The HSMG Conference Inspires Me!

Whew! What a busy week I had! I was in Palm Springs last week attending the Annual Conference of the Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild: 3 days of soap talk, business talk and hot weather! It was quite a switch from my usual days of being a one-woman soap business in temperate Northern California. But what an invigorating switch it was! I have returned home with renewed enthusiasm and a long list of ideas, suggestions and to-do's. Look for some changes coming to the Sirona Springs website that will hopefully make it a little easier to shop there.

I'll be describing more about the meeting all this week (I didn't even have time to blog during the meeting!).

One of many great presentations was given by Donna Maria Coles Johnson, leader of the Indie Beauty Network, a business organization helping small, independent businesses succeed. She explained that new internet technologies like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and YouTube have leveled the media playing field. Small business owners now have just as much access to their customers as do newspapers and magazines, and mostly for FREE!

She gave me some great ideas (Twitter: here I come!) and her organization is a powerful force, supporting and shaping our industry. It was a thrill to hear her take on this brave, new world of technology media!

VoteHandmade.com launches today!

If you're a lover of all things handmade, it can be pretty hard to keep up with the bajillion of offerings on the web right now. And, let's face it, some are hidden gems and some should just stay hidden.
I just joined VoteHandmade.com, a new social media website dedicated to highlighting and sharing links to handmade items. Members post links to craft items in all kinds of categories and specialties, and fellow members vote on whether they like or dislike them. It's looks like a neat place to share your discoveries, promote your work and/or find some treasure that would otherwise stay buried.

Sign up is fast and simple. Do you think this will be useful? Check it out and comment back here with your impressions.

Click, click. Who's There?

I just recently discovered Google Analytics and find that it has changed how I view the internet in general. I heard about it as I've been setting up the business website and researching web tools. This one (another freebie from our friends at Google) tracks all of the visits to your website and offers up an array of information and details that left me slack-jawed. The handy report will dish out: how many visits there were to your website, how long each visitor stayed, which pages they navigated to, how they got to your site, which browser they used, whether they have visited before, where they are(!). OK, maybe I was a little naive about this, but I was really surprised by the amount of information that can be collected and analyzed and used for...what? Marketing, targeting, perfecting websites to lure consumers like a cyber-Svengali? Well, let this be a warning to any of you that are still as clueless as I used to be: your every click is being counted by somebody.