FORUM: What’s Your Trouble, Bubble?

Lately, I’ve been facing all kinds of challenges and dilemmas with my store as I’m exploring options for a brick-and-mortar establishment,  so I know that it can be kind of frustrating at times to try and create a balance between life, work (if maintaining your Etsy store isn’t your only job), creating (for those of you that are handmade artists), EEWIL responsibilities, blogging,  your Etsy store…the list goes on. This is especially true if, like me, you’re the only Etsyan in your “real world” social circle.

So, I thought I’d just set up a post here on the blog that can be an open forum for you to talk about your challenges, frustrations, conundrums, and the like.  Hopefully we’ll have a lot of interaction with this topic, and we can all help each other figure out solutions.  We have close to 200 members, all with different levels of Etsy experience, which means that we have a large pool of advice at our fingertips;  if you’re stuck with something, that resource!  Post here and ask questions — chances are, there’s somebody on our team who can help you figure it out.  Use the forums on our Facebook page discussion boards and on our Etsy Team discussion board, too.  The more places you ask, the more likely you are to find some assistance.

Whatever you do,  don’t go it alone.

Frustration can lead to burnout, and that’s not good for you or your store.  Check in with your cyberfriends, and let us help you get back on track!

Until next time,

Happy Etsying and Loads of EEWIL ♥!

Victoria 😉

Extreme Makeover: Treasury Edition

Building Treasuries takes a lot of work.  If you want to do it right, and do it beautifully — and all of us do — you end up investing a lot of time. It’s easy to get caught up in searching Etsy for just the right thing to complete your collection.  It’s also easy to get distracted by things you find while searching for just the right thing.  Personally, I end up adding at least ten new items and two or three new shops to my Favorites list each time I build a Treasury.

The time investment is totally worth it and building Treasuries can be a relaxing hobby if you’ve got a bit of free time to indulge yourself.

But… many of us regularly find ourselves with less and less free time due to everyday family duties, keeping up with our Etsy shops (and our brick-and-mortar establishments, if we have those), work obligations… you get the picture, right?

Let me offer a couple of suggestions that might make your Treasury-building life a little easier:

1.  Use multiple tabs.

When I build EEWIL Treasuries, I always have at least three tabs open in Internet Explorer (sorry to Mac fans — I’m not sure if you guys have tabs or if you have to use multiple windows.  The first tab is our EEWIL Facebook page.  The second tab (or sometimes a window) is used for clicking through to members’ shops.  Tab 3 is for building the Treasury.  Multitasking with tabs makes it much easier to search for items and build your Treasury.

2.  Work with what you know.

 Take your inspiration from something you REALLY know well.  It will take you less time to find items, because you’ll know immediately when you’ve found something that fits in your Treasury.  For example, my husband’s birthday is coming up next week.  A few nights ago, I built a Treasury full of things that remind me of my husband and his interests (check it out here).  They weren’t all things that he’d necessarily want for his birthday, but things that made me think of him.  It took about 10 minutes to build, it got my husband’s seal of approval (he said, “Hey, you did good,”  which is a HUGE compliment coming from him!), and I’m planning on using it for EEWIL recruitment purposes. 

3. Pick a color, any color! 

Choose a theme color.  It gives you lots of options, especially when you’re choosing items from EEWIL members’ shops.  Let’s say you chose PINK as your theme color, like I did for this Treasury.  When you head to an EEWIL member’s shop from our Info page on Facebook, you can then enter “pink” in the “This Shop”  search box, like I did in CleopatraKerckhof’s  shop in the screenshot below (click on the image to enlarge it).

Searching for pink items in Cleopatra's shop

4. Curate your Treasuries!

Maybe you don’t have time to build a brand-new Treasury from scratch.  I know I haven’t, at least not lately.  But how about updating or re-vamping some of your older, more popular Treasuries?  Do a Treasury Search for your username, either by searching your shop name through the Treasury search bar or copy-paste this link www.etsy.com/treasury/search/yourshopname into your browser’s address bar and replace “yourshopname” with, well, your shop’s name. 😉 (see screenshots below, click to enlarge).

