Total Art Soul - for artists

Hooray for Etsy sale

Zibbet are very big on community involvement- they have set up a 'zing' community for people to run groups etc without paying Ning charges. There are great forums for people to share advice etc and they'd welcome your input Cathy- I'd e-mail Jonathan Peacock, the guy behind it, to see where best to post it.

He's also very good at giving things a push himself if he likes what you're doing. It's a shame really we had to let ours go but with everything happening at once here, we didn't want to be in a position where we were taking on more than we could handle. We may well go back when things have calmed down a bit

I meant for selling guides, not giving free info (unfortunately). To keep TAS going, we have to find a way to start earning some money and we don't want to add more advertising. We are not even covering our hosting costs right now so I thought that this would be a way to harvest all that research and experience and produce easy to follow guides on marketing in general.

I know there are a couple of people who do it on Etsy but they don't quite have the same slant as me so I'm hoping that this will be of interest to people. It would be for a small fee for a lot of information that a lot of people just don't know about.

Zibbet probably isn't the best place for that , as being a new venture they are in the same boat, still spending their money on site development. My thought would be magazines or e-zines again for articles of that type- trouble is, so many people are doing this sort of thing for free because it draws attention to them that it's going to be hard to find people prepared to pay a sensible amount. I will keep my eyes open though

The information that is available for free is NOT what I am writing about. The stuff I am writing guides for is how NOT to be in the internet 24/7 but still be visible for that time whilst you create. It's taken me a very long time to find out how to automate a lot of stuff and a lot of people have no clue where to start with that. That's why I think these would be different. I have not yet found a guide that offers that kind of information.

They're not really articles. These are step-by-step guides for using certain programs to help save a lot of time. I take people right though from creating accounts to adding information.

I will buy a few more guides just to be sure it's not already out there but even so, hopefully there is still a bit of room for me. There's not that many offering these guides for sale and the ones that do are making a fair bit of money which just shows people want to have this info.

I tried Artfire for about a year with my Kootsac shop and made one sale, whereas on Etsy I have steady sales. So I quit trying to sell on Artfire but do still have a listed store there.
I much prefer Etsy because I find it way more professional. I like the competition on Etsy - I think it's healthy and because of it I think the quality and creativity is way better than on Artfire.
The thing that really bothered me about Artfire was that all newly listed items appeared on their front page and sometimes the whole page would consist of the same seller's stuff - it looked tatty and unprofessional. Etsy has received a lot of flak for 'favoritism' but I disagree. Being choosy has consistently given Etsy the edge over other sites for presentation and this is good for all of us.

I had considered selling on Artfire, but I guess perhaps its a good idea I stick with Etsy! =)