Add This!

First, for those of you who will be having Passover seder tonight (and maybe tomorrow night as well) - Chag Kasher V’Sameach.

Next, I would like to plug Chocolate and Steel's blog, great pictures, fun information and on Mondays she posts a "Undiscovered Uncovered" feature about new Etsy shops, which is a wonderful way to support fellow artisans!

Next to last, I discovered on Chocolate and Steel that Lora, of Lora Hart Jewels, is having a giveaway on her blog. Beautiful precious metal clay designs (and another medium I'd like to work in, eventually - not really set up in my little back bedroom "studio" for using torches) and she's going to give one away next week - click the 'giveaway' link above to read and participate.

Lastly, the other day I talked about readers and blog traffic (The Long Tail post). Saw a great post on Simply Shiny today with a recommendation to use the AddThis button. (They've got a blog, too, in case you're also into reading about techie stuff).

I've had a number of little icons at the end of my posts that give readers the option to share with various services like Digg or StumbleUpon, but decided to switch to AddThis and see what happens. Mostly because they have analytics - if anyone was sharing my posts somewhere before, I had no clue. This way I can (I think) check the analytics and see if anything was shared.

So how does it work? When you hover over the AddThis button a list of options pops up and you can select from which ever one you want - the process is quite simple - AddThis does a lot of the work for you. If you've got an AddThis or other similar feature on your blog, I'll certainly return the favor.

One last thing - I just followed someone on Twitter whose tweets seem to be very funny - if you want to grin, follow @mkramer (Melody Kramer).

The Long Tail, You and Me

Ok, before I go into my little essay, here's some stuff I'm working on - a while ago I mentioned that I'd started working on a necklace using some beads with a yellow rose print on them, then I took off the rose beads and put them aside. Here's how I ended up using the beads - they're on a brass chain, about 24". I was thinking this needed to be named "Ring Around the Rosie" but maybe that's just too twee...

I've also been working on this three strand antiqued brass necklace - just have to add a little extender and clasp, it's a bit small even for choker length as is.

So, what's this about the Long Tail...

No, it's not a new kind of bead or crafting technique - it's a description of the situation many of us (meaning most of us who read this and each other's blogs, I'm assuming, are like me - not a "celebrity" in our crafting niche or professional life) find ourselves in, bloggers with relatively low traffic* are at the "long tail" of the blogosphere. Maybe this is old hat for you, so I apologize, but having once been a teacher, I can't help it sometimes if I get all pedantic.

If you want to read a fairly technical, but one of the first explanations of the long tail, the 2003 essay "Power Laws, Web Logs and Inequality" by Clay Shirkey is considered authoritative essay on the long tail concept as it relates to blogs/websites.

*Relative to a number of metrics such as us vs. all web sites, or all blogs, or all crafts blogs, all beading blogs, all non-commercial beading blogs, etc. Our ratio probably improves as you head down that list towards more specialization in our niche, but it's probably still low relative to the number of non-commercial beading blogs - my site traffic in March - the all time high - was 747 unique visits.

Getting noticed is hard - but getting noticed is crucial for online sales (and in-person sales, too, but that's another post, I guess). Thousands of Etsy stores, hundreds of Art Fire (and growing) stores, all the other sites and promoters/aggregators of sites (the biggies, Digg, Technorati, StumbleUpon and "homegrown" ones like Shop Windows at Artfire).

Just a fraction of the aggregators are sites that showcase or are about work from handcrafting artists, all of whom are doing the same sort of work you do - how to stand out from that crowd? One way to get noticed is to have lots of people linking to you from their small to medium traffic blogs or (dream come true) a few high traffic people linking to you from their blog. The ultimate would be to get a major web presence to feature you - but that has consequences (slashdotting, boing-boinged, farked - those can crash your site.)

There are ways to improve your traffic, and there are many people who've written about it. You could spend weeks going through all the sites and blogs. Let's not.

There's a group of folk who consistently link to each other - those blogs were among the first I discovered when I started reading about beading. If you visit Art Bead Scene on a regular basis you'll see they post a "The Desperate Art Bead Scene Neigborhood" feature regularly. The bloggers they feature also post those links out to their readers, this is a great way to keep good rankings in blog searches and share their traffic. Getting on blogrolls, joining blog circles...all good for getting traffic.

I was fortunate enough once to get a mention in Margot Potter's blog - my traffic for that day and the next really shot up. Leveled off, too - but that's one example of how cross linking can raise your blog's readership - at least when it happens. Building a circle of persistent readers, however, comes from committing to regular blogging about things that people are interested in, like sharing ideas, doing tutorials, providing pictures - but more than anything, I believe, comes from making connections by responding to comments, and going and commenting on your commenter's blogs.

I'm not into my crafting full time - I have a day job that pays well and has great benefits. I'm very fortunate and know it. So why do I even think about this? Well, what I really enjoy is converstations with interesting people about something I really love doing. The side benefit might be making a few more sales than if I weren't blogging and linking and commenting as much as I can, but I do the blogging and linking, etc., to make new friends.

So, to all of you who visit and keep the conversation going, thanks!


My Yellow Rose Necklace at Art Fire

Dawno

Buy Handmade