After having much success with selling a wide range of handmade goods over at Etsy, particularly kitty and puppy toys, I figured there had to be a way to utilize the article marketing techniques I learned here to help drive more traffic to my shop.

While I made a decent number of sales in 2011, most of which were as a result of buying in to various treasuries that allowed my items to get featured to large numbers of other sellers, this process worked well until the evil pieces of plastic told me I was out of money and could not shop anymore. I knew I had to find a better way to get Google to like me, as some of my items have large amounts of competition when it comes to searching via the keyword tags that are associated with each and every item. 

Currently I own a free WP blog for creating content for my shop, but I have not been good about keeping it updated with fresh content, mostly because I found myself at a loss as to what I needed to talk about. I created a FB fan page, a Twitter acct and the blog in one day so I had valuable "follow me" content to add to my business cards, but somewhere along the way I never learned the right way to utilize these tools. 

It wasn't till the last few weeks of December that the light bulb went on and I remembered, "hey I can use article marketing to drive traffic to my highly competitive items!" Why I had forgotten about this handy tool, I do not know. Maybe it was because I had become so overwhelmed with life in general that I somehow lost the thinking part of my brain that allowed me to write like I had in the past. 

So after some keyword research on the great Jaaxy tool, I found the perfect keyword to promote my handmade trivets. Everyone that has seen them in my shop loves them, but very few have sold and I'm not sure if that was because those that liked them did not have the cash, or if I was just not getting them in front of enough of eyeballs due to the countless number of other sellers offering other forms of a trivet. 

With new found optimism, I logged back in to WA after a 6+ month hiatus and wrote my article with the help of Rapid Writer. Everything flowed, I had a good keyword, and my link so optimistically went to SA to submit it for approval. Having been out of the loop for awhile, I was first rejected due to improper referral to my link. I quickly fixed that and submitted again. The next day I was faced with a second rejection telling me that my landing page did not contain enough quality content. Crap, you mean to tell me I cannot send someone directly to my store's home page?  It contained my about me info as well as other ways to contact me, but in the IM realm I guess it doesn't contain the "meat" that Google seems to love so much. 

Not knowing exactly what to do next, I found myself asking for help in the WA chat. I knew I had a free blog, but for some reason my experiences building my WA promo site lead me to think that the free site would not contain enough "meat" to make Google like it. I soon found myself over at GoDaddy purchasing a domain name for my shop. While my Etsy store is Jennies Home Made Goods, I some how left off the goods part in the domain name. I'm not sure if this was done on accident or intentionally so I could avoid creating an overly complex web address. And I must admit, the more I look at it, Jennies Home Made actually has a good ring to it.

With only a few weeks left to 2011, I got as far as re-directing my DNS, and setting up my hosting here at WA. The site is live, but has no content on it what so ever. I figured it was in my best interest, physically and mentally to just let the site sit and wait till the new year so I could get a fresh start on it. So now here it is Jan 4th, and  I'm raring to go on making my mark in the handmade goods realm. Luckily I had printed out all my emails from the 30 day club and have plans to go through them each day by day. 

While promoting physical items may be outside the norm, I embark on a new venture which I hope will bring me much success for years to come.