It's Coming Right at Us!

Christmas is fast approaching, and I Have a feeling I'll still be getting ready for it when it's gone. I should be done with cards, but knowing that there's time between now and Christmas makes me just want to keep designing new ones. I'll make the one that everyone just has to have, and that will open the floodgates to the selling out of everything else in the store. That's the fantasy. The reality is I need to figure out how to promote my store(s) cheaply and efficiently. Dropping my life's savings into advertising on Summergetaways.com might get me some eyeballs on my sight, but there's probably a better way to go.

My budget for advertising this year is free. I can advertise anywhere that's free. Actually, that means facebook & google+, which is better than nothing, but not much. So I'm interested in google adwords. I love google. they own this blogsite, the browser I'm using (chrome), the software that operates my phone (droid), my email carrier, and of course google+ (which many people are saying isn't a big deal, but there are a ton of people on there). Of course they also use the search engine that is most popular for finding things, so they have tools to help people who invest in their products. My girlfriend who runs ahtees designs, turned me on to Google adwords keyword tool, which analyses and suggests keywords, the tags that help people find your stuff.

I just joined for the purpose of reporting the cost to this blogpost, and they let you create whatever budget you want. I put in $2 a day which doesn't sound like much, but is considerably more that $0. In fact; it is 2x365 or $730 a year, so that's an estimate based on how much I spend on coffee a day. It's also about $60 a month. This is kind of a lot for me, but I have no idea how it translates into how much advertising it will buy. They say that once my budget is exhausted for the day that my ads will stop appearing. That means that perhaps they wont be seen during high traffic times, but it doesn't matter because it's not tv or radio, only one person is looking at each screen, so the same number of people will be exposed to my ads whether its all in the morning or spread throughout the day. There's also pay per click (again a bid I set that I have no idea how competitive it is.) I didn't intend to get this deep into this subject for the purpose of this post, but I've been hovering over the "join now" button for a while, and I haven't commited to anything yet, so I'm ok so far. I'll let you know when I know more.

I finnished the Santa card, and need to make more shirts, and designs. I'll leave you with this: successful people are the ones who do what they love.