E-Commerce Resources For Artists & Crafters By The Liberty Jane Clothing Team
This is a continuation of our 10 Proven Pricing Principles articles. If you missed the first principle, (You Need A Pricing Strategy), read about it here.
Pricing Principle #2 – There Are No Winners In A Price War!
[ This post has been truncated so that the full collection of pricing principles can be placed on the Kindle platform as Craft Pricing Power. For the spring of 2014 you can download it for free on the last Friday of every month. Get it here. ]
Hi everyone,
Happy 2014! I hope you are ready to have a fantastic year!
In December I polled our Liberty Jane Partners (roughly 1,300 people) and asked them what topic or issue they wanted me to focus on more as I work on blog posts and ebooks.
The topic that got the strongest vote was – pricing. So I’m finishing up a brief ebook about it. But rather than just publish the ebook, I thought I’d put out the entire thing and ask for your feedback & commentary. Then when all the chapters are released – I’ll consolidate all of it into an ebook, (which I plan to give away for free).
So – here is the introduction and the first principle. Over the next few weeks I’ll put out all 10 principles for your review and input.
Pricing Principle #1 – You Need A Pricing Strategy. There are three common strategies to choose from.
[ This post has been truncated so that the full collection of pricing principles can be placed on the Kindle platform as Craft Pricing Power. For the spring of 2014 you can download it for free on the last Friday of every month. Get it here. ]
Hi everyone,
As part of the launch of Instagram Power I’ve assembled the interviews we did for the book and created a free ebook for ya. I also included answers to the commonly asked questions about marketing on Instagram.
I hope you enjoy them – and please do me a favor – pin them to Pinterest, tweet them, and share them with friends!
Click here to download the PDF version
Let’s make 2014 great!
Jason
Hi everyone,
We have been incredibly energized by Pinterest, and the opportunity to grow our brand using it. So much so that we decided to create several blogs on the topic. In the last 2 months we have seen Pinterest go from a small contributor of traffic to our website to the largest social media contributor of traffic, (larger than Facebook or Youtube).
We even wrote a 33 page Ultimate Marketers Guide. . .
If you’re interested in this topic, you can find all of it here: (And a quick note, we decided to blog about this topic “outside” of Liberty Jane Partners so more people could have accesss to the information. To get the guide, you will need to enter your email address, and you’ll be on an email list specifically related to Pinterest Marketing. Let us know how Pinterest is working for you . . .
Pinterest Zooms Past Etsy.com in site traffic…
Here is the ComScore pageview graphic:
This is a remarkable accomplishment. The average pageviews per user per month in October was a staggering 128. So despite having a relatively small online user community of just 3.3 Million unique visitors in October, they were able to generate 431 Million pageviews. For a site that is in private beta, with only 3.3 million unique users, again, that’s remarkable. If you do the math… If they scale to 100 million unique monthly visitors in the near future, and this level of pageviews holds up, they will be one of the largest sites online with almost 13 Billion pageviews a month. That would put them in the league of Amazon and Facebook. Will it happen? Only time will tell. You can read more about this growth story at Techcrunch.com:http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/pinterest-pageviews-etsy-grew-2000/
Pinterest Q&A With Jason & Cinnamon:
Q: What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a social network styled website that allows users to create pinboards by ‘pinning’ pictures or video that they find visually interesting. Simple right? You ‘pin’ pictures (or video), and organize your items into digital pinboards. People follow you, and ‘repin’ what they see to their boards. It’s an online version of a craft room concept. And it’s insanely popular with scrapbooking enthusiasts.
Q: So why is this site so popular?
If you’re a visual learner, and enjoy seeing beautiful items, you’ve grown accustomed to an Internet that is full of, well, crap. And on that rare occasion, when you did stumble upon a beautiful picture, you didn’t have a simple way to save it forever. You could always add it to Facebook to share it with your friends, but after a day or two, it would be lost in your feed like an old memory. Pinterest solves that problem with a simple to use interface & tool kit.
Q: This idea sort of sounds familiar, is it really a new?
There are lots of image sharing sites, we use Photobucket and Flickr to run our business, but Pinterest is different than those image hosting sites. And, if you’ve tried to use Google image search to find an interesting picture, you’ll be familiar with seeing mediocre imagery at best, and sometimes semi-crude and unrelated images. You search for red apples and see pictures of random visual garbage.
Q: Why is Google image search so bad, and Pinterest so good?
In a word, Google Images is un-curated. Curators take care to only include images that are spectacular. Pinterest was designed to be an online tool for visually astute curators. We can all benefit from their eye for perfection. And from Pinterests visual search functionality.
Q: Is there a marketing opportunity in the use of Pinterest?
