New Sizes Coming Soon and Treasuries

Recently a potential customer contacted us to ask if we offered larger sizes of our bath salts. I answered that yes we did offer them in larger sizes - this particular person wanted to know if we could do 16 or 32 oz sizes. I said sure.

We procured a box of 12 canning jars in 32 oz (quart) size, as well as a box of 12 canning jars in 16 oz (pint) size. We plan to make a few batches of our current scents in these sizes - although I have to say that one bucket of salt will only make 7 of the 12 pint jars or 3.5 of the 12 quart jars before we need to buy more salt. :P Those jars a bit more expensive as you can imagine because we use a lot more salt than we would if we were just doing 4 or 8 oz jars. :)

Plus we've been featured in several treasuries over the weekend - at least three that we are aware of.

Easy Like Sunday Morning features our Sugar Cookie Bath Salts
Berry Fusion features our Wild Berry-Vanilla Sugar Scrub
Sneaky Treasury Challenge 11/12/11 features our Buttercream Cupcake Bath Salts

We've also had several of our items added to people's favorites, as well as a couple of "shop favorites" so far. I think the search ads may finally be working as far as getting views to our shops, but I'll have to stop them until we either get some sales or I get some extra revenue coming in somewhere to be able to pay for those ads. Even $5 a week adds up fast! :)

We also have a few possible new items coming soon, so stay tuned for those! :)

More Advertising

Most people will probably find this interesting, but I have actually done more to advertise Candlelight Boutique than I have for Eternal Stardust Designs. Sure, I used an AdWords credit to make an AdWords account for Eternal Stardust Baby, but I have never used any other means of advertising for ESD. However, I have used an AdWords credit to advertise Candlelight Boutique and I have done two weeks worth of Search Ads on Etsy. I think the problem with Etsy's search ads is more related to my not being willing to try more than $5 per week as a budget than anything. Then again, with my not having a steady day job to help pay for advertising, I'd rather play it safe for the time being. According to Google I still have about $47 of my credit remaining, but it says I can't use it because my campaign is limited by the budget. I am not yet sure if I am going to try and add more money to AdWords or not. It really depends on whether or not I am able to get more freelance work and whether or not the Holiday season brings me some sales. :P In other news, I have completed a custom order for 100 facial scrubbies. I am simply awaiting the customer's approval before I set up the listing for them. :) I also completed a request for 80 samples of bath salts. I chose a new scent - Lemon Cupcake - to send samples of. Now all the samples are bagged and labeled, I just have to get the address and mail them off. :) All in all, between advertising and working, I've been busy!

More Products Available

We now have 18 listings in our Etsy shop! :) I added the following listings today:

Peppermint Bath Salts

Cucumber Melon Bath Salts

Red Rose & Thyme Bath Salts

Vanilla Bath Salts

Pastel Rainbow Facial Scrubbies

Summer Flecks Facial Scrubbies

All in all a rather productive listing day for us. :)  I also started a Google AdWords campaign (gotta love getting free AdWords credits from hosting companies and domain registrars) for Candlelight Boutique as well as Etsy Search Ads. 

The Search Ads I only allowed one week at $5.00 total for the week to see what kind of statistics we got from the ads. I've  heard some bad things about the results for the search ads, mainly that views and favorites went up but sales did not. So far we've only gotten 9 views in 24 hours, no favorites or sales from those views. A friend of ours did a search for bath salts and found that the ads tend to repeat certain shops/products and that she went through the entire search results for bath salts and never once found an ad for our shop. :( She did however find an ad for one of our sugar scrubs? LOL

I realize that the people who keep coming up over and over in the search ads probably paid a higher amount for more impressions.You only get 5,000 impressions for $5.00. If I had paid $10.00 I'd have gotten 10,000 impressions and if I'd paid $25.00 I'd have gotten 25,000 impressions. Basically you pay $1.00 for every 1,000 ad impressions you receive through the system. I'm not really thinking so far that it is anything more than a money waster for Etsy shop owners because I'm just not seeing the love. 1,487 impressions with only 9 views, no favorites, and no sales? I'm pretty glad I set the ads to stop after one week. :P