Thursday, August 27, 2009

Can You Smell That?.......Well I Sure Can't!

The rigors of soapmaking are ever ongoing. During this month of Ramadan I have found it more difficult than I assumed to have the energy to really make soap consistently. The thing that really has been bothering me more so than lack of energy, has been my stagnant group of fragrances. The time has come around for me to remake some of the older scents that have sold out, so that's not a big issue. What about the new scents though? Well, lately I've found myself not really being able to spare the money to purchase a new round of fragrances. I "window shop" as it were almost daily making, then deleting, then remaking a list of fragrances that I want to buy. With the fall around the corner, I need to put my body butter sticks back on the shelf. They were a best seller over the winter and fall months, and so would be a complete fail if I didn't get them back up. As for the scents, I want oils that are appropriate for the season, but that doesn't scream Thanksgiving and Christmas. I want subtle and warm and spicy without having to fall back on the old standby's like pumpkin or pine. Though admittedly I have never used them in my lineup, so they may be worth a blend.

Well I don't know how I'm gonna pull it off, but I may be getting a little finacial boost in a couple weeks. That should be a big help in deciding exactly what kind of scents I want to go for.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Such a Long Time

Oh boy, it's been such a long time posting here, that I'm afraid no one will read me!

Nothing much has been happening, hence no posts. Over the last few months business did pick up however. Etsy, the site where I sell, decided late last year/earlier this year to create their own brand of SEO. For those of you unaware SEO= search engine optimization. It seems they buried pretty much the entire site from Google by taking up valuable keyword space, that should have otherwise been used at the discretion of each individual shop. They "spammed" the word Etsy in everyone's metatags, basically making Google's crawlers regard the entire site as a spam site. Google buries sites like that into an irrelevant supplemental search. Basically no one's shop could be successfully searched via Google or other major search engines.

Well, I guess they finally sorted that out after much wrangling by the Etsy sellers. It has taken a little while for the search engines to re-catalog the site and thusly individual shops. It must have worked because I started getting sales and views again after a very long draught.

All in all I guess I am getting quite tired of the whole Etsy site and how things are run there. It doesn't seem to run very effeciently, and they spend more energy closing threads it seems, than tending to real issues.