Taking Care of Business

The front of my new business card

I've spent the last two days devoting my hours of energy to various business matters. Since I've opened the new store, I figured I'd better have a business card for it. I also ordered some shipping supplies for larger items, since there are quite a few listings for 11x14 and 16x20 photos in the new shop. I also purchased plastic sleeves for protecting note cards, though several hours later, when I was in the shower, I suddenly remembered that I already have sleeves in that size. Oops. Fortunately, it only set me back $6 or so, and with luck, I will eventually get through them! One of the other things I did yesterday was to order another round of notecards, some for my mouse store and some for the macro store, and hopefully they'll prove popular and I can get through those 5x7 plastic sleeves!

Cards are something I haven't worked out completely yet. People, when they see the mouse photos, tend to remark that they'd make great cards, but I haven't had much business in that area. I have lots that I haven't listed still, partially because I haven't decided whether to offer them individually or in sets. They're tricky, too, because to get the cards at a cheap enough price to be able to sell them for a less-than-astronomical sum, you have to buy them in quantity. I've found a printer that makes beautiful, high-quality cards for a reasonable price, in sets of twenty-five, with as many different images on those twenty-five cards as you want. The last set I had printed featured lots of flower cards for summer, but I spent the summer coping with the head injury, so I fear I missed my best seasonal opportunity. It's also much more fun to make listings for the new store than to cobble together ones for cards with flowers and Mouse on them, which may be a larger part of the problem! At any rate, you can view the ones I currently have available here.

I hope someone agrees with me that this makes a sweet card!

So between putting together the new business cards and getting twenty-five images properly sized for uploading (both endeavors that involve a lot of clicking around in Photoshop and Illustrator), I've really fried my eyes. I had to take a very very very long shower (one hour and forty-five minutes, not a record, but close) this afternoon to quiet the brain down and my heart's been pounding even more than usual, which means I'm under stress. It's just that this sort of thing is so much more interesting than doing nothing! All in all, though, I've done pretty well this past week in keeping my activity level within my limitations, which is why I was able to take care of any business at all!

Next on my (eventual) business matters agenda: figure out some of the vexing wrinkles in my Google Analytics data, such as why it continues to count my own visits to my shop despite the fact that I installed a filter, according to instructions, for it to exclude all visits from my computer's IP address, and why in the area where it tells you what keywords brought visitors to your site, all but three of the nineteen search terms are utterly inapplicable to my site, and seem, rather, to be the results for a seller of vintage goods. Figuring this out is much less interesting than, say, giving myself a raging migraine by designing things in Illustrator; if I'm going to be starting at a computer screen, I like to at least be enjoying myself! But it will ultimately be good for business if I figure out how to make Analytics report proper data and then guide various decisions regarding shop content accordingly.

Oh, and if you're the returning visitor who typed "sascalia" (another Etsy seller, according to my research) into Google and somehow got my shop and spent nearly ten minutes looking at ten different pages, could you explain to me how that worked? Thanks!