Two Easy Things You Can Do This Weekend To Better Your Crafty Biz

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Do you want people to take you and your biz seriously?
Do you want to portray yourself as knowing what the heck you are doing?
Do you want to make the most out of what you are already doing?
Do you want to be awesome?

Here are two really important things you should do as soon as possible if you answered yes to most of the above questions:

One – Figure out when your online shop/ blog/ whatever gets the most traffic
Use Google Analytics! If you haven’t done so, set up Google Analytics on your shop. (Links to Meagan Visser’s video tutorial.)

If you already have it set up, log in and look over to the lefthand side of the screen, do you see this?

Click on “Visitors”, then “Visitor Trending”, then “visits”

Now you can pick what you want to see, by hour, day, etc…

Let’s go to “Hour” (It’s the little clock icon over more toward the right side of the screen)

This is where you will be able to see quite clearly when your shop is getting the most traffic! Simple!

Two – Buy web hosting space
If you want to have a button for your blog, or a banner, or share images, or save things online…. you should stop using Photobucket and start using your own domain’s hosting.

Oh you don’t have a domain?

You should get one. (I feel like you should know about that elephant thing with the CEO of GoDaddy right about now, just to make a more informed, personal decision for yourself…)

Besides registering a domain – which you may or may not use to have an actual website or redirect or whatever – you need to have web hosting so that you can upload and save images to your own domain.

What’s the point?

Free services are great but are often unreliable and most importantly, do not appear as professional. Certain free services have become very much associated with the pros (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr…) but trust me on this, you want to have your own web hosting space.

If you are hosting your button image on Photobucket and Photobucket decides it doesn’t want to work today, all pages on the internet that have your button, will show a nasty image of some P.B. logo and an error message rather than your image.

Thumbs up for taking little steps that make a big difference!

This is far less likely to happen if your image is being hosted on your own domain. Paid services tend to have less hiccups than free ones. Let’s not argue about this. Anyone who uses Tumblr knows what I am talking about…

Also, it’s way nicer to direct people, in any manner, through a link that looks like this:
www.daniellespurge.com/reallyawesomestuff

than like this:
www.freeimagehost.net/18_89/yourimage/folder/yourimage.jpg/

You will look way more professional, trust me!

You can compare prices all you want, and find something that works for you. I have my domain hosting through JustHostand I have been happy with it.

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Oh, hi! Welcome to The Merriweather Council. I’m Danielle and I am a maker in business and mentor to other makers in business. I teach you how to turn your crafty tendencies into profits!

Oh, I’m also really into crafts, boy bands + iced coffee. Email me anytime to say hello or send cute Backstreet Boy videos or dog pictures .. or whatever! danielle (at) merriweathercouncil.com Thanks for stopping by.

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This is a for profit blog and includes a few affiliate links. This means that if you purchase something through one of these links, I may receive a small commission. I only bother suggesting products or services that I have used and loved because if you buy something on my suggestion and hate it that would suck. So I only suggest things i’m 99% sure you’ll love as much as I do.