Green & Brown Sea Glass Earrings

This mini-stack is in my other shop, 1000 Markets.

Green & Brown Sea Glass Earrings

Now that the shopping frenzy over the holiday weekend is over, how did all the Etsy shop owners here on myLot fare? Let's here about how your shop did? Anyone with any sales? Did you even get any hearts or an increase in views?I'll start it off....

I added a couple of items heading into Thanksgiving. One sold the day before Turkey-Day. I had another item purchased on Black Friday and a 3rd item sold on Cyber Monday. I don't think I had a lot of views, despite doing a bit of promoting, but I did add several hearts on individual items and in my shop. Hopefully these hearts will turn into a future sale of two.

It seemed like there were an awful lot of shop owners promoting quite frequently throughout the entire weekend and the threads I promoted in, seemed to get buried to the second and third page within minutes and I was lucky to even receive a view in the threads I promoted in... the good thing about promoting was 2 of the 3 sales I made were made because of the promoting I did.

Things went much better over the holiday weekend, than the first yr... maybe I learned from my experience last yr.

So let's here fromthe rest of the shop owners on Etsy... how did your shop fare over the holiday weekend?

Sea Glass Turtle Mosaic

Sea Glass Turtle Mosaic

Other than my handmade sea glass jewelry, I haven't done very much creating. I still have a couple of scarves in progress, but very desire to get back to them right now.
I have lots of sea glass that isn't jewelry quality. I have them in jars by the window sill, on the entertainment center...anywhere that get a little bit of sunlight during the day.

And then I remembered an idea I had years ago about making mosaics with some of the pieces. So I spread out a couple cans of smaller pieces one evening after dinner and played with the pieces... after playing for awhile, I had made a couple sailboat images, a dragonfly, a butterfly and a turtle (shown below) I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my new creations...maybe keep a few for myself and maybe put them in my Etsy shop...not sure yet, but i thought I'd share my newest creations with my myLot crafting friends!So what's on your crafting table?

Lovely mystic topaz ring

mystic topaz ring

I just had my 6th sale yesterday, yippee. I sold this lovely mystic topaz ring, I hope the buyer loves it as much as I do.

you can go to etsy and run a search on an item you want, from there click on the item that looks most like what you are aksing for, this will take you to the shop that is selling it...

you can also run a search for the seller, use a this as a search criteria and you need to have the name of the seller, or part of it, for example my shop name is Jelvehdesigns, if you say designs a million shops will come up, but if you ask for the full name or just Jelveh then my shop comes up...

there is also catagories on the side bar to the left that lead you to items and shops, or gift guides or showcases or one of my favorite if the feature called Pounce, where you get to see the most recently sold items or the undiscoverd items this is a random find...I POUNCE when I am just looking for color or other trends in sales...

you can buy by Color, a feature that lets you choose the colors you like and once you click on one, the items with the color in their photos come up, there are endless ways to find items on etsy...let me know if you have any questions...

Gray Sea Glass Necklace

I'm very excited about this creation! Gray is considered to be one of the extremely rare colors when it comes to sea glass and this is my first Gray jewelry creation. I'll be adding it to my Etsy shop sometime today.

Gray Sea Glass Necklace

I had planned on adding Twitter for more exposure after the holidays, but a sick child at home gave me more time to promote, and create this week and after reading of Etsy members who have had some success using Twitter for their Etsy shop, I decided to see how tough it was to do.

Signing up for Twitter takes less than 5 minutes. Just some simple questions, a email confirmation and I was off. Now I have my shop linked to Twitter, so when I add an item to my shop, the whole community hears about it within the hour. Everytime I update my blog, the Twitter community hears about it.
So the results after one day...

My views on new items have gone up! Within minutes after setting my Twitter up and linkin it to my shop, my newest item in my shop was Twittered and my views shot up by 10 views. After adding the item to my shop and promoting the piece a few times, I only had 14 views after more than 24 hours. 2 minutes after the piece was Twittered, it shot up to 22 views (no, it hasn't sold, but it is getting viewed and anyone on Etsy knows that you can't sell your items if they don't get viewed) I added two new pieces yesterday and both had minimal views (6 or fewer) after the first half hour on Etsy and then when each was picked up by Twitter, the views more than doubled. So in the very short time it took me to sign up for and link my shop to Twitter, I have found a way to have new items viewed and bring potential new customers to my shop...all with a very minimal effort. It's a pretty cool promotional tool!

Treasures from the Sea Bracelet- Sea Glass

One of my latest bracelet creations using 5 beautifully frosted, deep green pieces of sea glass.

Treasures from the Sea Bracelet- Sea Glass

After months and months of shop owners imploring Etsy to allow shop stats, Etsy announced late last week they have teamed with Google Analytics to provide shop owners with statistics for their stores.

Google offers free stats with their Analytics program and set-up takes less than 10 minutes. It's great new tool for etsy shop owners who having been looking for stats on where and how people are viewing their shop.

More importantly, owners that advertise their Etsy shops can see the results of these ads and know which ads are worth their hard-earned dollars and which ads are missing the mark.

Most of my advertising is done through word of mouth at craft fairs and through Etsy's promotional forums and Analytics provides me with a breakdown of when my promoting on-site is most effective, how often someone clicks on my Etsy mini from my blogs or here at myLot, etc.

At least now, if I choose to advertise on the internet or in a craft magazine, I'll have daily stats letting me know if my advertising dollars have been well spent.
For those with etsy shops, log in & go to "your etsy" scroll down the page and you should find a link for "web analytics in the right hand column. Click there and you are on your way. There are also many great tutorials on the Etsy site, in the business forums on how to set-up and understand your stats.

Made by me, you can make one too

Huge Orange Murano Glass Pendant

I made this necklace using a huge 40mm Orange fire Murano glass focal bead. I used craft wire which is very soft and pliable to make it into a pendant then added it to the lovely goldtone chain. This is the first piece I have done in a while. I was so busy over the holidays I just did not have time to create. Please share any new pieces you have done.