Yes – for sure. We are already seeing Pinterest traffic show up regularly in our “top 10” referring websites to www.libertyjanepatterns. And we expect that to explode as we start to develop our own content in Pinterest. You can also list items in Pinterest as gifts by simply including a dollar sign ( $ ) in the item description.
To see our pinterest page go here: http://pinterest.com/cinnamonmiles/
Over the last few weeks we’ve been working on a new website project. The idea is
pretty simple.
If you want to sell a doll online, you think of using EBay or Craigslist, right?
And if you want to sell custom doll clothes, you can use those, or Etsy, right?
But there hasn’t been a really good marketplace exclusively for selling dolls, doll clothes,
and doll accessories. We wondered if we could solve that problem. So, we’ve
created dollabee – the Doll marketplace. It’s like Craigslist, but for dolls.
Here are a few of the features:
[special note for premium partners – as part of your benefits, we are going to give
you a special coupon code to use, which will allow you to list your items as ‘featured’
for free – ahh you’re welcome! – another good reason to be a premium partner! Check
the Partner site and look for Coupon Codes like you normally do for the monthly free
pattern]
This is the biggest online experiment we’ve ever done, and to be honest, we have
no idea if it will succeed or fail, but the feedback so far has been really really good,
and we’d like to invite you to check it out. We are hopeful that it will be a huge
blessing in your online selling efforts.
We are considering you our 2nd test group. There are 350 partners partners,
and probably only 250 will see this. And of those 250, not everyone will
go to dollabee.com and give it a try, but if you’re reading this – then we’d love to
have you go check it out for us. There is a blog entry on the site called, “dollabee
feedback”, which is the best place to leave your general feedback and suggestions.
Just remember, we are still getting the site fully functional. So there are improvements
to be made, and some specific technical issues to be resolved, but it should work
for you pretty well. The largest ‘issue’ is the page navigation sometimes errors out,
but we are working on fixing that as soon as possible.
Dollabee Launch Plan:
Starting 8/6 or 8/13 will begin to announce dollabee more broadly to attract
buyers via Facebook and our newsletter. On Facebook we have almost
11,000 followers – so that should begin to send good solid buying traffic to the site – so get
ready! Then, through our weekly newsletter, we have almost 8,000 subscribers. So
that should really pump it up too.
So the basic plan is – to have you start listing items on Dollabee, if you want, then
after you are familar with it we will ‘turn on the marketing’ to get buyers to show up.
Okay, ready to check it out?
www.dollabee.com
Hi everybody,
We just came across a new photographer and his online resources that we are really liking alot. His name is Karl Taylor. You can check him out on Youtube. He has a free micro-training course for beginners that very good (Just look for it on his Youtube channel). Of course he’ll try to sell you his full course, but he gives a LOT of free information away. We think you’ll really enjoy it. Here is his Youtube channel link: http://www.youtube.com/user/GreatPhotographyTips
Here is an example video from Youtube:
Winston Churchill once said,
“Attitude is a little thing that
makes a big difference”.
When it comes to being in sales, there is one attitude above every other that can really mess you up, or set you up for success. Can you guess what it is?
It’s an abundance mentality versus a scarcity mentality.
Abundance Mentality: Seeing “Plenty” of customers, opportunities, and ways to succeed.
Scarcity Mentality: Seeing very few customers, very few opportunities, and very few ways to succeed. (Don’t confuse this with the idea of using scarcity as a sales tactic. That’s a great idea, but a whole different thing).
See, when you talk to really successful sales people, they are almost without exception nice, generous, helpful people. And they are frequently massively successful. And you think, wow, they make this look so easy and fun. It’s a paradox, the busiest people are the ones who will take the time to be helpful and generous. The least successful people are usually the ones that will say, “sorry I can’t help you”.
When you really get into the mindset of these folks, and try to figure out what makes them tick, you discover the successful ones are not afraid of competition. In fact, they don’t even worry about competition at all. They don’t believe that there are very few customers, or very few ways to succeed. They focus on being the best they can be, and staying focused on serving the customer with grace and style. They aren’t focused on the competition. Heck, sometimes these nice people even help competitors without regard for their own benefit. It’s almost like they think they are bullet-proof.
And guess what?
They pretty much are!
On the other end of the spectrum you’ll find people who are always obsessing over the competition, and over the ‘drama’ of who is doing what, and how it’s going to damage them and their work. They believe that every time a competitor makes a sale – the competitor is robbing them of a sale. In essence, these people are stumbling forward, while they look over their shoulder to see who is following them. They hoard, and act greedy.
Have you ever tried to partner with someone who is totally mistrusting of you and overly competitive? It’s a drag!
This mindset makes them very awkward to work with.
