Launching into cyberspace!

All the advice is you must have an on-line presence these days. I’m quite good with computers but they do seem to take up so much time without you realising!

I had a personal face-book profile, so a face-book business page was the obvious place to start. I had already decided on my business name so I could print off  business cards to hand out at the mini markets – ARPglassdesigns (ARP being my initials in case you are wondering!) Setting it up was not difficult but getting ‘likes’ proved more of a challenge. Initially I just shared any posts on my personal page. Not overly successful as I’ve not loads of face-book friends like some people, many of my friends, like me, are not that active on face-book and I have to say I’m not a great fan, especially since they changed to timeline!

So a few months on I realised I needed to promote my page by perhaps liking other people’s pages. Now it took me a while to discover how, as I’d set up my business page independently but you have to make your personal page an admin to enable your business page to ‘like’ other people’s pages. This now meant I could also email my face-book friends from my arpglassdesigns page.  Take note though, if you want to help increase a business pages ‘likes’ figure you must do it from your personal page, an annoying anomaly.What a palaver and I’m still not up to 30 ‘likes’, so please do ‘like’ my face-book page and I’m happy to return the favour!

Next up was getting a domain name. Here I’ll direct you to a website with great instructions and advice: http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/registerdomain.shtml. My domain name is www.arpglassdesigns.co.uk and currently forwarded to this blog. A website is on my to-do list!

Creating an on-line shop was the next obvious step. My thanks to Amy @amyorangejuice for her encouragement on this, I was wary with having to post glass. I decided to start with a British site www.folksy.com – the link you can find on the right. This was not difficult to set up, although I did take forever getting a banner the right size!
Image

The key seems to be taking good photos (quite tricky with glass!) and of course getting traffic to your shop.

It is early days, a big learning curve but I’ve made one sale on Folksy and hoping that this blog, my 4th cyberspace entry, will generate more! Next week I’m opening a shop on Etsy.