Advice on Sales!!

Amara, I remembered you saying you'd deleted the visitor counter that DSN sent. You might want to read this:

http://cleverthings.info/dsn/lang/en/2009/08/morning

Oh! Thanks Skell! Just sent Rika a request for another one. Great idea! I had forgotten

Oook my general list of how i organise thigns works a little differently:

I do ads and boxing in bulk do i always hav items in my inventory to release even if im not in an overally creative mood that day or week. I usuallydo this once every three weeks or so.

1. Put items into my store and send notices to my update group and add those boxes to my Xstreet box in world (Daye 1)

2. Put items onto Xstreet EVERYTHING (this is most important.. my sales have jumped hugely since i sarted doing this not just an item ehere and there) (Dayes 2 to 4)

3. Send notice to fashcon - i dont bother with any other groups now ceptthe freebie groups... the others i was seeing ZERO of my new customers belonged to sexyshoppers fashion trend etc (i suspect some alt abuse for numbers in those groups in all honesty) (Day 5)

4. Do ad shots for the blogs and forums (ihave staretd doign more fashiony ones as opposed to my normal in world ads for them) then postign on the blogs and forums (Day 6)

Then i start it all over again.


But this is just my general day to day stuff. I have been networking with other fashion people and gettign to know them working with them and am building up thatway.

I am also continuing to DAILY send an IM to new shopprs invitinig them to the updte group. I also randomly IM regular customers with a tahnk you IM and a gift. My store group has gotten to the 1000 mark now nd the majority of ti is made up of regular shoppers....

I too hav been adding stuff to the SL shopper on SLU though i honestly have no ida if it has any value.

I have been networkiing , getting to know new peope, socialising and gettig myname out there, my partner and i will go out dressed in my cothing, peoepl will often ask about stuff and we get sales that way and it is fun!

I have been working on making my xstreet listings more appealing and having click through links on all ads for other products i sell thatpeople may be interested in.

I have plans to try out an ad on SLU but i havent done it yet...

I recently added a MM board and lucky board and have been IMing those groups a few times a day about the itemswhich seems to be netting sales, though th groups annoy me so i dont know whethr i will continue with the groups long term ... but ill leave the boards up.

Intrestingly though my biggestbenefit has been taking the time to IM peopel and thank hem for shopping with me and inviting thm to join my update goup. I now seee a largeflux of sales from my notices to my update group ove the24 hours after sending it.

Well, I woke up early today and couldn't get back to sleep, so I boxed up a couple of little things I'd made and posted them on XStreet. (And I've just made a post here in New Products.)

I don't have a store inworld yet, though it may be something I want to think about.

I do need to go back and read the early parts of this thread, but any advice is most welcome. (I am not happy with my pictures at all, and not 100% sure what I want to change. I have next to no experience editing photos/textures.) Price point? Details I need to include/exclude from the listings? I may not take all the advice I get, but I am definitely open to it!

My XStreet page:
https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&MerchantID=156077

My post here:
/196/00/335451/1.html

I am almost embarrassed to call myself a content creator next to some of the names in this thread, but we all started somewhere, right?

Hi Nic

and welcome to the thread. The pictures are good in that they are uncluttered and the product is clearly visible. I think what you are missing is some sort of branding. Do you have a logo for your store ? branding is one of the things we have all learned is of key importance.
And don't be embarressed, you create products, therefore you ARE a content creator

huggsss and good luck

Rhia xx

I love the Bubble Sphere!! It is just too cute for words

It does need to get seen though - what Key Words did you use?

This is a good reminder of something I've been thinking about: I need to get into Photoshop and make a frame or banner with my logo. (I'm assuming here that those photos of products-in-frames are made with layers inside Photoshop or some similar program.)

That might solve another problem I've been looking for information on: the size of the photos. I've been posting the snapshots (taken inside SL and saved to harddrive) just as I get them from my Pictures folder...and they end up quite large.

I see such a range of sizes of photos on people's View More Images pages----if they are smaller or larger than mine, is this because they've been changed inside a graphics program?

Or is it possible to specify in my SL Preferences, the size of images saved to my harddrive?

I ask this in the Sales thread because I suspect that customers MIGHT be affected by the annoyance of having to enlarge their window to see the entire photo......!

If you look at the Take Snapshot drop down, you will see a More button- there you will find several things you might want to look at changing to your own preferences. There you can also choose where to save and what to call your snaps as well as what format to save in.

I use two programs for creating and pictures- I am not a whiz at this picture stuff and still manage ok. One is of course the Gimp- an awesome grafix program that is actually FREE! Google and DL it if you havent yet. There is a bit of a learning curve, but there are classes in world and many tuts on line.

