ATG February Reseller's Challenge

I decided at the end of December that I was going to set myself some goals for January.  Nothing too fancy ... not resolutions, but goals geared toward my Etsy shop & ramping up my reselling efforts.  I looked through my data for the 4 months I had the shop open in 2011 & figured out that my biggest waste of money was in renewing items before their 4 month expiration date was up.

Renewing can be done at any time & it is one way to get your items seen if you haven't the time to post new items.  Every time you post an item on Etsy it is added to the recently added section on the front page & has a chance of catching someone's eye & leading them to your shop.  So renewing items is a very quick way to get your shop seen, but also burns up your money lickety split!

If I had posted a new item for each twenty cents spent instead of just hitting the renew button, every backlogged item in my Etsy room would be listed by now.  I found that I lost track of how often I was renewing & it cost me.

For my January goals I decided on:

1)  Post three new items for each day of the month.

2) Don't waste money renewing items!

3) Save late night listings as drafts - check for errors, etc & post in the morning.

It went okay.  I posted a total of 48 new items during the month.  That came out to just under 1.5 items per day, about half of what I had planned for myself ... I fell short of my expectations, I will definitely try harder this time around.

I ended up renewing only 30 times.  Which pretty much poured $6 that could have been used to post new items down the drain, but I only did it at the end of the month while I was sick with the flu & had no energy for editing photos & creating new listings.  Once again, I will try harder this time around.

Late night posting sort of misses out on a large chunk of my customer base.  I have a whole lot of customers here in California & many in Canada.  Posting at 2am doesn't work so well, not to mention I am usually pretty sleepy (even if I can't sleep) & small errors go unnoticed when editing the listings.  Best to save them as drafts & post in the am after a quick run through, I did well with this goal.  I believe it helped as my views went up quite a bit for each item sooner after it was posted.

So anyhow, I read on Apron Thrift Girl (what an inspiration this gal is) about a listing challenge for February & decided to take part.  I am trying to be more active on my blog & in the reselling community of bloggers, so I thought a challenge would be a great place to start.

My February goals will be the same as the first two goals from January, except I would like to renew ZERO items.  If you need a little motivation & inspiration take a peek at the challenge by clicking on the button in my side bar.

Wish me luck!