Watermarks on Etsy

Do you use watermarks?

If so, you may want to place your watermark as close to the bottom of the photo as you can. If you place them in the middle and want to be included in treasuries, you may find that you aren't chosen as often as you would like.

The reason is that while people would love to use your photo's, they know that the possibility of Etsy choosing a treasury with watermarked photos is pretty low.



Try to place your watermark low in the photo like this one.

Treasury Tags

Are you tagging your treasuries?

You have up to 18 tags that you can include in your treasury and should try to use as many as you can. Why? Because Etsy Admin and potential customers search on words and phrases to find your treasury.

What words should you use for your tags? If you are on a team, for instance TeamEPE, and have made a treasury full of its members, you should tag with teamepe. The search is not case sensitive. Or, if you are participating in a challenge treasury you should use the designated challenge term. If you pay attention to Etsy's monthly marketing report and your treasury is designed appropriately you should include some of the words from their suggestions. Make sure you include colors as well and some emotion words.

Pay attention to the Etsy finds and the phrases that are included at the bottom. If you click on one of those phrases it brings you to an entire list of treasuries that include those phrases. And, yes, you can go back into your treasury to edit tags and include one of those phrases. But, remember when you include a string of words or a phrase the customer/admin would have to search on it exactly. For instance the phrase, "falling into autumn." That exact search term would have to be the search term. Or, if you use a string of words, "blue box fall," not many people are going to put that string in the search box, so you are going to lose the potential of your treasury being found. They may search on the word "box," but your treasury isn't going to appear because it's within a string of words. Hope that makes sense!

Have you become addicted to making treasuries? I think they are all getting more and more beautiful and sophisticated!

Are you ready for the holiday rush?

While the summer months are slow you may want to get ready for the holiday purchasing season. Here's a list of some things you might want to consider:

• Stock up on packaging; tissue, tape, boxes, envelopes, shipping materials
• Business cards, regular or moo
• Stickers
• Organize your craft/design work area so that you know where everything is.
  
• Update your etsy shop, perhaps your banner needs refreshing
• Take a good look at your pictures, update them if necessary
  
• Set up your shop announcement for SEO optimization
• Are your shop policies set for holiday delivery times?
• Make sure your listings also draw your customer in and have all of the pertinent information.
• Are you getting those new designs ready? Post them early, since there are people who shop early (thankfully)

What do you do to get ready for the holiday purchasing season?

What's Your Location?

I was browsing Etsy the other day and when I find a shop that I like I almost always look to see where it is located. I am always surprised when people use odd locations in their "locations" option. Things like, "where harry potter lives, somewhere over the rainbow, Wrigley field, etc." While it's fun to read these things it does nothing to help you when someone is shopping by location.

The location feature on Etsy allows people to shop local or in certain areas of their choice. But if you put in a cute location, the etsy database is not going to list your shop when your potential customer does a search. I would also recommend not stuffing your location. I use my city and state. It's important to use city, state, country since someone living in Bavaria may not know where Cleveland is. Then there is the confusion of which Cleveland you live in -- Cleveland, Ohio or Cleveland, Tennessee? Or, any of the other locations.

I also like to know where you are so that I have an idea of how long it may take for my purchase to arrive. Plus, I know whether or not the item can be tracked through the postal system. It also helps when I order. If I'm shopping in the late afternoon and find something I want from Germany, then I know the shop keeper probably will not see my order until the next day. Knowing that keeps me from being anxious if I don't hear for the seller for a day.

What is your location?

Keeping Your Treasury Tidy

Yep, I said it..."tidy."

Etsy admin does use treasuries with sold items in the collection for the front page. They also use treasuries that are days/week old. However, they will put an alternate in place of the sold item. Since treasuries do not expire and if you don't delete your own then you should consider keeping up with the sold items. I generally check mine once a week and choose to delete some and then replace the sold items with new items from the same shop.

I have noticed in many of my treasuries that one to five items have sold in a very short time. If five have sold you will not have enough alternates to cover the ones sold. Good reason to keep an eye on those rascals!

There is also a bug in treasury making. Some people have found that if you use an item for your treasury that has a number in the title, either that item will not show up, or one of your other items will not show up. It doesn't always happen, but a pattern has been observed. If you have numbers in your titles, you may want to consider taking them out so that people feel safer using your creations.

Clicking and commenting is still important for treasuries. Doing this helps keep the treasury you made on the first page of that huge list. I've seen one of my treasuries stay on the first page for an entire day when it got plenty of comments and clicks.

So, get those brooms and dust mops out and clean up your treasury!

Treasury East What Makes it Tick?

No Waiting for the Magic Box to Open Anymore...

Staying up until the wee hours of the morning just to catch one...

You can make as many lists as you want, anytime you want...

What do you think...love it or hate it?

Everyone is trying to figure out the algorithm to understand what gets and keeps your treasury on the first page (the front page is another topic...) of the thousands of treasury east lists. From observation it appears that once you make a treasury you need to get as many people to visit your treasury as possible. They also need to click on each item and comment. The faster you get people to visit in a short time span the more likely it is that your treasury will be on the first page and stay there for, maybe a few hours! Since there are sooo many treasuries now we can't expect that buyers are going to page through all of them. Buyers will certainly look at the first page and probably a few more pages deep.


It really appears that Etsy is pushing hard to get everyone to use more Social Media tools...Twitter, Facebook, blogs...etc. Since these tools are used to communicate quickly and get rapid response to new treasuries and shop changes. If you have been hesitating to adopt, at least one of these, marketing tools I would suggest that you do a little research and find one that you can live with. I believe that you will begin to see less and less traffic in your shop if you don't begin using some of these tools.

There seems to also be some bugs when visiting and clicking the new treasuries. Depending on your browser your clicks may or may not register. The biggest offender is IE. It seems that Firefox works the best and Sarfari is marginally successful. I'm sure Etsy will get all of this under control pretty soon. Etsy has also stated that clicks sometimes take time to show up, but they will eventually.

You may be frustrated when clicking on items and you have to page back to keep looking at each new item. Try this trick. Open the treasury in a separate window. Then once that window is open, if using firefox you can hold your control key down and click on the item, it should open as a new tab within that window. Keep clicking each item like this and a tab will open for each item. Once you have looked at each you can then just close the entire window, rather then closing each item individually. This same thing works in Safari and I've been told it works in IE, but the commands are a little different.

If you want to find out what treasuries you are in and have google analytic's set up Craftopolis now has a tool to let you search. If you want to find a friends treasuries use this format with their shop name at the end:

http://www.etsy.com/treasury/people/shopname

If you have found any shortcuts or tips on how to maximize Etsy's Treasury East, post them in comments. I'll bullet point the additional tips/tricks so that we have one place to find them.