Weekends are a great time to create fun projects that have a big impact!  This fabulous DIY sofa made with pallets has a lot to offer! {from Scraphacker} It’s just the kind of home DIY project you might be looking for to fill in that awkward little spot in your home…not that you have one, but I sure do!

I’m in love with all crafts including vintage typewriters!  You can stitch your own Love Letter embroidery hoop with this sweet pattern from Crafty Modern.

Here are a few more ideas for Valentine’s Day…

• Create awesome glitter chalk to share this Valentine’s Day! {The Scrap Shoppe Blog}
• Make a sweet Valentine’s Day Wreath to jazz up your front door! {Handmade & Craft}
• Enjoy yummy Cupid’s Arrows for snack time with your kids…so cute! {Organize & Decorate}
• Make yourself some Berry Cheescake Bars.  They look amazing! {Epicurean Mom}

• Download your free felt heart hair clip & brooch pattern from me.

You can always find our latest DIY tutorials in our Project Gallery!

Have a wonderful weekend full of crafty handmade goodness!

~Kim

More posts you might enjoy reading…

• 101 Handmade Valentine’s Day Ideas
• 101 Valentine’s Day Printables {free}
• 5 Crochet Heart Patterns to Love

If you operate a business online, you need to know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). For the average Etsy seller, an advanced degree isn’t required. A working knowledge is.

With a basic understanding of SEO, you can make your products available through a search engine to someone who is looking for them.

Just don’t get too excited when your items show up in a Google search. For most Etsy sellers, search is a small part of the puzzle.

I ran across a forum thread on the Etsy Forums today. The thread is hot with hundreds of sellers responding to a call to deactivate your shop pages and then reactivate them, thus supposedly instigating a Google “crawl” of your whole shop.

One of the “triggers” for a search engine robot to crawl your shop is new activity, so I suppose it could make sense for the tactic to instigate some action. But the pages and pages of excitement the idea generated is a bit over-the-top because it isn’t going to equal sales for most people.

Search Rank Doesn’t Equal Sales

Our “The Lavender Road” shop on Etsy ranks right behind Martha Stewart on the front page of Google for “Lavender Sachet” and “Lavender Sachets”. That’s great and all since the shop does, in fact, sell beautiful handmade lavender-filled sachets.

But being on the front page for that term only brings in about four or five visitors a day on average, and those visitors rarely buy. When we don’t promote the shop in other ways, we don’t get many sales.

Now, if there happens to be a worldwide explosion in the popularity of lavender sachets things might change, but for now we have to do more to get sales.

If we decided to try and push for some sales this week, we would do these things:

1. Make a plan to list new items and re-list old items, a few at a time, periodically over the next few days. We would try our best to time the listings to peak hours, though it is a bit of a guessing game.
2. Provide a more aggressive free shipping incentive. Buyers love free shipping.
3. Promote a new item using Facebook, Twitter, and our blogs.
4. Contact a few frequent repeat customers via email announcing the shipping special.
5. Increase our advertising presence online (various methods).

We won’t be doing these things because we’re not pushing this week, but that’s the short formula for you if you are pushing this week!

When it comes to getting sales on Etsy, know SEO, use SEO, secretly hope for Google to send thousands of visitors to your shop, but don’t count on it! There are plenty of ways to build those sales and search is only a part of it!

For that basic knowledge of SEO, a good place to start is a short list of the top five things you can do to improve your Etsy Shop SEO. I put that list on the Everything Etsy Facebook Page a little while ago. If you’ve not joined us on Facebook yet, please do!