Diving into the Deep End

As a fledgling small business owner, It is up to me to let the world know that I have something that they must have to have! How else is someone going to come to your site to buy your stuff? At first when I started out on Etsy, it really was just luck of the draw and I stuck to some of my safe places, let a few people know that hey.. I make this and that. Ya some people would buy my stuff. As I lurked into the forums, a huge topic is how do you get people outside of your friends to come and buy your items? So of course you go and lurk in a few places and try and come up with a clever way to say come and buy my crap.. ie beautiful handcrafted one of a kind items. It is intimidating. You do a few giveaways on some other crafters blogs, and then start and OCDing over views and sales. Do some paid advertising and hope it pays off.. YA!!! gotta sale!

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So now your britches are getting bigger and you start to realize that there is a larger market out there, but how do you get those people to know that you have this crap.. ie one of a kind handcrafted beautiful item. You know they will, if they only knew about it. Congratulations you just jumped onto the Marketing Roller Coaster of the Internet.

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I am so OCD over views, sales, marketing that I really am driving myself insane. I can spend hours and hours.. OK let me be honest, the whole freaking day going back and forth between the places that I know to google myself, see if posts have views etc. I think this is why I burned out on the whole CT/publishing thing. I would spend so much time waiting for people to tell me how great my pages were, and if nobody was forth coming, I would find people, tell them how great they were, so they would come and tell me how great I was. Its a constant roller coaster of praise and refreshing, nail biting empty ego boosting.

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Yesterday was especially bad. My obsessive compulsive neurotic tendency got the best of me. Yesterday was the feature at PropInsanity. So of course I was back and forth between the site looking at comments, after all I am giving away 2 $20 GC to my store, going to Momdot and asking for their help to tweet me, logging into my sisters facebook because she has hundreds of friends and announcing this great giveaway. But that really wasn't good enough, because there were no sales, and not the large amount of comments about how great my crap.. ie beautiful handcrafted one of kind items .. how great they were and how they would just die if they didn't win.So of course, I needed to rectify that, If the world is not going to twitter about me, I will tweet myself! I just had to figure out how to do it! Yes I did feel like a complete and utter TWIT!. The blog wasn't getting enough views so of course I went and signed up for The Secret is in the Sauce, a blog networking site, by 6pm I only had about 8 twitter followers and thought.. If I go and join some more twitter groups then I can get more people to know about me. If you follow me I will follow you etc.. My head was pounding, I was on caffeine overload with no food, G was digging dirty clothes out of the laundry for soccer practice, but I was determined ...
Finally I thought to myself.. one last refresh and just finish up.. You have done what you can do, you have gone one foot into the asylum. Drink a glass of wine and just relax, spend some time with the kids (that you ignored all day being a TWIT) and watch some Greys. but that's not exactly what I did... Because somewhere in my brain.. just one more look, one more tweet one last refresh... So there I was laying in bed with B. and while he was drifting off to sleep, I was checking forums, comments, views, tweets, replies, email back and forth over and over on my Iphone. Gotta love technology, It allows me to be OCD from anytime, anyplace. It feeds into my Obsession. I was able to shut off my computer and within 30 seconds get back online and look thru a little tiny screen (which is probably what added to my headache) and feed into this complete unhealthy behavior. All the while still thinking... I just haven't done enough to get the word out..

Yes .. social networking is a must, how else will I get the word out? I will probably spend my day coming back to this blog to see if anyone new is following, checking my views, and posting in numerous forums and tweeting to the world at large, about the fact that I did blog and drive myself crazy for another day doing it. I will do the 4:30 tidy up, maybe get dressed by 5, drink alot of ice tea, forget to eat, and all the time fretting over is anyone anywhere going to buy my crap.. ie wonderful awesome one of a kind handcrafted items. I have dived into the deep end of social networking, and Im struggling to treadwater, but isn't that how most swimmers start out? Its not a perfect life.. but for today it is my life.