Searching the Treasury list using the Search Bar

Searching the Treasury by using the link

 Once you pull up your Treasury list, find your more popular past Treasuries, and work on re-vamping those.  If you haven’t been back to check on them in awhile, chances are there will be a few items that have sold or that have expired listings.  Replace those items with new ones, contact all of your featured sellers (yes, even the ones that were in the original Treasury — they will appreciate that you featured them again!), and share your Treasury link just like you would for a new one.

5.  Have fun!

Treasury building isn’t meant to add more stress to your life — it’s meant to help you relieve some of it.  Etsyans, by nature, are a creative bunch; we happen to have an exceptionally creative and talented bunch of them in our EEWIL membership.  Those of you that are regularly building Treasuries do a beautiful job.  But… everybody experiences “writer’s block” at some point or another.  So, if you’re struggling to come up with a theme, check out the existing EEWIL Treasuries for some inspiration.  Or, better yet, ask another EEWIL member for help — especially if you’re a fan of their Treasuries. 

We’re all in this together, and if you think about it, helping each other is pretty much the main focus of our group. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, post comments, interact. It’s the best way for us to grow as a community, and when we do that all of us benefit. 🙂

Until next time ,

Happy Etsying and lots of EEWIL Love,

Victoria 🙂

Welcome to Our New Home

Welcome to WordPress, the new home of our EEWIL Blog!

We hope you’ll find this new blog a little more in line with our EEWIL philosophy, a little more streamlined, and a lot less cluttered.  The layout and feel of the blog over on our old hosting site just wasn’t quite right, so after a little research we landed here. 🙂

You’ll notice a few differences on this blog, the most obvious being that it feels a little more like a webpage than a blog.  Please take a few minutes to peruse the links at the top of the page.  Some of them are still “under construction,” but you’ll start to see them fill out over the next few weeks.

As always, your comments and suggestions are always welcome.  Let us know how you feel about this new blog, and what articles you’d like to see here.  If you’re interested in writing for the blog, drop Victoria a line here or on our EEWIL Facebook page — we’d love to hear your “voice” on our page!

If you were following us over on our old blog hosting site, please follow us here instead.  Over then next few weeks, we’ll be setting up links to our followers blogs.  Once that’s complete, our old blog will be taken down — we don’t want to lose any of our readership when that happens, so following us here is just extra insurance that we don’t lose touch.

Big EEWIL and Etsy love to all of you.  Keep up the great work.  You make EEWIL the great community that it is!

Easy Tagging, At Your Service

 

There’s been a lot of discussion on our FB page recently about tagging items if you’re a member of the Etsy Team and also how to search for Team Members, so it seemed like a blog post might be in order.

First, let’s talk about TAGGING:

If you’re a Team member who’s interested in tagging the items in your shop with the EEWIL tag, but you’re finding the task a little daunting because of the volume of stock you’ve got, etsyonsale.com has a great tagging app that makes things go quite quickly — all you need is a Google account — and special thanks are in order for DesigningImpressions for sharing the info in our Team discussion board on Etsy and also on our FB group wall. 

For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with etsyonsale (I wasn’t until I read DesigningImpression’s post!) and want to know more about it, here’s a Storque article that explains its purpose.  (It also comes in handy for setting large-scale sales in your shop! BONUS!)

If you’re ready to try the tagging app, head over to etsyonsale, and follow these steps:
1) Click the red “Sellers” link in the top right corner of the screen
2) Sign in with your Google account

3) Choose your time zone, make sure the checkbox is clicked (etsyonsale will send you an email when it’s done adding tags so you don’t have to keep checking back), and click “Authorize Access”

4) You will be taken to a page that tells you an app would like to connect to your account — read through what’s on that page and then click the “Allow Access” button if you want to proceed
5) Click your shop banner to begin
6) Click the “Tagging Tool” link
7) Choose “Add, ”
8 ) Decide if you want to replace the last tag or skip the item if you’ve used all of your tags, click the appropriate button for your choice
9) Choose “All Listings” (or just certain sections of your shop) from the drop-down menu
10) Enter EEWIL as the tag you wish to apply
11) Click “Apply”

If you left the checkbox from Step 3 checked, you’ll received an email from etsyonsale when the app is all finished tagging your items.  Speed of tagging depends on your internet connection — it took about five minutes for it to tag all 120+ items in my shop.

