Carmella DeCesare...NOT!

It's Carmella the first puppy to beat Distemper in the US. Out of curiosity I decided to do a Google search to see how many times my Carmella came up, and to my disappointment found page after page devoted to the same sex industry star. It was as if her promoters bought the entire fist 20 pages on Google! ***Well, psyche!*** Every once in awhile the little guy prevails.

I thought, "No wonder Etsy seems to be the only place through which people are finding my blog!" With such a monopoly I was hard-pressed to find any other Carmellas. There were maybe 2 others that I could find links to (and I had to search for quite a long time).

However, one thing that was encouraging was that when I searched Giftbearer and Etsy other bloggers' features of my shop and my blog came up fairly often because of the 90 Day Challenge I started last year around the holidays. Those blogs that featured me continue to come up on Google with my name or blog referenced long after the original post, so maybe the key to getting the word out is for multiple bloggers to write about Carmella in their blogs as well.

A year ago I had theorized that such an approach would work to boost Google ratings and not only did it turn out that I was right, but the long-term effect was even more positive than I'd anticipated! The one post on each participant they blogged about had residual visibility again and again!

So if you feel like you just can't compete with the paid Google position folks, don't dispair. There is more than one way to skin a cat...(and sometimes it's with a dog, hee, hee). If any of you are interested in trying this experiment blogging about Carmella I would be very interested to see how it turns out and to report in my blog what kind of impact we have. Here's one more way the community can come together to help Carmella. Maybe we'll attract some dog-lovers from a variety of other places in addition to Etsy.

http://Giftbearer.etsy.com/

90 Features in 90 Days-Press Release

Get your art or fine craft featured 90 times in 90 days! Want to know how? Here’s the deal; post on Etsy’s messageboard on this thread; http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5276160&page=1 (if you don’t have an account you can easily open a free buyer or seller account at http://etsy.com in order to post there), and agree to swap features with me and however many others also post on that thread there as you want. If you have either a blog or a website that you can use to post pictures and 1-2 paragraphs complete with link to that person’s online store on each feature you swap, you can do this! If not, and you would like to participate, you can easily start a simple and user-friendly blog by going to; https://www.blogger.com/start and set one up in a matter of just a few minutes. I was well into my 40’s before I ever knew what a blog was and I picked it up very quickly.

For those readers who don’t know me, my name is Pippit Carlington, owner and jewelry artist of Giftbearer, and Street Team Leader of The Art Jewelry Collective, a group of jewelry artists from Etsy who collaborate in our marketing efforts with the goal of educating the public about the value of art jewelry, supporting a living wage for jewelry artists, and upholding standards of high quality and innovation in the jewelry industry.

The 90 Features in 90 Days Challenge came about as a way to increase sales in my own business, but it occurred to me that the group and even others outside the AJC could utilize the same method to increase their number of sales, based on the law of averages. Just imagine being front page news every day until Christmas, the biggest gift-buying time of the year!

I figured if I could swap features with 90 people and do one feature per day between the time I get 90 participants and Christmas, that should create a large enough internet splash to have a noticeable impact on number of sales. The results of many blogs reciprocating, when combined, would be like advertising in a much bigger venue. The impact of such a marketing challenge will make whichever sellers do this extremely visible all over the web; the more people you swap with, the more visible both you and they are. You can also increase this exposure two-fold by linking to your feature stories.

The end result should eventually be increased sales because you have reached a larger number of potential buyers of your work, and because not all the participants are working in the same medium, there is great potential for cross-promotion, such as handbags with jewelry, or clothing with jewelry, and with only about 10 minutes a day invested in posting your features. So this holiday season not only raise a glass, why not raise your odds, and maybe even… your income!