It does , however, speak the truth. It seems the more I set out to do, the less I'm accomplishing. I'm choosing to blame it on The Big Guy. He distracts me and misleads me along the way. When he's at work, I usually get a lot done and I cross things off my list at a steady pace. When he's home, I seem to get very little done and then, only do things grudgingly. He's been home since Wednesday afternoon. Not much has gotten done.
Today's big activity was going out to breakfast, something we try to do every other week or so on the weekend. Seriously, we went to breakfast and came home. That's it. We were back snug in our warm living room before 10 a.m.!! That's exactly where we've stayed. (Baby, it's cold outside!!)
The most constructive thing I did was read my e-mail and add one listing to the shop.
Yep, I added the first of the hamster shirts to the shop! My offline sales of this one are rolling pretty good. What can I say? Hamsters are BIG at the moment!! You can check out the listing here.
So, I'm already behind for the year!! (I didn't add anything yesterday!) One of my Business Goals was to add one item per day for the month of January. This should accomplish several things.
First, it will rebuild the shop stock. (You can't sell what you haven't got!)
Secondly, it will bring my shop to the front of the line at least once each day. I'm not a big believer in relisting for that purpose. I consider it a waste of money as it hasn't worked well for me in the past. I know I personally get tired of seeing the same merchandise day after day as sellers relist simply to get their name out there. I would prefer to get there with new listings.
As an added push, I've made a habit of putting at least 10 blurbs in the promotion area of the Etsy forum each time I add an item. Again, I'm not sure this is useful but it takes little effort and costs nothing. I have found the best way to get views is putting a blurb on Twitter when I list something new. The promo section of the forum got me 2 views in 40 minutes today. Twitter brought 18 in less than 2 minutes. I feel most of those coming from the forums are sellers who are just taking a gander. Folks on Twitter actually have to make the effort to change sites and may actually have an interest in buying. I have had sales traced directly to Twitter.
One of my Home-Related Goals was to add at least one freezer meal each week to my stockpile. This goal was for a specific time period, after-all, my freezer isn't that big. At any given time, I like to have 5 or 6 meals stored up that can simply be pulled out and heated. These come in handy when the schedule gets tough, the weather gets bad and limits runs to the grocery store, we have surprise company (this happens a lot around here!), or even when I just feel lazy. The holiday rush completely wiped out all stockpiled meals.
I just barely squeezed that one in tonight by putting a pork shoulder in to cook overnight. (I slow cook it for about 13 hours.) I'll get up in the morning and make a large pot of pulled pork. We'll eat some and stockpile the rest. I often do two shoulders at once but I only had one on hand this time.
I really had hoped to have a more exciting start to the year. It feels like I've already WASTED valuable time. On the other hand, I've spent quality time with my man!
Okay, I've at least spent a fair quantity of time with him this week!!
