Creative Cafe Salesrooms: The Future

[Jill]

Hi

I feel quite stupid writing this because I spent ages persuading many of you to sign up and list your lovely works for sale in Creative Cafe Salesrooms
Now that you have and we have some great art and handmade crafts for sale I have been going round persuading people to visit the site and become buyers. I thought this would be the same as promoting Creative Cafe and persuading you to sign up but it seems to be much harder. Increasing the traffic and visitor numbers isn't so hard its getting people to stop long enough to register and become buyers that is harder.

I have had free and cheap adverts up, we have now got £30 a month on Google adwords, we have been on Stumble on and I have joined a business network called Ecademy hoping to find customers. I have the name of the site in my signature and have sent bulletins on My Space. In many ways the salesrooms is having more publicity than Creative Cafe members ever has and yet I don't see results in people registering to buy. We have a few regular customers but even when new people sign up they are not buying much.

What can be done on a low budget that I am not doing already? Is it worth keep promoting the Salesrooms when there are other sites like Etsy which are well known and have the customers? I have a limited amount of time I can work on this each day and don't really want to waste the time on a lost cause. Or am I being defeatist and will the buyers soon come flocking in!

Would love to know what you think and any suggestions to improve the current situation.

Bye for Now
Jill

[Jill]

Yep.

It seems to be fixed up earlier than I thought. Theresa should be joining up as a member to get used to things around here in the next couple of days and will be working as project manager on the Salerooms site soon. So I hope things will improve and you will be able to feel more confident in the hands of someone who has experience in this kind of sales and site traffic promotion. I did do some craft markets back in the 70s before computers were invented but I don't think that counts in this environment!

Hope you will welcome Theresa when she joins us.

Bye for now
Jill