5 Essential Things to Focus on in Quiet Times.

Quiet times. We all have them.

What do you do during a lull in your business?

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Do you panic? Do you take advantage of it and spend more time with your friends & family? Or do you use the time wisely?

I do a bit of all of them if I'm honest.

Here are a few of the things I do, to ensure I'm being productive during my quiet moments:

1. Update my Etsy & Folksy listings. Adjust the tags and descriptions to make sure they describe the creative process, the advantages your product can offer the customer, fully detail the measurements, cleaning instructions, restrictions, etc that are needed for your products.

2. Get my accounts up to date. I know, I know, it's a boring job (for everyone except those funny accountant people who enjoy all that stuff!) But it's one that has to be done to keep on top of your business. I just keep a simple spreadsheet with incomings & outgoings, and a front page with tables tallying up month by month, how much I've made & how much I've paid out. It means that come tax return time I'm much more organised and don't panic quite as much!

3. Make extra stock. This is something I do in limited quantities as most of my items are made to order, so it's difficult to know how much of any items to make and in what colours, but there are certains items, like the Campervans, which I know will remain popular all year round, year after year, so I do make some of those when I have the chance to.

A tower of Campervans

4. Research. Be it researching suppliers, retailers to approach, design methods, packaging & postal methods or how to divide your marketing & advertising budget... All and any legitimate research is good for your business. I say legitimate because it's easy to get distracted from your purpose and get caught up with looking at shiny pretty beads, for example, when they have nothing to do with your business. (Yes, I am speaking from experience!) Even if you aren't in a position to buy, change suppliers, branch out into retail markets, pay for any marketing, it will be useful to have some knowledge for when you are ready to take that step.

5. Design new items. Now this is something that I would like to spend ALL my quiet times doing, but I've put it last because although it's the point I like the best, if I started off on this one, I'd never get numbers 1 - 4 achieved! I'm one of those designers who always has ideas racing round my brain and rarely have time to get even half of them down onto paper.

I find I quite often have to refer back to this list when I hit a lull as although I know what I need to do, re-reading it afresh always helps me to focus.

On that note, I'm off for a couple of weeks on holiday with the out-laws and will be doing plenty of number 5, with a little bit of number 4 thrown in for good measure!

PS. If you want other posts along the same lines try these:

The Reality of Being a Work At Home Mum

5 Mistakes Most Businesses Make Using Facebook

5 Reasons I Love Etsy

I had never even heard of Etsy until I started designing and making things last autumn. A friend of mine who went to Uni in America (and is therefore far more clued up about transatlantic trends than I am!) told me about it when she saw my photos going up on Facebook. For those of you out there who have also not heard of it, Etsy is a website that allows people to set up their own web-based shop, selling either handmade or vintage goodies world wide, from one safe site. You don't need to have your own website or any experience to use Etsy, they make it really straightforward for you (which was a relief for me as a total novice at online selling!)

The 5 things I really really like about Etsy are:

1. Shop Stats
This means you can see how many people have viewed items in your shop over different time periods, what search criteria they've used to find your items, which items they have 'favourited' (sort of like bookmarking them, so they can find them easily again) and where they have originally come from - i.e. the number of people who read this and then click through from the blog to my Etsy shop. All these things really help a shop owner to know which areas to focus on, how best to label their items and what is popular at the moment.

2. The Teams
I'm part of three Etsy teams, all of which give me something slightly different. The Etsy's UK & Ireland Seller Support Team is brilliant for being friendly and helpful when you have a question, an idea you need sounding out or just need some confidence boosting! The other two teams I'm part of Seller Opportunity Tools and UK Felt Obsessors are both fun & useful, but I don't participate in them nearly as much as the first one.

3. Tagging
Etsy help make it easy for sellers to tag their items as they allow you 13 different tags for each item you list. You can also see the tags that other sellers have used to get ideas for yours. It makes a big difference from my point of view as the majority of sellers & buyers are based in the US, there are some terms that are used differently there, which would result in a lack of sales if you didn't take advantage of the tagging opportunities. For example, the word 'personalised' is spelled differently in America, so by just using one tag to repeat your item title but spelling it the American way (or the English way if you've used the American spelling in your title) means you hit that wider audience.

4. The amazing range of beautiful handmade items
There are SO many absolutely wonderful designers & creators who sell through Etsy, you could spend days lost on the site! My Father-in-Law and my Grandfather are both into golf, so for Christmas I came across a wonderful shop called Tiny Love Treasures who made them both a golf ball marker with my kids names on. So lovely & something I would never have found had I been out shopping on the high street - they'd both have ended up with yet more tees and a new book full of golfing jokes!

5. You can see how much the postage is going to be before you add an item to your cart.
One of the the other things I love is that when you are shopping on Etsy you can see how much the postage is going to be from the word go. Quite often if you are based in England and trying to buy off an American site, either you get to the payment section only to find that they don't deliver outside of the US or that the postage is going to be prohibitively expensive, so you end up starting all over again... with Etsy, you can see straight away if you can afford the postage (and more importantly if they will post overseas) which saves a lot of time & frustration!


To have a browse on Etsy either follow the link to my shop or have a look at just a couple of the other lovely shops that I have come across:

Great Bottles of Fire

Tiny Love Treasures 

Belle Cards And Gifts 

Happy shopping xxx