3 Steps to Prepare Your Etsy Shop for 2011

2011 is almost upon us. Some of you have been planning how to kick 2011's butt for months now. However, it's not too late for the rest of us to get our acts together for the coming year!
(And as usual "Etsy" is working as shorthand here for Artfire, DaWanda, etc etc etc.)

1. Get your goals together!
Last year, I put up a 3 part blog series called "How to Make 2010 the Best Year Ever". It included
project planning worksheets to download, information about time management, and of course 2010's Etsy Goal Worksheet. With the exception of the update to the Etsy Goal Spreadsheet, it's all still good. Set those goals! Write them down! Plan them out!

2. Clean house.
Take a good, hard look at your Etsy shop. Are there some items there that could use a new photo? Can you improve your titles and/or tags? How's the grammar and spelling in those listings? Take some time to spruce things up. For those of us with eleventy billion listings, this can be really overwhelming. Try setting a timer for one hour increments. Really focus on the work at hand during that time. You might just be surprised how much you can get done in a focused burst of energy. Or, try the Craftopolis Edit Express to edit multiple listings at once.

3. Make a marketing plan.
Now that your shop is polished and gorgeous, how are you going to attract people to it? Setting a written plan ahead of time can really streamline your work day. It can also help you stay on track, and waste less time with social networking. Here's a really cool article on Handmade Spark about how to visually plan out your marketing.

What are your favorite ways to prepare for the coming year? Share them in the comments!

The Etsy Goal Spreadsheet for 2011

The last two years on my other blog, I've given away Etsy Goal Spreadsheets for that year. Keeping an Etsy Goal Spreadsheet remains one of the best things I've ever done for my little business. I've heard great things from others who have started using it, too. Naturally, we've got to keep that going!

I've been using it for two years now. It's given me clarity on how much I've been selling week by week. I can see on what days people have been buying stuff. I have gratitude that I have been selling regularly. It's also made me conscious of how things are going for the shop.
All this from just a simple little spreadsheet.

But just tracking isn't enough. You have to know where you're going. So I set an audacious goal. Audacious, but hopefully achievable. What this does for me is enable me to really know how well I am doing from week to week, how close I am (or not) to reaching my goals. And then I can adjust accordingly.

So without any further ado:
Download the Etsy Goal Spreadsheet for 2011

Here's how you use it.
First, add your sales goal (where you'd like to be, sales wise at the end of the year) in the cell below the GOAL cell. (I've put 500 in randomly, but change it to whatever your goal is.)
The first column has weekly dates in it. Along the top are the days of the week. Enter how many sales you've had on any given day. They'll automatically subtract from the Left to Go cell. That's it!


Notes:
* Feel free to share & change this willy nilly, but please let people know you found it at http://absolutelysmall.com/blog
* This spreadsheet is an .xls file. In other words, it's made to be opened with Excel, but can (hopefully) also be opened by a number of other programs. (Numbers, Open Office, etc.)
* It may be titled Etsy, but of course this spreadsheet would work equally well for Artfire, your own site, or whatever else it is you need to track.

*1/1/11 - The dates have been corrected. However, dates pulling up as #### has been reported. This is not a spreadhseet error. Simply widen the column to make those pound signs go away.
(Thank you Chrystal S & Madeline from the comments for pointing this out!)

Library Book Review - Ignore Everybody

Ignore Everybody! And 39 other KEYS TO CREATIVITY! Why, I like ignoring people! And being more creative! Look, there's even a sketch of a guy with an axe on the cover.
Naturally, I picked this book up. I found this tiny tome sitting on the New Releases shelf of my local library during a recent-ish run. (Yeah, it was released in 2009. And it's nearly 2011. No matter.)

The book is divided into 40 tiny chapters. Each one is only a few pages long and gets right to the point. It's interesting, but very confrontational. This is not another feel-good artsy-fartsy woo-woo book. But there are plenty of those I've already read. Quite frankly, some of it annoyed me.

While I didn't agree with everything written, this book really made me think. Nearly every chapter was provocative, and very good at making you question your business/craft. Needless to say, that also makes this a very slow read, at least for me. Having to stop every few pages to stare into space and think can do that to you. Not that being made to think is in any way a bad thing.

Ignore Everybody started out as a blog post, and swelled out from there. What's really cool is that you can read the first 12 chapters on Gapingvoid's blog. I love that you can see if it resonates with you first.

