Handmade The Hippie Way :)

I want to take a break from the craft fair series to talk about a few things i've learned recently. I figure why not share the wealth, teach others rather than being selfish :) Granted you can find all the same information i'm about to talk about on Google, but this makes it easy, all in one spot!

In the last week i've been spending alot of time working with my Google Analytics. Doing things like figuring out which days of the week are better for views, what times of the day are my best, keywords, landing pages etc. I can't take any credit for figuring that stuff out, i've either read about it in our Dteam Etsy thread, or found things via Google. One of the things i've found in my search to master GA I came across the official GA blog. Now this blog opened my eyes to a few new things, they have a series of posts called their "Back to Basics". Now I learned how to embed a code into my blog page to track my blog traffic in addition to my shop traffic. Before yesterday, I would have never thought about that!

The first and most recent post I read was called Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations. It teaches you the step by step on how to find out where people are "landing" in your shop, meaning what is the first page they're going to. It's incredibly helpful when trying to figure out what your more popular products are and how long on average people are spending there. Safe to say I jumped on that and added it to my dashboard reports :) I'm quite addicted to that particular thing now LOL.

The next post talks about saving things to your dashboard for quick access in the future. This is a pretty good time saving feature, instead of having to click 5 times, you'll only have to click once. Who doesn't like saving time?

The last one that I read that I really liked was the one that talked about how to set up GA on your blog. I hadn't blogged since may, and not once did it ever cross my mind to connect GA to my blog. Partially it was because my blog was covered in dust and cobwebs, and I didn't really have many followers. I figure now with doing more tutorial style stuff i.e. the craft fair series, and blogging more often it would be worth it to know where my traffic is coming from, and if i'm even getting traffic LOL

All of the posts are very informational and helpful, they take you through step by step so even those of you that aren't highly computer savvy could do it :)I hope this helps some of you. You can find the Google Analytics blog here

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Well I haven't posted since October, I think the blog got lost somewhere along the way. The shop has come a long way in the last 7 months, suffering the lows and reaping the benefits of the high moments. I had 5 sales in October, 3 in November, 2 in December, 4 in January, 5 in February, 1 in March and not one since then. Safe to say, I started feeling the dark clouds coming and really was beginning to feel discouraged.

Life has definitely become busy, and hasn't allowed me to spend the time with my shop that I would like to. I figured that was the reason sales tanked, views tanked, everything tanked. I thought for sure my lack of twittering, facebooking, promoting etc. probably had alot to do with it, until I was reading through our team thread this month. My long time friend and fellow D Lister Mishelle (PinkyCrafts made a post about SEO/google and it's relation to your shop intro. In order for google to pick up your shop you need to have a quick description of whats in your shop in the first couple of sentences. That way when people do a search on google it'll pick up your shop. For instance, I googled "crochet kitchen towels" and on google shopping one of my listings showed up as #6 on the first page :) *giddy* safe to say I was really happy. Alot of times people pay good money to get in the higher rankings of search engines, I have not spent a dime on advertising other than business cards. Til this point it's been through free social media, word of mouth, and repeat buyers.

So the biggest point being that a basic change such as re-doing my shop intro boosted my traffic and views :) Believe it or not the smallest things can have the biggest impact on your shop, not to mention life in general! I'm hoping to be listing some new stuff here soon pending the weather and wind cooperate LOL

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