Ursine Logic's interview

Day118
Take a look at Ursine Logic’s Store while she share’s her experiences;
http://www.cafepress.com/ursinelogic?pid=4370506

1.What drew you to opening an online store? Were you in a related field?

I've been a free-lance graphic artist/web designer for several years now. One of my clients hired me to fix some of his images so they would work on black t-shirts. I went to look at this site and thought hey, I can do this with my art and photographs. It's better than having them sit on my hard drive all lonely and forgotten.

2.When did you open your store?

February 2006

3.What is harder about doing this then you thought it would be?

Getting traffic to the site. I usually can manage to get decent traffic to websites I design in about three months. This one is taking forever, although I've done everything and more that I usually do, with a focus on descriptions, keywords, and manually registering with the big search engines plus ones specific to what I offer in my store. I never show up in any of the CafePress marketplace searches even though I do everything I'm supposed to do. That's another mystery. However I am still optimizing my shop for what usually works and not on CafePress marketplace listings.

4.What do you like best about being an online shopkeeper?

Being able to have complete and total control over the designs and products. It's a great way also to show people who want to hire me for jobs what I do. It's a great portfolio page if nothing else.

5.During the very first month, what do you wish you had known then that you do now?

I think the most important was how to organize my shop. I set it up by product at first and then realized the other shops that were doing well were set up by design. Knowing this without going through all the message board stuff ahead of time would have been good information. I had to redo it.

6.Could you share some of the marketing you’ve tried so far (on or off line) and what has worked and what hasn’t?

Adwords totally sucked. It is expensive and I only had one sale that came from them. Don't even bother unless you are an adwords expert because that is what it takes to figure it all out. Sure, they have all the help files, but I think for the amount of money it costs, there should be more support when you first start. You're left there to figure it out yourself and by the time you do, your advertising budget has been eaten up with nothing to show for it.

Most of my traffic, little that it is, comes from my blog. I've had that since September and since I love to write, I put up my designs and use them to illustrate what I'm writing about that day. I'm an odd duck in many ways and so I think people come to look out of curiosity.

7.What other sites, blogs, etc. do you have if any?

My main blog is:

http://mishkabear.blogspot.com

I am also on MySpace, but I write less in that one. I'm there more for the social aspect of MySpace which I love. I could cut and paste from my main blog for the MySpace one I suppose, but that would seem kind of slimy and dishonest somehow.

Nancy’s comment – Urzine Logic has done a great job with text and descriptions on her site. She mentions in her interview she likes to write and it shows. I especially like her world peace greeting cards, buttons, magnets and stickers and her peace star design.