Find Your Niche

Large Alice in Wonderland Key Necklace by absolutemarket

Take the test below to see if this will help you find your niche?

Ask yourself a few questions:

What can I do for hours and be happy doing it?

What were you great at when you were young?

What are you great at that others find hard?

What have your friends asked you for advice about?

What would you do even if you didn’t get paid for it?

By answering these questions you may find your Niche.

Let’s take the first question?

“What can you do for hours and be happy doing it?”

Let’s say your answer is working with your hands, that’s fine! Now ask yourself what do I like making using my hands.

Let’s say you like making hats with your hands, now break this down again and ask what type of hats?

Now you got the type of hats.

What’s the hat made of?

Let’s try the second question now?

“What were you great at when you were young?”

This may be hard to think of because some may say: “I was not great at anything...”

If you think more you will see you were great at a lot of things, so make a list.

See if any on the list tie into your answer to the first question?

Let’s try the next question now? 

“What are you great at that others find hard?”

Again some people will say I am not great at anything. You are wrong again.

If you look once more, you will see there is a lot of things that come easy to you that other may or do find hard to do.

Again make a list and see if any on the list tie in with the answers to the first and second questions.

Let’s try the next question now?

“What have your friends asked you for advice about?”

This also looks hard to answer at first but as you think about it a few areas will become clear. Again make a list.

Now see if any on the list tie in with the answers to the first questions.

Let’s try the last question now?

“What would you do even if you didn’t get paid for it?”

This is really asking you what you love doing.

This should be easy answer as most people only have a few.

Again make a list and see if any tie in with the answers from before.

By now you should have picture of what you are great at, what you like making and what others know you are great at doing.

Now all you have to do is put your angle on that product and make it your own and this will be your niche.

by William Doherty

Etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/absolutemarket

Adding variations to your listing to get more sales.

 Red guitar pick necklace by Absolutemarket on Etsy

Adding variations in to your listing is a great way to get more sales of your Etsy products if you are making your products in other sizes, colours, materials or even finishes.

I found this out very fast when I added variations to size to a few of my listings.

The main size I was selling before turned out not to be the most popular size, but once I added variations, some buyers started buying larger or smaller sizes.

These are sales I would not have got before adding variations to those listings.

Buyers would have said to themselves “it’s nice but not the size for me” and moved on to the next seller.

Now 90% of my listings have variations in them.

If your item comes in different sizes, materials, colours, finishes, or other variations, then variations in your listings are a must.

You can add these in the variations section of any listing.

You can choose up to two variations per item.

How do variations work?

Once you add variations, a buyer will be required to select an option before purchase. You’ll be able to view the options they’ve selected on your Sold Orders, Receipts, and transaction emails.

Properties and options are not incorporated into Search.

When buyers purchase your item, they’ll need to choose from the options you set in the “add variations” section of a listing.

Click the “select a property” drop-down list and choose the correct property you want to use.

You have:

Colour

Device

Diameter

Fabric

Finish

Flavour

Height

Material

Pattern

Scent

Size

Style

Weight

Width

Couldn’t find a property?

Add a new property

In my case I picked size, and because I picked size, the Etsy system asked “what scale are your sizes in?"

I could have picked from:

Alpha

Inches

Centimetres

Fluid ounces

Millilitres

Litres

Other

I picked inches this time.

You will be asked for options, and because I am doing size this time I added 11” in the box.

Now click the add button. 

That was my first variation set up (that was easy) but I wanted more sizes. Luckily, that's easy too as all you have to do is repeat the same, and I added 5 options.

If you don’t see the property you want you can add a custom one.

Click the Select a Property drop-down list,

Choose “add a new property”, type the name of the property, then type the options you offer in the box and click the add button. Repeat as necessary.

Don’t forget to preview the listing before going live.

Have a happy time adding variations to your listing and I hope it brings you more Etsy sales.


William Doherty

Etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/absolutemarket

How to Craft a Killer About Page

Reposted from the Etsy Blog.

