedbykelly.etsy.com

TiLT said...

Great finding you...I see Roseworks beat me to it :) e are doing a blog series on online selling sites (primarily for handmade - she does jewelry, I do handbags)...now we have another one to add...thanks for sharing :)

Anonymous said...

hi, i think the way to be successful on etsy is to sell art supplies, becuz most of the people on etsy are artists........i've not had much success selling on etsy, but then again i have done basically nothing to promote it....