Spincus's Page

I am not known for being very political. I thought I would take a stand on an issue. The issue is energy. I took an environmental studies course in college in 1978. We talked about how to develop a hydrogen economy then. Little has happened along that front and we are talking 30 years latter. It is time. The economics are ripe for such a development. Here is a speech given by Joe America. I can not say I totally agree with what he is saying. I am not sure that his economic model will balance out as he predicts. But I do think he is on the right track. 1.5 million viewers so far. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPch2k63uj4

Hi Guys, Well I finally am catching up some so hopefully I can get a post here soon. I sent off my work to the for the show above. If you are in the area check it out. These are some of the best Art Metal creators I know of and you can check out some of my work live! lol. I have been doing to local farmers market, and that has been going well for me. Etsy is doing well for me relative to the time I am spending on it. One of these days I will sit down and publish tons of new work on Etsy. We finaly have warm days, so tons of shop time for me, yeah! Ok, cya all latter. I hope everyone is having a good summer and finding much success with their marketing efforts. :)

It was 53 degrees out this morning. Rainy all night, Sorta nice to be honest. Etsy Statistics Here is what Etsy posted recently; The numbers for May: • $6.5 million sold here on Etsy last month — 8.3% more than April. • 449,000 items were sold to make up that sales figure. • A tiny bit over 730,000 new items were listed. • 65,200 new buyers and 14,400 new sellers joined the community. We were very close to 300,000,000 page views for the month (we came in at 298,000,000) and we had our highest traffic day ever: 10,500,000 this past Wednesday, May 28th. This puts the average order at $14.47 This is a pretty low number from the from the perspective of the price point of many of the items that I am selling. We do not know how much variance is in these numbers, but i suspect that there was not much. Thinking about it If the average item you are selling is twice the price of the average sales on Etsy, you probably are not experiencing tons and tons of sales unless you have been around for a while. This is only a guess though, so take it with a grain of salt. My average is most like 3 to 4 times the Etsy sales average. In order to satisfy the customer on Etsy budget, this means that if we want to generate lots of sales, we have to have many items priced under $20.00 A reminder, If you make a Blog post here let me know so that it can be featured on the front page. The Etsy Team Considerations has picked the team tag of TeamConsiderations. Cya, Still have sooooo many things that need to be done over the next 2 weeks so i do not plan on posting much till I get caught up. Welcome to our Community,cya

it was about 50 degrees out here this morning, gray sky, but warm enough for me to be able to get in a ton of shop time that I desperately need. I have 3 outstanding order, and some commision work to do, all cast, and time consuming. Welcome This is going to be a lite post. Welcome all of the new members. If the folks here are wondering how come we got a whole bunch of new folks, well, i sorta made a mistake lol. I meant to send out email invitations to our new Team marketing group members, our Etsy street team folks, and some how I ended sending out invitations to all my friend ning wide. Guess some other folks want to participate :). It is all good but I had not planed on marketing this group till we where a bit further along. Oh well, it will all work out. :) Thinking about it I have a ton of things that need to be done over about the next 3 weeks so I do not expect to be doing many blog posts for a little while only. For new folks, there is a ton of content here already to keep you busy for a while. I am also waiting more more information on my paid advertising before reporting. So far it looks very promising. What time i do have i for considerations will be spent thinking about our new team and what directions we should be heading. Artsfarm is running that and should be the primary point of contact, but she and I are in constant contact so I am keeping up on the team. Also I am monitoring all the threads all over consideration as usual and I will chime in where i can contribute. I want to remind folks, if you post a blog here, please let me know so that I can consider making it a front page article. It is not automatic here like it is on some other Ning sites. Cya, Well lots of things to do, Scott