Story by Julie Schneider

Published on Feb 06, 2014 in Seller Handbook

When Forbes staff writer Hollie Slade was researching a story about running a small business from home, she went to Etsy to find shop owners to profile. Specifically, Slade was looking for shop owners with at least three staff members. After perusing the About pages of several shops, she found two that fit the bill:Bread and Badger, a sandblasted drinkware shop owned by Amanda Siska, and Dock Artisan,  a shop selling wooden charging docks for mobile devices owned by Joel Young. Both shops describe their at-home workshops and list their shop members on their respective About pages, which landed them spots in Slade’s published story, “Running a Startup from Home: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

Your shop’s About page gives you a chance to tell the story of your business. In turn, About pages all across Etsy collectively paint a portrait of the community as a whole. An informative and captivating About page can help create a devoted following of customers. It can also spark unexpected opportunities, including press coverage and collaborations. Amanda and Joel reported a spike in traffic from Forbes readers in their Shop Stats. Amanda notes that her social media fans were duly impressed. Being featured in the story, she says, has had “a lot of impact in establishing our credibility as a shop.”

But figuring out the best way to put your shop’s story into words — and images — might seem daunting. With that in mind, here are four tips to get you started.

Tell Your Shop’s Origin Story

The best About pages feature a memorable story that describes how the shop owner got started. “People need to connect the product and the story with the person who made it,” says Joel Young of Dock Artisan, which is based in Murphys, California. ”Otherwise, it’s just this cyber land of ‘Where does it come from?’”  Joel traces the evolution of his family business, including the initial creative spark and notable milestones, on Dock Artisan’s About page.

On Bread and Badger’s About page, Amanda Siska describes how she dreamed of being a tattoo artist before discovering that glass engraving is similar in technique, but, she writes, “without sterilization and possible regret.” Amanda also describes how her husband, Sean, quit his day job to help her expand the Portland, Oregon-based business. If you develop a case of writer’s block when you sit down to write your story, imagine you’re explaining it to a customer at a craft fair or to a friend. Then, put those words to paper.

Amanda Siska hard at work.

Captivate With Beautiful Photos

High-quality images are another key to great About pages. This is your chance to give customers a behind-the-scenes look at your company, so include images of yourself practicing your craft in your workspace. If you’re hoping to attract press coverage, be sure to upload five professional-level, high-resolution photos (those measuring at least 1,400 pixels wide). This shows you’ll be ready with the good stuff if the press comes a-knocking.

Around the time of his Featured Shop interview in 2012, Joel of Dock Artisan sprung for a session with a professional photographer. He says the investment has served him well. “If you’re an online company, everything you have is your pictures, your product, your workspace,” Joel says. “So, don’t skimp on pictures and don’t skimp on quality.” If hiring a photographer isn’t in your budget, take your own publicity-ready photos and organize a photo shoot on a budget by using readily available elements like flattering natural light, simple backgrounds and props for context.

Joel Young uses a specialty router jig in his outdoors wood shop.

Vive la Différence

Highlight unique materials, production processes and anything else that might help your shop stand out. For instance, Joel Young’s About page describes the ecologically sound practices that his shop uses to source local materials for their product lines, which fuse nature and technology. “We believe in natural selection when it comes to harvesting our wood,” he says. “Every year, storms come through the Sierra Nevada Mountains and blow over trees and break limbs. We give this wood a new life with purpose.”

Across the world in Vilnius, Lithuania, Inga, Kestas and Viktoria from Bure Bure Slippers use their About page to explain how they source wool from their herd of Skudde sheep and use ancient felting techniques to create their line of shoes and slippers. They paint a vivid picture of their mountainous rural organic farmstead through striking images and connect the dots from their free-grazing flock to a finished pair of cozy footwear. On Bread and Badger’s About page, Amanda explains how she and her husband do their own sandblasting in their garage using a CrystalBlast cabinet and 60-gallon air compressor.

Bure Bure Slippers’s process extends from farm to feet.

Meet and Greet

When you include photos and information about you and your shop members on your About page, you put a friendly, approachable face on your business. On her About page, Valerie Lloyd, founder of Seattle-based vintage craft supply shop Smile Mercantile, writes: “I like to think of the Smile Mercantile as an old-time general store with friendly and reliable folk (me) working behind the counter. I have a deep love for history, and I find that living with vintage pieces connects me to the past, and the people who were here before me.”

Bread and Badger’s About page includes a smiling image of Amanda Siska and the names and photos of her husband and shop member. It also links to Bread and Badger’s website and Facebook and Twitter accounts, encouraging people to interact with the business in a variety of ways. “If we were a brick-and-mortar storefront, I would be sitting in the store talking to people and they’d be able to walk right up and talk to me,” Amanda says. “I want customers to know about me, my business and even my family. That’s the kind of thing that I would talk about if they were to meet me in person, so I don’t need to be too shy about that online either.”

Amanda Siska creates digital artwork from her hand drawings and prints it on transparency film.

What are some of your tips for telling your company’s story? Share in the comments!