If you're looking for a book that will make you question the way you're doing things and what you're creating, by all means pick this one up.

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

5 Must Have Etsy Apps

I like Etsy very, very much. However, there are a few little gaps that 3rd party developers have stepped up to fill, for which I am eternally grateful. Here are five of my very favorite, can't live without, as essential as coffee Etsy applications.

Statsy
Yes, you know Statsy. Everyone knows Statsy, right? With good reason! Statsy will notify you if you're on the front page. Statsy can schedule out your renewals for you. Statsy can tell you how far back in the search results you are. I love you, Statsy.

Favoritizer
I do most of my shopping from my favorites. This is only problematic in that Etsy offers no way to organize one's favorites. Favoritizer to the rescue! You can sort by creating lists that make sense to you, and then populate them simply dragging and dropping. Better yet, these lists are private, so your gift ideas can remain safely secret. (Of course, you can make them public if you wish.)

Etsy on Sale:
Yeah, Etsy just started offering coupon codes, and that's great. However, if you want to offer something other than a percentage off of everything, Etsy on Sale to the rescue! You can customize your sale in several different ways. Actually, it wasn't so very long ago that I was singing their praises right here on this very blog that you are reading now.

Craftopolis:
Another one that everyone knows, and for good reason! Their Shop Lovers page just gets better and better. It lets you see at a glance how many unique visitors, how much you've made, how many things are expiring, how many new shop hearts *deep breath*... In other words, it takes all that squinty Google Analytics data and makes it pretty. And easy. They also offer Edit Express, which allows you to make changes to a batch of listings at one time. How many times over the years this would have come in handy! The Tag Report is promising, too...but it's either slightly broken, or no one finds me through searches on Etsy, ever. (Which is possible, I suppose...)

Etsy Hacks:
It wasn't so very long ago that Etsy didn't offer a way to copy a listing. And it was in those dark days that I found Etsy Hacks. Etsy's done a bang up job with the whole copy/edit options, but Etsy Hacks still offers a wide range of applications that make Etsy work better. In the forums a lot? Downloading Forum Wrangler will make your life so much easier. Convo Linker rocks my socks. And there are tons more.
*Note: you must use Firefox to take advantage of these aps. And then you need to run Greasemonkey. But seriously, this is so easy. You can do it!

What are some of your favorite Etsy apps?

Putting on an Etsy Sale

It's been a really long time since I've put on any sort of Etsy sale, mostly because it's so darn inconvenient. My shop usually hovers between 150-200 items, so going through and editing each listing (and then editing them back) is really NOT an option. Or I could tell people to check out like normal, and then wait for a revised invoice...yeah. Shockingly, that doesn't go well, either.

But then.

Etsy on Sale came along, and changed everything. For those not yet introduced, Etsy on Sale is a 3rd party ap that connects to your Etsy account and allows you to easily put your shop on sale mode. No more editing every listing yourself! No more revised invoice nonsense!

There's already a really great tutorial on how to use it over at the Handmadeology blog.
Or if you want to just jump in and take it for a spin, hop over to Etsy on Sale!

My own experience with the Etsy on Sale ap has been great so far. I found the ap easy to work with, and better yet, it actually WORKS! (I've been having such troubles with Etsy lately...all that reconfiguring and redesigning has left most of my Etsy Hacks sadly non-working, and me sadly too lazy/pregnancy brain addled to deal with them.)

The only thing I found a little squirrely is that if you relist an expired item, it doesn't have the markdowns taken. Which makes total sense, actually. Just a minor inconvenience.

I set my sale as 20% EVERYTHING in my shop, from now until Nov. 13th. So far, people seem to be really responding well to it! (Which is awesome, as it has been a slooooow Fall.)

I also followed another Handmadeology blog post, Running an Etsy Sale But Nobody Knows, to get the word out. That seems to be helping a ton!
I've set up a giveaway on my Facebook Fan Page to help spread the word...and that actually has not been going so well. Oops. (I'm giving away 2 Chickenpants at the end of the sale. And so far, I have a whopping two comments. Feel free to hop on over there, leave a comment and massage my poor broken ego. I'm pregnant! Pity me! Feed me cookies!)

Have you put on a sale with this ap? I'd love to hear your experiences. And if you're currently running a sale, by all means leave a link in your comment with the details!