Bootcamp Week 2

Ok so I started behind on this and I have to admit I'm already slipping even further behind, having failed some of this week's tasks :P

Here is the list of instructions:

Read this week's Boot Camp article
Make a list of your most popular items
Brainstorm new work you'll offer this season
Find your Boot Camp buddy
Post in the Boot Camp forum thread

The first one was easy, good start :)

Ok.. list of most popular items. Well, following the advice of a fellow SFEtsy team member I'm using CraftCult to make this easy. Since I only have 1 sale I can't use sales as a judge of popularity for my items so I'm going to use hearts and views instead.

My top 5 items based on hearts are:

My Octopus Pendant with 5 hearts. This item was recently featured in a treasury

Dancing Cobalt Tiara with 2 hearts

Tied Together Earrings with 2 hearts

Ocean Swirl Pendant with 2 hearts. This item was also featured in a treasury.

There are quite a few with 1 heart so I'm going to ignore 5th place on that list.

If I look at views my top 5 list looks like this:

 Dancing Cobalt Tiara with 168 views

Tied Together Earrings with 109 views

Silver Crossover Earrings with 106 views

Octopus Pendant with 96 views

Frosted Black Pendant with 95 views

There is clearly some overlap here, which is fortunate because I have no idea which measure I should take to give the most accurate idea of popularity. Also these ratings are almost certainly biased in favour of items which have been listed for a longer time.

If I throw sales in as another measure of popularity (I have some sales off Etsy I can consider) I get a very different list:

These Copper Earrings are top

and the copper version of the Silver Crossover Earrings listed above are next

Danielle suggests using Google Analytics to get an idea of which items are the most popular. According to that 

my Turquoise and Copper Swirl Pendant is the top item but I did just list it in an SFEtsy competition so thats skewed.

Anyway I guess I can draw a few conclusions from this list...the wire items are more popular than the beaded items. The black wire items are clearly more popular than I give them credit for (they aren't my favourites).

Ok so how does that translate into offering new products. To be honest I'm not sure. I do already have several new items ready to be listed (don't worry you will see them here first!) and I'm constantly working on new items anyway so I think that counts as done...?

Right, here is where I slip up... finding a buddy. This I have not done. However I did just reply to someone's Facebook post saying they still need a buddy so hopefully by the time I post again I will have a buddy :)

Posting on the forums I haven't done either, mostly because I don't have anything pertinent to say. Maybe I'm missing something but posting on the forums for the sake of posting on the forums seems like a waste of time to me. To be fair I haven't even visited the forums so there maybe be some real gems I'm missing out on which I would find if I went to post...I guess I'll never know.

Are you participating in the Bootcamp? If so are you finding it a struggle like me? Or are you not an Etsy seller and wondering what on earth I'm talking about? Leave your comments here :)