it was 53 degrees this morning. woot! Impressions It is all about impressions :) There is a thread started in our forums by Pam Hawk of Pass it on Plates, discussing Project Wonderful (PW).. To get up to speed, check out this thread. Pam's defined market is a bit different than most artist because she has defined a whole new market niche. She has to deal with both eduction and availability at the same time for her defined market segment. It is very doable, but a bit more challenging. I am of the opinion that Pam needs to get in front of influencers first, then market availability. Influencers are blog writers, magazines, reviewers, that type of thing. Any ways Pam did the ground work on PW and got me interested. Please note, the PW site works best with Explorer and not so well with firefox. . Get to the influencers, they will teach the market place about your wares. Here are some of my early thoughts on PW: ok first off, it should be noted that the bidding increment is for 1000 page views or what is commonly called CPM (cost per 1000). This is bidding for views, not clicks. The goal is to get clicks. if you bid on a page at .05 and only 200 views happen in a day, you will get billed .01 for that day, since only 20% of the 1000 view rate was hit. This is a very fair way for them to have set up the costs. Testing sites is very important. If something cost .50 cpm but you get 50 clicks, that is cheaper per click than something that cost .10 and you get 1 click. It will take a while to find the sites that work best for your products, and do not forget, your add will effect this also, and needs to be tested. If you have a decently presentable add to start with, add testing can wait till after you have found a good site, with plenty of views and clicks. Here is my current square add: It is simple, clean, uses attractor colors that I know work, visible form, easy message, and more importantly I know what the response on Etsy is to this when I advertise through renewing. So I feel that testing of the image will be only a moderate exercise. Right now I want to find sites that convert to clicks. I plan on changing this image to have it have a simple glowing animated single sparkle. Folks respond to movement, and I can use that in moderation and really make this add pop to attention on a page. I personally do not like the heavy animated adds and turn off to them quickly. But done discretely and minimally i expect decent improvements in results relative to a static image. My first early take on PW is it is a bit confusing, but after a while you can wade through what is happening. Keep the CPM in mind, and the average daily visits to the site you are testing. You want to find sites that result in the highest possible click / view ratio per CPM. In other words, we are trying to find out the best possible cost per Click in the long run with the lowest cost per click. I do think that the minimum bid part of PW needs to be revamped badly. They have a lot of unused property out there. We want to find the best possible cost per click If you have a website: Use google analytics to track incoming and drill down to see what your sell through is. If you are like me and do not have a web site yet this is applicable: Then we are also trying to figure out return on investment (ROI). ROI will be harder to figure out here because we will not know where our sales are coming from. So it is sorta a guess. If you have been monitoring your daily sales per view and have a baseline on it, even just a sense of it, you can get a subjective feel for if you are getting sales from the adds or not. But you have to give it some time to work for you, because of the 3 impression rule. Thinking about it This is early testing, I want to find good sites with fair costs for me. My budget is extremely small to start. I also plan on trying other types of advertising, like Google add words, but this is a good start into the paid add arena. I recommend starting out very slow on paid advertising, test tons, find sites that work for you, and then start promoting what you have shown is working. Remember also that add size and static verses dynamic content plays a role. Cya I am still trying to figure out what I want to do today. I finally am caught up on all my outgoing orders. I have ordered my portable display case so I can look professional when I show up at boutiques doors. I want to explore more sites on PW for possible testing. And I have a bunch of new testing I want to do. I need to get some more content out on my blogs and DA need my attention desperately. As well as some friends I have been ignoring need my attention. So many hats. I can say that I have started to set up yearly goals. I am not big on goals, or used to not be, but in this case yearly goals help me organize my efforts more. This year is the year of the boutique for me. Next year or the year after will be, if ever, craft shows, and boutique buyers conventions. This helps me keep priorities on order. Welcome to Our Community,cya Scott

This morning it was 50 degrees outside. It is going to be a nice warm day, even if the sky is full of clouds. Inspiration Todays inspiration is brought to you by Kimberly Rogers. Kim and I became friends over on Indie, well before I got Etsy famous with my 6 mil dollar man post that started me on this road to blogging and community site moderation. Kim has a nice blog that she keeps up on over on inde also. Kim was smarter than me on what to market on Etsy, she jumped right into supplies almost from the beginning. Goes to show you that a marketing background does not mean that you will always get it right, it just helps. Kim's work speaks for itself. She bought some of my toggles pretty early on so kim is also a customer of mine. I can not wait to see how she uses the toggles. I did not know what the word lampwork meant before I meet and became friends with Kim, I now know, and I have to tell you I am in awe. Have fun, check out here great works, they are really something else. Thinking about it Etsy just changed their policies recently. One of the things they now allow for is notification by Treasury Curators to folks they have included. This is a nice and welcome change. Etsy, has a lot of growing up to do. I sure hope they can figure out and implement some of the many services that folks need and desire for a sales platform site. Cya Keeping this one short, because I am just so overloaded with work and the weather is warm enough to put in 18 hour days. Guys have a great week! Welcome to our community,cya Scott

it was nice this morning, so nice i forgot to look at the temprature. :) Wow! Here is a link to free on line marketing classes offered by HP the printer computer folks. I thought this was important enough to include it in a blog post. I will put in the the forum also. I have not looked at this series yet, but am looking forward to hearing what a big boy says works. Looks like lots of other free classes offered on their site also. Welcome to Our Community, Cya Scott

