Image by epiaf.geo

I’ve meant to post more often, but as you can see that hasn’t happened.  So here I am!  I spent this weekend completely away from crafting, off twitter and off the Etsy forums.  It was the first time taking a day off for over 3 months now.  It felt so good I didn’t do anything yesterday either!  Now I’m back, trying to re-engulf myself in Etsy.  I’ve been a bit discouraged as I haven’t had any sales for almost 3 weeks now.  Not sure if there is something wrong with my shop/products or if it just isn’t the right time of year for me.  On to things are aren’t me whining!

I thought I’d post a few Etsy tools that I’ve found the past few weeks that have been quite helpful.

The first is Craftopolis.  This site allows you to find out if you’re currently being featured in a treasury.  Treasuries are something I still haven’t gotten myself into yet.  They are time consuming to make, searching through Etsy for great products that usually go around a central theme.  And because they are so popular, it’s very hard to get one uploaded.  I did however have one of my roses appear in a treasury for the first time and I was thrilled that someone wanted to include me!  Craftopolis allows you to find out if you’re featured in a treasury if the author doesn’t tell you.  It also has a treasury clock feature to let you know when a new spot will open up and allows you to see if you’re currently featured in any of the gift guides on Etsy.

Craftcult is another awesome site that allows you to see all your hearts in one place.  you can see your shop hearts by day and you can also see all of your item hearts on one screen instead of going into each item.  They have a great tool that shows you if you’ve been featured on the front page of Etsy or in The Storque.  Great tools.

Etsy Hacks is amazing.  A Etsy seller’s husband created some great scripts to allow for some short cuts.  My favorite and I think the most useful is the copy listing hack.  This allows you to copy a current listing (minus pictures) so you don’t have to re-do your description, materials, tags, etc if you have similar items.  This was a HUGE help to me when I listed 15 new rose bouquets that just were different colors.  There are other hacks for editing and item shortcuts that I haven’t used yet, but I highly recommend this site!

Twitter

If you’re not on Twitter, you need to be.  This is a great place to interact with other people from all different fields in small snippets of conversation.  It is easy to network with people and RT (re-tweet) their info which is a great way to promote others besides yourself.

Twitin is a great tool that allows you to follow or unfollow people in one easy click.  It is a good idea to follow anyone that is following you to help build your following.  This site makes it easy to follow everyone or “flush” people that aren’t following you.

ifollowback is a source to find other twitterers.  There are tons of groups (of course plenty of Etsy people) that can give you some new people to start following and that will hopefully return the favor.  The more people you follow, the more that will follow you, and the more people you are getting word out to about your products.

Twitalyzer is a great Twitter analytics tool that allows you to see how you’re stacking up in the Twitter community.  Are you tweeting enough?  Are you re-tweeting enough?  Are you giving information worthy of other people reading it?  This site will tell you with wonderful charts and graphs (oh how I love charts and graphs!).

If you’re like me, you have a personal Facebook and a fan page, a personal Twitter and your shop Twitter.  It gets a bit tough to keep track of everything.  Tweetdeck is a great desktop tool that allows you to keep track of everything all in one place.  You can set up multiple columns so you can see everything on screen all at once and keep track of who you need to.  Trust me, once you have a few hundred people you are following, you need it!

Hope these tools and tips make up for my lack of blogging as of late.  I promise I have some Christmas ideas in mind for ongoing blogging so stay tuned!