Scarcity thinkers generally don’t partner with other people for mutual benefit because they always think the other person is out to get them. That’s a huge mistake on their part.
If you have an abundance mentality – cool – nurture it. If you have a scarcity mentality to overcome – here are a few exercises you might try:
Tell us what you think about this issue…
Jason & Cinnamon
Ps. And hey, we are rooting for you!
Ready for our next topic?
Here’s #7…
Writing Descriptions That Sell…
Want to hear a story?
Our daughter Libby started making
doll clothes and selling them on
Etsy this year.
She wanted to do it all by herself,
part of her, ‘I’m a big-girl now’
phase or something.
So she didn’t want Cinnamon to help
her with the sewing activities, or
photography, nor did she want me
to help her with the selling
activities.
We were excited by all of this and
thought it was amazing that she was
taking the initiative, she’s only 9.
Good for her!
Her first listing was on Etsy in no
time.
Trouble was – it didn’t sell. She had
taken an okay picture, made an okay
outfit, listed it for an okay price,
and written an okay description.
Actually it was all fairly good,
better than some of the other stuff
we regularly see on Etsy.
Finally, a little discouraged, Libby
told me that she was frustrated, and
asked for my help.
I made one simple change and her
outfit sold within a day.
Can you guess what I did?
I went into her listing description
and wrote the following sentences,
(actually, this is a paragraph
because I didn’t save it, and don’t
remember the exact wording, but it
was very similar to this),
“I’m Liberty Jane Miles, from Liberty
Jane Clothing, you know, the doll
clothes company? They named it after
me, and this is my very first outfit
I’ve ever made. I’m going to be a big
designer someday, so if you want to
be able to say you bought my very
first outfit, then you should buy
this outfit”
Bam, it sold within a day.
So what did I actually do in those
3 sentences? Well, I’ll tell you in
a minute. First let me properly
introduce this important topic.
Here’s the proper introduction…
If you can take a good picture, and
learn to write clear, interesting
product descriptions, then you are
going to do really well in your
online selling efforts.
These two activities – photography
and writing – are like a one-two
punch of selling power. Or, to put
it in more fun terms, (and since I’m
hungry at the moment), they are like
that Peanut Butter and Chocolate
combination that most people find
irrresistable.
Many people think that effective
sales copy has to be smarmy,
long-winded, manipulative.
But the truth is – good sales copy
isn’t any of those things. It’s just
clear, concise, conversational
writing, that describes the important
information customers need to know.
That’s it.
Okay, back to Libby’s listing and how
I made a little change that had a big
impact.
You know what I did – right? I used
the power of a story. And with my
story I gave people a fun and
interesting reason to buy her outfit.
That story closed the deal. It wasn’t
manipulative, or contrived, it was
just a difference point of view, that
got the reader interested in the item
for a ‘bigger’ reason than just
getting some new doll clothes.
The buyer was now going to be part
of a journey with Libby – invested
in her future career as a designer.
The story gave the buyer something
to talk about with friends and
family. It made the buyer consider
the long-term impact of her
seemingly simple buying decision.
Wow – all that from 3 sentences?
Yep! That is the power of a story.
The power of effective writing that
sells.
So, how can you write effectively to
sell your outfits? Here are a few
ideas…
First, write clearly! Simple words.
Simple sentences. Don’t stress over
punctuation elementary school rules
about writing.
Second, be complete. Take your time
and consider all the good reasons
that your customer should buy from
you, and buy that particular outfit.
Third, use stories, and your
imagination to enhance the meaning
and importance of your item.
Ever heard of Malibu Barbie?
Think about what they did. There is
absolutely nothing that connects that
doll to Malibu except the creative
imagination that the marketer used
when creating it. Then the clothes
and accessories.
Obviously Pleasant Roland was a
master at using the power of
stories, and built the American
Girl Doll brand on that simple
idea.
Starting last year we launched our
International Collection so we could
do the same thing. It’s been a fun
and meaningful part of our work.
Now we have Outback Libby, and Euro
Libby, and even “gasp” Malibu Libby.
Guess what? No one seemed to mind
that we were taking a play straight
from American Girl. It was different
enough to be our own, but familiar
enough to poeple that they enjoyed it.
Can you come up with your own story
line?
Fourth, and finally, when you write,
make sure that you take each idea,
topic, or piece of information and
give it a unique paragraph. Break
things apart using lists, bullet
points, line breaks, or images to
break your information up so it is
easy to see and read.
There is no need to cram everything
into one gigantic paragraph. People
won’t read it.
Bottomline – writing descriptions
that sell is a tradeskill that you
need to continually study and
improve on.
Now go write an amazing description!
Jason & Cinnamon