The one i use for quicky on the fly is an old one called MGI Photosuite- later bought out by Roxio- you can still find it on ebay for next to nothing.

Good luck!

I would suggest you find a back ground you like - a color or tones of colors - something you can develop consistency in. When i first started my adboards where a horrible mishmash- read the folks comments to me way back when - I've come a long way thanks to so many helpful people.

Oh, wow, do I feel dim! In all this time I've never noticed that button! I had actually spent time looking in Preferences and hadn't seen anything, but never noticed the "More" before.... (Thanks! ^_^)

As far as the branding graphics---yes, one reason I've delayed working on it (beyond the fact that I've been in XStreet less than a month and have been preoccupied with just getting a good selection of products up there) is that I can guess it would be easier to make a too-busy frame than a just-right frame. It will definitely take some work.

I don't know when they snuck this one in... but I only found the Save As button last month!

Well, I suspect you're just saying that to make me feel better, but...Yeah, that one is nice for naming your harddrive save. ^_^

Nope- honest! I use to log out between shoots to keep like stuff together- so yeah.. been doing that for going on four years ...

That's nothing--besides my having missed the More button, I just recently discovered the Stretch button for objects.

(Hey, this is a good start for a 'what face-palm thing about SL are you most ashamed to have missed' thread.....)

Waves to everyone in the thread. I feel so out of touch with things lately, and am sorry have missed replying to loads of posts, most of the time these days I have no idea whether I am standing on my head or what lol

Isn't it strange though, how we all have different ways of doing things, and I think in many cases you don't learn about certain things until the point you actually need to use them.
To this day I have never downloaded a snapshot to my hard drive, I use a totally different way of taking my pictures for sales signs, snapshots is one those things I have never learnt much about, I can just about take a picture using that option lol

Ok- now you def got me beat! Haha- oh well at least you did find it! Oh here is a recent discovery- did you know you could copy/paste dimensions, coordinates etc into the object edit boxes? In case it gets boring to just keep typing it in when adjusting things, you can also tab between them - seems obvious in retrospect, i wd always click on it and then type what i wanted *face palm*

Same here on both counts.

Nic, I had absolutely NO graphics editing background when I began my store. I have since taken a lot of Gimp classes (and there is still MUCH more to learn) but that helped me learn how to deal with layers, etc. The school I currently recommend for either PS or Gimp is SOMA. They are currently revamping it with a grand re-opening scheduled at the end of the month. They work off a HUD system. The HUD is free and the when you first acquire it, it already contains something like 15 classes on Gimp within it. I can't wait to dig into it. (These can be picked up at the SOMA campus, or if anyone has difficulty finding it there, just IM me and I can send either a lm or a HUD to you.)

Prior to learning Gimp, all I had was a tiny photo-editing program called Photo Explosion that came bundled with one of my former printers. I use that for quick shots that don't need a lot of futzing with. My profile pic was done with that program and I have had people comment on it and "wish they could do that" when that photo was probably one of the easiest I've done.

Good luck, Nic and most of all, have fun

I LOVE the criss-crossed shelves. Reminds me of what we used as combination end tables, record holders (for those who *cough* remember vinyl records *cough*). Great work!



I would suggest speaking to Rhiannon at Primal Arts. That was my first "real" shop and she now has a second level that may have some openings!!



I made a comment on photo-editing/graphics programs below in response to Amar's post. Again...HIGHLY recommend Gimp and SOMA as the school to learn from.

As another poster said, branding is important. Eventually you'll work up some visual brand (you can see all the varieties in some of the signature lines). And/or a written "tag line" to include on the note cards you include with your products and on your XStreet ads. Easy beginning advertising is to use your picks in your profile. Until you have a store you can use one to list your XStreet addy, and the others to advertise each product.

(I'm in a slump atm, so I stripped my profile but Amar and Ralektra are two good ones to look at.)

And as for starting somewhere - absolutely!! My first attempt at selling something I created was putting it along with resale items at a yard sale. I was THRILLED when someone purchased my first item (my Japanese photo shelf...which still sells well 1 1/2 years later).

I cannot recommend enough the girl that did the little advert for me in my siggy. If you need story board help, as limited as my experience is I would be happy to help- take a look at my blog for a whole bunch of examples.

Hi, Rhiannon, and thanks. I had thought vaguely about a logo, but haven't put it together yet. I was actually going to use a variation of my husband's RL business logo - he's already agreed to draw it up for me - using the NN from Nic's Notions in place of the letters he uses. Then I'll have to learn how to use a graphics program to put the logo on my product pictures, I guess... I really appreciate the suggestion.




