I think things are very slow at my store.......only 59 odd cards sold in a year.....people talk about Promotion....
There are things I would not  do...like making my friends feel obliged to buy my cards...I do not have a blog, and the people that read my Facebook page would not be interested ( I only have 13 friends , and am not in a compeditive race to get more !)
Can I rely on just the normal search engines to crank things up ???
Would love to hear of any successes from people in the same boat !!

Hi Mary,
 
Well I certainly understand about friends and family...I have always felt the same way and never push my work on them or even expect them to purchase it from me.  That left me in a similar position as you a couple years ago...how to do I get out there without the help of my friends  
 
Here is what worked for me.  One of the absolute most critical ways to be found and move up in search ranks is backlinks.  That's why blogs, online newsletters, Facebook fan pages and other stores where you sell your work is so important.  One way to get backlinks that don't come from your own site to site links is to look for ways to connect to sites that a design or collection of yours fits the theme or purpose.  
 
For example, you have some unique and adorable Stork designs.  Find places you can link your designs to customers looking for baby cards.  Such as blogs that talk to mother's to be, Squidoo lens about New Moms and so on.
 
Another critical issue for being bumped up in searches is frequency of updates.  Online stores that have new content added regularly (preferably weekly) will be bumped above those stores that have become stagnant.    
 
For me, I found that creating my online newsletter was perhaps the most significant things I did to jump start my sales.  I write about what I know (critical to stay within a box you are comfortable with) and link my products and those of others to match what I'm writing about and to fit the upcoming occasions.  Because mine is such a variety pack of good content (and CONTENT is what search engines MUST HAVE) I draw a huge amount of visitors who look around and have grown to a nice mailing list of nearly 1000 people over the past 2 years.  
 
I hope this helps you some, its not an easy road.  It's very time-consuming and you have to work at it until you find 'your sweet spot'.  Everyone is different and how they go about promotion is different.

I'm in the same boat as you, but I don't do too bad for sales.  
 
I don't like pestering friends and relatives, but I do send them cards from my store on their birthday and at Christmas. That is one form of advertising.  
 
The other I do is to have a message about my store on the bottom of every email I send out. At the moment I'm letting people know there are new Mother's Day cards available.  
 
Many of my cards are found by the keywords I use, so the words you use are very important.  
 
And of course, the longer you have your store and the more cards of good variety, the more your sales will develop.  
 
Hope some of that helps. Best wishes for future sales
Eve

Hi Mary, Yeah, what they said.  
 
I meant to say in my first post what Doreen said about keeping active. When you see a holiday coming up, put up a new card. That's every month. It will also keep your mind on your shop in a positive manner like Sri said. By putting up new cards, you are showing the universe that you believe your shop will sell cards.     See?
 
Posting to blogs, squidoo, having a fanbook shop page, updating your shop and sending a little link at to bottom of regular emails can really boost sales. Once you learn how gratifying it is to toot your own horn, putting up little notices of new stuff and holiday reminders, seeing it make sales, you may be encouraged to keep it up.  
 
And as Sri said, visualization is a powerful thing. Try to think in positive terms. I will, instead of I won't and seeing positive things happening in your life.  
 
We did an experiment in the 70's where we just walked around with a smile on our faces, no matter how we felt. The surprising thing that happened was the response of people around us, responding to us in a positive manner. The smile was infectious! More than that, even when alone, it was impossible to feel down.  

Hey Mary,
 
This was actually a really good post you put on the forum. I am the exact same, I have hardly sold any cards (lots of nice feedback just not many sales unfortunately). I am sure there are lots of other people in the same boat as well and these suggestions members are posting in reply are great tips to get us going  
 
I have been going through all of the suggestions posted in reply to your post and there are some good ideas. Like yourself, I am not keen to entice my family or friends to buy them which just leaves random people on the internet haha.
 
The one thing I have done which has been suggested is a facebook page. Everyone managers their facebook page however they like, I am a fan of a few of the GCU members pages and it's good to see how people choose to promote their work. Like most people I add images of my cards to an album/gallery - I add a link in the description box to my GCU store so if someone likes the image they can buy the card. To be honest, not a great deal of sales yet as I haven't had a lot of time to work on it but I do seem to have more traffic to my store and YouTube channel (I use the facebook page to promote my cards as well as animation work).  
 
So I would say that people's suggestion of creating a business facebook page is a good start.
 
All the best  

Quote from Evelyn_142919 on Apr 2^nd, 2011, 9:48pm:

 
Facebook! that's what I meant to put, not fanbook. Heck I went over there and the whole thing's been taken over by the prince of tennis. lol
http://www.facebook.com/nahepner
 
There's also myspace, Livejournal, Fanbox and a lot of other places. I'll be 60 this year and I'm just getting started.  

Quote from Eve_138255 on Apr 3^rd, 2011, 1:32am:

 
 
Hi Eve, This is what Becky (Rebecca) told me, so if you have any questions I probably won't be able to answer. However, her instructions were good enough to help me get mine up!   Firstly, look on your facebook page for a link to 'create a page' or something like that. I looked and can't find it today.   Then ...
 
"From: Rebecca (Becky) 140932on: Yesterday at 3:56pm No. The first thing you do is go to the one in the top middle called, "Company, Organization, or Institution". You hit that. Then, it will bring up a "Choose Category". There you will scroll down to "Small Business" and hit that. Next you will type the name of your store in the "Company Name" section. Agree to the terms and wa... la... You have a page.  
 
It has step by step instructions once it is created. It is really very easy.  
 
Once your page is created, you will always be able to find it by hitting your "Account" tab in the upper right hand corner on your personal Facebook page.  
 
When you do so, it will show you all the pages you have created there and you can hit any of them to see them. It also asks you if you want to switch. I do not hit that tab. I just go straight to the one of the left with my store's name on it to get to that page. I myself do not want all my pages interacting with each other, other than being added to each others favorites.  
 
When you are on your newly created page, you look over to the left, there you will see the word "Wall", you click that. Then you copy any URL to any card and hit the link  button and paste it there with anything you want to say about it. It shows up on your wall for all to see.  "
 
I still don't know how to post things up on it. I'm going to try by hitting 'sell' or the dollar sign and pasting that into my fanbook slot. Wish me luck!

You're very welcome Eve