Now, on to SEARCHING:There are a few ways you can search for EEWIL members if you are trying to build a Treasury.

1) Use the list of group member shops that’s under the “Info” Tab of our Facebook Group Page.  The list is divided into “Participating” and “Non-Participating.”  The goal is to give priority Participating members’ shops, then move to the Non-Participating members’ shops if you still need more items for your collection

2) Search for the EEWIL tag using Etsy‘s in-site search feature.  Choose “All Items” from the drop-down menu, enter EEWIL, and click “Search”

3) If you’re a member of the Etsy Team, you can see a list of Team Members by going to the “Members” section of the Team.  Everyone who is a member of the Etsy Team is a Participating Member of EEWIL. It’s a smaller group, because we’ve limited Team access to members who are currently listed as Participating.

Hope this helps!  Please feel free to comment here if you’ve got questions or more info to add!

TAG! You’re It!

For those of you who have already joined our Etsy Team, please feel free to tag items in your shop as “eewil.” Doing this will create a sort of “directory” of team member shops.

If you haven’t yet joined the Team, membership is gained by application or invitation only. Victoria is currently in the process of sending invites to all EEWIL members who are currently hold “Participating” status on our FB page info tab — however, because Etsy only allows us to send out 25 invites per day, you are welcome to fill out an application if you don’t want to wait for the invite.  Those of you who currently hold “Non-Participating” status will not receive an invite and are required to fill out an application.  CLICK HERE to send in your application.

Also, please remember to keep creating those Treasuries!  They are the backbone of our group, and also what ensures that you have access to all things EEWIL — membership in the Etsy Team is subject to the same terms as membership in our FB group!

Join the Team!

 

Just a quick post to let all of you know that our EEWIL Team is up and running on Etsy!

It’s a members-only Team, so you’ll just need to submit a quick application to obtain membership — all the info on how to submit your application is included in the “Who Can Join?” section of our Team description.

Ready to head over to Etsy and check out our Team?  CLICK HERE!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

 

Well, folks, the holiday shopping season is upon us! Are your Etsy shops ready?

I thought I’d share a few suggestions to for getting yourselves and your shops in the spirit, if you haven’t gotten yourselves there already!

1. DECORATE

We decorate our homes and our brick-and-mortar retail establishments — why not our Etsy shops?  Put up a festive seasonal banner in your shop to welcome in holiday shoppers.

2. OFFER SPECIAL DEALS
Big box stores do it, and so can you!  Black Friday sales, holiday specials, contests, VIP Shopper events — be creative, work your promotional magic, and bring in the customers!

3. GIFT CARDS

Gift cards are a great way for your shoppers to give (and get!) the gift of handmade and vintage.  Choose your denominational amounts, create a simple graphic, and you’re all set.  To create a physical gift card to send to the buyer, print or draw your own on index cards.  If the buyer is purchasing the GC for someone other than themself, you can also offer to send it directly to the intended recipient.  Just be sure to protect yourselves (and your sellers) by stating very clear guidelines about how the gift cards can be used.   

4.  GIFT WRAP

Offer gift wrap services! If your buyer is sending their purchase as a gift, offer to ship to directly to the recipient and offer to gift wrap.  You can choose to offer this as a free service or at a small additional upcharge.

5.  CREATE HOLIDAY TREASURIES

The main goal of EEWIL is promoting each other (and ourselves!) through the creation of Etsy Treasuries.  This is one of the best ways to get your shop and other EEWIL‘s members’ shops some excellent PR!  Creating Holiday-themed, Gift Guide, or Shopping Handbook Treasuries will draw in views AND get you in the spirit.   If you need some inspiration, check out the great Treasuries below created by EEWIL members.

Dear Santa All I Want Is A White Christmas by AsianUyen

Who Needs Black Friday? by GemsCrystalsandWire

Winter Solstice Celebration by DesigningImpressions

Got any other holiday ideas? Please share them as comments — we’d love to hear from you!