Black Friday

Check out a Black Friday SALE on my shop! Get 20% off your order! Use code BLFRD2012 at checkout! Click the photo below to go to the shop:

Big Cartel

After some more or less random browsing and a bit of investigating about online ways of selling handmade objects, I decided to open a shop on Big Cartel. It seems like a nice website gathering a lot of brands, with great looking products.

So here is byVellamo on Big Cartel!

Following, a comparison between Etsy and Big Cartel. But it looks like for Big Cartel you have to do your own marketing and bring the potential clients to your shop, chances of them just finding you there are not that high.

Heliotrope fascination

I discovered this amazing special effect of Swarovski crystals and I instantly fell in love. It is a sparkly, violet, blueish, very shiny color.

Absolutely breathtaking.

Pinterest

Another new way people browse online is a website called Pinterest.

I discovered it couple of weeks ago and it quickly because a site that I open every day. 

Here you can PIN items, photos, anything you find anywhere on the internet. You create boards for your pins. I use it mostly for creating collections of things I am interested in, beautiful places, artwork, products I would like to buy in the future. Here also you can connect to other people by following their boards, repinning interesting things you find there and commenting on their pins.

You can find me here: byVellamo on Pinterest

Google ads

One of the more popular ways of marketing on the web seems to be Google ads. I have used them several times for several different websites. As one observation, for my photography website, http://www.sandrarugina.eu it did not work well at all. I believe it is because people searching google were not potential clients, or else my keywords were very wrong.

The cost of Google ads (CPC - cost per click) can be controlled manually, or you can let Google do it automatically for you. I would advise you use the auto bidding, but keeping an eye on it and pausing the ad for a while if the cost seems to be higher than you want to pay.

I ran my latest campaign for my Etsy jewelry shop, http://www.etsy.com/shop/byVellamo and got quite a few visits. During the duration of my campaign I got quite a few clicks and my items seem to gave gained a lot of attention. I am not completely sure if it is related to one of my Google ads clicks, but I believe it is. However, I have had no sales so far from running Google ads. 

As a conclusion, I think it is a very good way of marketing for medium and large businesses, who can afford running a large campaign and investing more than I have into Google adwords.

Purpose

I start this blog with the purpose of testing and analyzing different online and offline marketing options which I personally tested on my jewelry web shop and write about them here. If any of you find this useful or have some comments, I would love to hear about your own experience.

I will also try to keep track of designing and making jewelry techniques and add useful links which I might come across while browsing the web.

So, welcome to byVellamo blog!