I loved it too, though it had its flaws. It really was my home for many months, with a platform above I could TP to when I wanted to be "outside".

Do you mean keywords in XStreet? I haven't used any, so far - I was a little fuzzy yesterday from not enough sleep and I didn't want to get in trouble for keyword spamming. But now I think keyword spamming is actually using wrong/unrelated keywords, and using ones that actually go with the product is okay? I need to go back over that...

I haven't got any rezzed in-world at the moment. I suppose I could set up a small store on my land, but with only four products it seems kind of a waste.

I have some other things I want to finalize and box up for sale, but I've stalled out on trying to figure out whether my sit target scripts and the poses I have are okay to use in products for sale. Many of them have been handed to me in various classes and I feel fine using them for my own builds - but I can't help feeling that selling products made with them requires more checking. (Am I being overly paranoid about this? I'd hate to sell, say, a chair, and later discover that the pose or sit script in it was not meant to be freely distributed, or was meant to be sold only with restricted permissions.)

Keyword spamming is only if you use unrelated terms just to get people to look -

KW are VERY important so your items CAN be found - and name them preferably with the what it is as part of the name- for example, all my eyelashes are named- Eyelashes! then whatever I called it - This is something i need to update on my older items. a gown called say Midnight Dreams and with no kw to say what it is, add a story that decribes what a wonderful time and how great you will look - no where mention it's a dress and it will disappear under tons of better thought out adverts (trust me..speaks the voice of experience in bad adverts at first!) But it its all a learning experience-you wil get there! Keep reading this thread lot's of good info here and we have all learned much from it.

Re sits and poses - from my experience i would say this is fine - selling your creations - as the classes i have been to the teachers are careful to make trans only things you can distribute- but of course it never hurts to be sure. There is a store in world called Sissy's I believe, that has a number of full perm poses and anims that are quite reasonably priced - take a look in search- if you do not find drop me an IM an i will send LM.

When you are set to open your store remember to make it searchable - $30.00/wk. KW will help there too.

Good luck!

Czari, thank you. I will look into both Gimp and SOMA. What little, little graphics editing I have done so far has been in the Microsoft Photo editor. (I think... can't even find the program I used, now.) Something really basic, anyway.

Oh, I'm glad you like them. Someone on an online book club forum posted a link to a diagonal bookshelf that filled an entire wall, and one day I was fooling around and thought, "That's all just 45-degree angles, I could do that..." and I was off.

I've been to Rhiannon's mall, and it is very nice there. I also have a 4096 lot (for now, anyway - I can't help thinking how much less tier rental I'd be paying each week if I went down to 1024... and part of selling the stuff I've made is that it would help cover that cost, and I do love having the land) and I could set up a small shop in the sky. But with only two distinct products I'm not sure whether it's worthwhile to set up a shop - yet. I'm such a sporadic builder, too. (Hence the brand name - Nic's Notions. I build when I have a notion...)

I'm glad you reminded me about my profile. I meant to change out the web link, but I hadn't thought about using my picks. Darn, and I've already used them all supporting my friends' places, so I'll have to think about what I can sacrifice.

I've thought about a tag line, but I am still so tired and a bit spacy that I can't decide whether the one I thought of is really as good an idea as it seemed at the time.

Ah, okay. I'll have to go back over my XStreet ads and include keywords - and also check the item name and properties fields for any products I rez in-world when that time comes.

I *think* I just picked up some packs of free poses at NCI, and I have another two or so I picked up at Yadni's - those should all be safe, right? There was a thread here ages ago about animators whose work is/isn't okay to use, but I think those may have been all erotic animations, which I'm not after. I will check Sissy's out, too. Thanks! It never hurts to have options.

For the script, I think I'm going to look at the sit position scripts I have and then write my own. There shouldn't be anything in an LSL sit script that is so special it can't be borrowed from.

I really appreciate your advice and the information I'm getting in this thread!

Nic - there are some sit pose target things available for free on xstreet i am fairly certain- the one i use -can't recall now what it is called- i did get for free- I will be happy to send it to you.

I love when I can feel useful in some way Glad you began a shop, Nic...and don't worry about too few items at first, they'll grow...and one thing I learned...do it at your pace.

I tried to keep up with the more prolific builders in this thread and pretty much burned out. I had to step back, decide what was important for *me* to enjoy SL and the element of owning a small business.

If you have a piece of land you can dedicate to your shop, that is ideal. )

Going to drop the transcripts on Jojo's classes on Marketing Techniques to you. They were HIGH on my list of really starting to see sales!!!!