Guys help! My gaming group is meeting today to vote on our next RPG. My husband suggested I should name my adventure so it will be more interesting to vote for.
Brief synopsis: There’s two plotlines: one, the party trying to get evidence against a man who has confessed to murdering his father, the local Baron, but has now retracted his confession. They need to go to the town where it happened to see why he confessed then. The second part is that the town in question, Longvalley, appears to be in the middle of a duel between two sorcerers. Monsters are raiding the town, and it all started when two magic-users wandered into town and apparently set up camps on opposite sides of the valley.
All I can come up with is “The Sorcerers of Longvalley”, but I’d maybe like something with a pun?
Got both 3D printers printing today simultaneously. Thought I’d trip a breaker but didn’t. Next up, getting the laser working. Then the CNC. Then the delta printer. THEN, at long last, start my plasma table build. I need all that other shit to make the plasma table. It’s mocked up in openSCAD. But I need to spend time making the detailed parts, complete with bolt holes and measurements.
I have three friends who make jewelry. Two of them have Etsy stores. They cross post their Etsy postings on Facebook. Both of them have separate pages for their jewelry businesses. I’m not sure if they pay to promote their jewelry posts or not. I have enough dealings with them that it seems I do see their posts. The other one I think has her stuff in a place where they take a cut to sell her things and then she occasionally posts up on Facebook. I thinks she has more local business.
I have a page for an old baking blog I did a few years ago when I was winding down at a job and needed to appear busy at work. At first everyone seemed to see my posts. The later posts only reached about 6 people out of about 75 subscribers. I still get people signing up for my page even though the links are all dead and a couple of times recently I posted something just to see what would happen. About 6 people saw the posts out of now over 100 subscribers. I, too, am looking to promote my own business and not sure if I am interested in paying to promote a page now that they limit who can seem it.
Yea, I’ve done a few tests to see what happens with my facebook artist page posts, and anything referencing sales gets throttled like a dinner chicken.
One way I figured out how to get around it was s p a c i n g. O u t. M y. S e l l i n g. W o r d s. It helped with the throttling problem, but I soon found out that I was still having to compete with fundraisers, cancer, and animal rescues.
I’m going back to painting in public. I think I’m going to try it with the twist of advertising on a sign - my Instagram portfolio page which in turn links to a GoFundMe account.
Starting this weekend, I’m going to travel to a few interesting places like state parks or unique towns, heading west over the next couple of months or so and see how that goes. Starting out from Austin, towards El Paso along 10 to Tempe, or maybe as far as San Diego. Or maybe dip down along the Gulf coast of Mexico if it seems safe enough, and I can get my passport renewed.
Nothing ever served me better than just doing my thing out in public, but now I have the advantage of having my portfolio where people can easily find it, and then a link to my project story located on my Go FundMe page where I have more space to describe it.
I really don’t know if it will fly, but in my experience, it’s always been better to meet people at ground level while painting or traveling, both monetarily and for the personal experiences.
Incidentally, my friend from Moldova has been urging me to write about my journey there and to the Black Sea near Odessa, when I took my late cat with me. I think perhaps it might serve well as an illustrated story I could work on during the spaces in between paintings.
Honestly, go out and engage in the public and give away a fuck ton of business cards or postcards.
Do public shows, paint in public, give out cards. And have them all pointing to your current and up to date website/blog/FB/Instagram/Flickr/Tumblr/whatever. The point is its up to date.
Etsy is fine for a shopping cart but I’ve never gotten traffic there that didn’t come from my own efforts in the real world.
Yes. This.
Be warned, however: I find the transfer rate on the web to be terrible. Meaning, of those that will go to your instagram feed (a small percentage), a tiny percentage of those will click a link there (to the GoFundMe link). The fewer steps it takes for them to get there, the better.
An example: I had a tweet get retweeted 92 times and favorited 126 times. That led (twitter tells me) to 20,348 impressions and 3,018 interactions. From that, I got 2 new followers. 23 clicked my profile link (which has a link to my webpage in it) and that webpage saw no uptick in traffic that day at all.
Exactly. Internet apathy.
I have phrased the Instagram to GoFundMe link as “See my story at:” in hopes that that will pique curiosity with a little tease.
In addition, I think it would be fun to post pictures of customers with their paintings. Perhaps it might give it a boost.
But still, I think MissyPants’ inclusion of business cards will help, as well as just being there to talk to people while out in public. It’s all about the story.
My friend tells me people I met over in Moldova still sometimes mention the painter with the cat.
Looking back on it all, I fully expected my mid-life crisis would have something to do with choosing art over family expectations, but not exactly in this manner. Maybe that’s why it’s called a crisis.
