Sewing Your Seeds

I thought this would be a great question to see what others are doing to promote themselves. Personally, I am all over the internet, forums, facebook, my space, deviantart, beadartists.org, many blogs, yuwie, Yahoo groups, you name it. Then I also have my own dot com. I don't make sales off from there, so I have modified it basically to a gallery of my own.

I also have my work in a shop right here in town. She is a watercolor artist in the equine area and she often goes to shows. One of her friends last fall took some of my work to a show in Las Vegas and my work is going out to Scottsdale AZ, in Feb and Sacramento CA this June. Tell me I am not excited!! I also teach at The Beadin' Path in Freeport, Maine and at all the Bead Fiesta shows in the Northeast.

Some of this has fallen in my lap, but it is ALL (except for the local shop that carries my work, that was an 'on foot' deal LOL) a result of getting all over on the Internet. I cannot stress enough to take lots and lots of time to promote yourself on the net!!! That is how I landed the teaching at Bead Fiesta too, through a Yahoo group. Someone was looking for a teacher in Massachusetts and I was swilling to take the trip. The lady blew me off, but someone else had seen my interest. Out of the blue one day there was an email and an invitation. You wouldn't even believe how much that has pushed me up. Teaching at Bead Fiesta is what got me the teaching gig at The Beadin' Path! It snowballs trust me! LOL

What do you do??

Wow!, Christina. I have a dot com also, an Etsy account, and a icraft account. I have started a blog in my dot com. I am in numerous beading groups on both Yahoo and MSN with my information in my signature line. I belong to numerous forums but don't tend to be able to get back to all of them (even though I try). I have a facebook account but haven't done much with it. Not really sure how to use it or my My Space acount to be very effective. Not looked at deviantart at all because not sure how it would help me.

I, too, have my work in a shop about 60 miles from here. My SIL opened a beauty shop with a wonderful display case in the entry lobby. She says people look at it and ooo and aw but no sales. Well, maybe someday.

I hope to be able to start doing some of the craft shows in the future but have to look into it more because of the cost of gas and the shows themselves.

I would look into teaching but don't think there is much of a clientele for that down here. I might give the teaching bit a try. The most that can happen is that it would fall through. Maybe try having parties where people learn how to make something. I will have to give this more thought.

Might try to have a Chalupa/Bingo type thing like the home interiors do with my jewelry as prizes. The party is hosted by a person that gets a percentage of sales and invites everyone and supplies the treats. All I have to to is show up with my goodies. All the attendees pay a specific amount to play the games just like a bingo game. You can have special paper card games also for more money. The prize is one of my pretties. You could also have a door prize of one of your goodies too. You also have sales of your other work also. Hopefully this would be a win/win situation.

These are some of the ideas that I have come up with.