it was 46 degrees here this morning. Lots of shop items This will be a quick post. Due to circumstances, just being pretty busy, I have not been been renwing or listing new items much over the last week. But I have been watching my views with Heart o tron. Strangly, with no new listings, no active forum threads, and no listings in treasuries, my view count has been rising of late. Now there could be other factors causing this rise, the recent changes in how searches are handled on Etsy comes to mind, my banner add at my sisters high trafic site (but i have a baseline already on that). I suspect Etsy new search is helping me out some. When think about this something came to mind that I thought was worth sharing. Namely, the more items in your shop, the more tag words you will have out in the Etsy search ether, the more chances folks will come by and visit. And maybe when they visit for one item they will loook around at other items in your shop. So an now obvious way to get more folks to your shop is to offer more diversity and more items, which means more tag words. Thinking about it If you sell art, you might look at the Etsy search categories and see if you can offer something that fits into a top level category other than art. In my case i offer jewelry and supplies. So I am hitting two major top level categories. I might add some vintage also, but not much. I have a few items that can be recycled from vintage. What other categories can I get into? Art? Cya, As I said, a quick one. :) I had my first over $100 in sales in one day online yesterday. I celebrated and took myself out to dinner. :) This is always a significant milestone in any business. It was also the first day that I got two sales in one day. Today, I am taking that hard earned money, and buying my portable professional soft display case. When that shows up I get to hit the road and find some boutiques to carry more work. I had a fantastic casting session yesterday. 60 pieces! lots of new masters, lots of new findings, lots of new accents. I have a ton of work ahead and will be able to develop bouque new items of art. :) Welcome to Our Community, Cya

it is 48 degrees outside this morning, and one of those normal low clouds covering the entire sky type of mornings. Bleh. Things I like, a good cup of tea, chocholate in about any way shape or form but cookies are my fav, sunny warm beautiful spring days, my zune mp3 music player and the unlimited music and podcasts I can play on it. Things I do not like, squash, sour candy, shipping problems. Today I have to deal with shipping problems, something we should not ever have to deal with. In my first company we shipped 2000 orders a month, 80% of those shipped in 6x9 inch bubble mailers. The cost of my software to manufacture was so low that if a customer did not receive the package we automatically just resent no questions asked. We did run into lost packages but rarely. What we did notice over time is that there was one area we shipped into that we kept experiencing lost packages. We started sending to that township, and others in NY city, UPS instead of USPS, so that signature was required. Even with that we still had theft, In one case we still can not figure out how that was done, and that was for a $1,500 item. We had to write it off. There are lots of ways to verify address with credit card processing, and we did them all. Still theft could occur. Jewelry is much more expensive than replacing software. Even though I was aware of the problem with some NY city addresses, I sent out a package the other day USPS. The customer claims she never received the package. A little further research showed me she was a brand new customer to Etsy, and had place an order with one other vendor. I contacted that vendor to see if perhaps he had experienced an issues with the customer. Low and behold, that customer made a defective product claim, and the seller promptly replaced the item for free. The buyer was two for two on problems with sellers on Etsy. Not a great record. She filled a complaint with Etsy about her not receiving her order from me. Here is the letter I got from Etsy: Hello, The following transaction has been reported as incomplete by your buyer. Report filed on: May 07 2008 Transaction Number: 8278102 Buyer: XXXXXX Seller: Spincus (5600514) spincus@infowest.com If this is a mistake, please contact abuse@etsy.com to have your case closed. What to do next: 1)Contact the buyer to offer support, relevant information and to work out a solution. Include proof of shipping or proof of refund when applicable. 2)Contact Etsy: Reply to this email, or write to abuse@etsy.com once you have contacted the buyer. You are welcome to include proof of shipping or proof of refund. Tip: Please email us from the email address associated with your Etsy username and the claim. This will ensure your identity and protect the privacy of your case. ......................... Our Policy: 1)Shipping Problems Etsy does not hold sellers responsible for postal delays, failures, thefts, losses or customs problems. The buyer and seller are urged to file a postal claim in the event of a postal failure. 2)Address Problems Etsy does not hold sellers responsible for incorrect shipping address submissions. The buyer must provide correct addresses in both their Etsy and PayPal accounts at the time of checkout. 3)Payment Problems If the buyer has not completed payment, we will close the non-delivery case. A buyer may re-open their case if they send Etsy proof of payment. 4)Returns The seller must refund a buyer for goods returned, provided the seller has offered a refund. The buyer may not force a return. Both parties must agree to the return. The buyer (sender) is not responsible for postal delays, failures, thefts, losses or customs problems. 5)Seller's Policy Buyers will be referred to the seller's policy in any of the above events. .......................... Please be in touch as soon as you can so that we can close your case! Thank you, Etsy Support abuse@etsy.com It is worth noting that Etsy does not hold sellers responsible for lost packages... I have the following text both in my in store profile and the message to buyers on the appearance section of my Etsy store. STORE POLICIES: WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST OR STOLEN ITEMS. YOU MUST PAY FOR TRACKING AND INSURANCE IF YOU WISH TO PROTECT YOUR ITEMS DURING TRANSIT. I really hate to do that, what I may do instead is ship USPS tracking and insured on all packages and pass that cost on to customers. This means a jaunt to the post office for every item I ship. What a pain and terrible use of time. As soon as i start getting enough orders I will switch to UPS pick up. Even still theft can and does occur. Thinking about it There are lots of foreign countries that are not worth shipping to. I am sure there are lists out there of what countries to avoid. I generally ship to only known 1st world countries and some other countries with no problems. Beware, issues with custom agents is a whole area of possible theft also. Cya, today I get to pour some metal. I am really looking forward to it. Part of the casting leads to an outstanding order for a customer. I have several new handmade findings I cast that will help me create lots of different pieces. Can not wait :) Welcome to Our Community, Cya Scott

