Wednesday, July 20, 2011

A Hot July

It has been one year since I really started working hard to do more than pay the bills. Last year I started hanging out with an old high school friend who makes stone plugs, you know the kind for big ear holes. His little business was really successful and he'd started about the same time I did. I guess it made me think about my goals and how I was going to get my little spoon bending addiction to new heights.
I started social networking, I made this blog and built my Facebook fan page. I bought a lot more inventory at once and bought some extra tools I'd been holding back on. I learned a bit about Search engine optimization and started working my way to the top of the Google ladder. Ok, I spent a lot of time working on search engine optimization. I got to page 3 eventually with lots of very minor changes to my Etsy site and working on quality back links. It took the Google spiders quite awhile to catch up with my changes. I didn't move up or down for quite awhile and I got kind of used to being in page 3.
I was behind my competition who had over 1000 listings which were mostly 50 single listings copy and pasted a dozen or so times each to make it look like a bunch of different stuff. Christmas was good for Spoon Rings and he dropped off several times to catch up with the listings he'd sold and didn't have any rings made for. I was really glad I didn't go with the Billion Listings Philosophy! I was busy enough making 40 or so rings to keep up per day.
In January Google changed the way it searches and I'm now at the top of the search engine. Seems Google figure out all items that were copies weren't any different than the others. Google now searches for individual listings and some companies that have figured it out are spending thousands of dollars to say something different about each one of their 10,000 red bar stools. Looking back I'm really glad I hung in there and stuck to my little philosophy about taking real pictures and having a listing for every item. All those days of running out in -20degrees to shoot pictures really paid off!