I guess it’s a case of the right person being on the right site at the right time.

Woohoo.

I’ve listed only a couple of items for the time being.  I’ll add some more over the next few days.  I’m not too sure what sort of response I’ll get but hey, it’s another way of generating business, in addition to eBay and DaWanda.

I’ve not had much success with DaWanda.  I’ve made one sale since January when I joined.  Then again I haven’t really been poulating it properly.  I think I listed too much too soon.  It seems that one or two items every few days is the way to go with these craft sites.  I think I’ll have to revisit my listings at DaWanda.

I’ve got a couple of new blends in the pipeline.  Definitely having lots of fun creating my own fragrances.  Some have smelt absolutely revolting, but others aren’t too bad and they are slowly being added to the “possibles” list.

They are there for purely Internet Marketing purposes, trouble is that up until recently Google loved Squidoo.  They were good quality sites with relevent content for search engines.  What has happened, as is always the case with something this good, is that it gets abused.  As word spread, so did the amount of spammers who built lenses to bombard the Internet with crappy content and fill everybody’s inbox with junk mail.  What does Google do?  Drop it like a hot potato.  Consequently everybody who was using Squidoo to drive traffic to their genuine sites have been hit very badly as no lenses appear on Google.

So to compensate that I’m just going to run a duplicate blog site on Blogger, who are owned by Google, just as another means of generating traffic to my main site.  I won’t shut down the lenses as Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines are indexing them.  Unfortunately, 98% of all searches in the UK are made through Google.  So, I do need to target those Google users.

If anybody is interested it’s at www.makingsoycandles.blogspot.com.  I’ve also put a link on the right hand column.  Fingers crossed it’ll give my main site some added weight in the next couple of months.  I’ve also placed some Google ads on it too, we’ll see what happens.

So sad as they are a nice couple and Keith has worked so hard to build up their business.  I found them so handy as not only did they sell i bulk, but they also offered smaller quantities which came in so handy for months where I’d run out of wax but money was a bit tight.  You know what I mean, so I would order a smaller amount just to tie me over till I was flush again.

So RIP Candelights.  I do hope that maybe one day they can start up again as we definitely need more suppliers.

I hope that every one will find it easy on the eyes, but more importantly easy to navigate.

Quite frankly, I feel that eBay has lost the plot, and that they are now just looking to keep the big time players on board.  I never did sell much from my shop, but rather from my auctions.  As I have my own site I tend to use eBay as a marketing tool, so I will continue to list my goods as auctions, but with a “buy it now” option too.  At £15 a month it isn’t worth me keeping a shop going.

It is going to cost me more to list and coupled with the fact that the cost of my raw materials and shipping have gone through the roof due to the rise in oil costs and soy prices, I will be raising my prices.  They won’t be drastic, but I can’t swallow the excess any more.  I haven’t raised my prices for 2 years but I’m hoping that there won’t be many more huge increases by my suppliers.  I will be working out my new price list ready for 1 October 2008.

I’m hoping to have it all sorted by the end of the month (fingers crossed)

Does anyone else have this problem with their blog? I’m just thankful that I have a wonderful spam application to take care of it, otherwise my blog would be full of comments for viagra and enlargening my penis!!! For God’s sake, I’m a woman, why would that interest me, or do they know something that I don’t. I think my George would have noticed something by now ..LOL.

Sorry folks, but it makes me so mad, I just had to have a bit of a rant and rave. So for all you spammers “nah nah ne nah nah” I have Akismet running. If anyone out there has a Wordpress blog I would highly recommend you install it on yours too.

Anyway, I have managed to spend some time working on my new website. Still have a few things to sort out. At the moment I’m trying to sort out the loyalty points module. Just need to test it out and make sure it all works when a customer goes through the checkout.

I have nearly perfected my travel tins, so they will be on the new site. I will also be offering some new melts in different shapes. There will be some new autumn/winter fragrances making their appearance very soon, too. I also have some nice oil burners, some are very plain and simple, others are a bit fancier looking. All priced to sell, though.

We may be entering a depression but I feel that is no reason to push up prices unnecessarily. I’m lucky that I have no overheads as I make all my products here at home. All right, it’s confined to a corner of the kitchen, but I’m hoping by the end of winter to have cleared a space in the garden for my own shed that I can kit out as a proper workshop with plenty of room for storing all my supplies. Fingers crossed we can afford to make it big enough so I can start experimenting with soap making.