today it was 47 degrees out this morning when i went and looked. This means a full day in the shop, and probably an evening! Woot! Todays posting will be the quick version so I can take advantage. So I have a new experiment My take is,things though bad, will get better for the country. It is hard to call a bottom to any recession, but we are defiantly at a local bottom now. But I think this economic down turn woke up some folks, there also is something else in the air namely some sort of awakening of folks, sort of a resurgence into things more Green, local, neighborly, and I detect spiritually as well. It is kinda neat. Even many of the national advertisers are using green as part of their brand promise. I think folks are seeing that global warming is here; whether warming or coldlng, the Hadley cells, that are a major control on weather are playing havoc. This was considered the worst winter on record since 1966 for the pacific north west. Some how I survived it, spring is here and I am full of springtime energy. Say so long to cabin fever, say hello to haughty days of sunshine and warmth. I have been at my marketing model again, pushing and shoving it, and deflating the balloon and trying all sorts of things, some great some not even a whisper. So here is my take on what I am trying to do now. My take is green, local purchase are in. This means that I need to find the boutiques. Easy, get on line and search for local boutiques with an internet presence. Yep, If they do not have an internet presence, I do not want them to be part of my target group. I want to be able to cross pollinate, a presence is important. Say hello to brick and mortar. I am going to collect, database, and track, online boutiques,starting local and moving outwards. I am going to spend sometime cold calling. Now I am not a big fan of cold calling, but there just is no way around doing it. It is a MUST do even. The amount of information you get by cold calling is simply staggering and can not be duplicated in any other way besides getting out there. You must go in. Even though I am resistant to cold calling, it must be done to some minor limited way for anyone trying to fully understand their market. I will not have to spend lots of time cold calling, unless i am hungry. A few days on the road should be enough to get 95% of the information I need from the effort. My primary goal is to increase my understanding of my customers. My other goals while cold calling is to, see what stores look like, what are the presenting this year. Get to know some fellow business owners, and perhaps make some new friends while at it. My goal is to find at least one brick and mortar business owner that I can call a friend; Hopefully two. Someone that wants to shoot the crap about customers and business. Someone to bounce retail ideas off of. Someone one that is an expert at their customer base, and my customers also. My goal is 10 boutiques. Here is how I am going to do this. I am going to cold call so I can see my customer face to face. When I feel that most of my questions are answered through this research method, I will start collecting targeted names and databasing them; drawn from a demographics of online presence, art or botique sales. I will refine this targetting demographic model to include things like, they sell Art silver already, they are upscale, they have wonderful presentations both online and offline... I will then start an online marketing campaign or phone cold calling campaign against my target list. Till I get enough customers, 10 or so I will keep targeting this group. I will try and get into all the national big art towns as I evolve, I want representation in Europe also. This will take time. I want to turn cold calling into warm calling pretty darn quickly After i get to know my customer a bit from cold calling in person, I can work towards warm calling other targets; the preferred method. I will Email proposals and follow up with phone calls to anyone showing the least interest, to this targeted list, the form will be in a newsletter structure but very personalized if possible. I hope that should get me to my goal, but have plenty of other ideas about how to get my 10 boutiques. Thinking about it Things are changing, for me, for everyone. Spring time is here. I am taking all the wonderful pent up energy and applying it to my art. I have something like 15 new pieces right this second. Now is the time to strike out and share my work. I am in building phase now; building catalogs, and building customer relationships. Soon I will be in add copy phase, and will revisit all all my work, consolidate my marketing message across all presentations. It is during that phase that i will present my global message on a website also. Cya, It is warn today! shop time gallor!