After about 5 minutes in the store, I had my shopping list picked out. ShopGirls is my new favorite obsession, a classy boutique on Queen Street West in Toronto’s Parkdale district that features fine art and fashion from an all Canadian Artist base, with an emphasis on local work. Shop Girls is now carrying many Sixth & Elm pieces in their beautiful shop, and my work is in very good company there.

I fell in love with many items including some beautiful and unique jewellery, scarves and some very amazing mixed media pieces. Okay, fine, I actually did buy a necklace and pair of earrings and I had to keep reminding myself I was there to sell, not to buy in order to stop myself buying more. I have a feeling any money I make there will not last long and will quickly be used right back up buying goodies there for myself. Oh well, groceries are over-rated anyways.

But it’s not from Etsy.

Etsy Sellers have been asking (crying, shouting) for an RSS feed for our shops that is useful to us. For the unaware, an RSS feed for an Etsy shop is like a news ticker that will notify anyone following it when you post a new item. But an RSS feed is useless if it doesn’t entice your followers to click through to your shop, or if it provides so little info about the new listings that people stop bothering to look at it. The current Etsy RSS feed is just that - a boring list of your item titles and descriptions with no picture of the item and no price. A fine format for news, not for a shopping site.

Enter akendall1, who is not actually an Etsy Seller, he is an Etsy Member married to an Etsy Seller (soapdeli, to be exact) and I guess he figured getting involved with Etsy was his only chance of ever seeing his wife again, a lament many an etsy spouse can relate to. He wrote a beatiful app that gives you an RSS feed address to replace the Etsy RSS address that will show your listed items including pictures, prices and (wow!) an “Add to Cart” button right in the feed! And it somehow grabs my shop name as Sixth & Elm, not sixthandelm as the Etsy RSS does - much nicer looking.

How do you get this fabulous feed? The address for your “superfeed,” let’s call it, is hosted on the Google app engine and to access it you just use http://etsyfeeder.appspot.com/?userid=5034807 (replacing 5034807 with your Etsy user ID number) as your Etsy RSS url instead of the one you get from your shop. It is true that anyone subscribing to your feed via the button in your shop will not see this new feed, but you can promote the new feed address on your blog or twitter to get people to follow it, or import it into facebook, twitterfeed, indiepublic or any widget that accepts an RSS feed import. Please see the accompanying forum post on the new app, which includes info on what to do if you get a server error the first time you try to go to the address (just hit reload a few times - it means your shop is big).

Hello? Etsy Tech? Are you taking notes?

I love finding free places to promote your shop and I can’t believe I haven’t found the EtsyMini blog before now. It is essentially a collection of all the Etsy Mini’s of anyone who signs up, organized into categories, and it is a great way to browse Etsy Shops visually. It serves as a little unofficial catalogue of shops in each category, and we all know how much I love catalogues. Wait, do we know how much I love catalogues? I wonder if I’ve ever said. Well, for the future, I LOVE catalogues.

Getting your mini included is as easy as leaving a comment with your name and shop number under the category you best fit into. There are also lots of opportunities for more exposure by becoming a volunteer and assisting in the maintenance and marketing of the EtsyMini Blog.

Supply and Vintage sellers are not left out, either, as there is a SuppliesMini blog available as well.

I just started using a new Stat Analyzer on the site called GetClicky in addition to my Sitemeter counter. There are quite a few things I like about GetClicky over the Sitemeter stats, but GetClicky seems to be lacking a simple counter to display. They do have some nifty (and huge) stats widgets if you are happy with your numbers and want to show them off, but nothing just showing a number of visitors to date. For this reason I am going to keep both, but I will be looking to GetClicky for any stats and analysis I need and just use Sitemeter to display a visitor count to my readers.

GetClicky has a very easy to navigate dashboard with many very satisfying little charts summarized right on the opening page after logging in. My favorite feature is the Feedburner integration allowing you to input your Feedburner URL and see your subscriber stats right alongside your visitor stats. I’m also quite taken with the spy feature that allows you to watch your visitors in real time, although it kind of feels like stalking them.

The best way to get a good feel for it is to go there and use the free demo. There is a Wordpress Plug-in available that makes it even more customizable and allow you to install the code without editing your template, or displaying the GetClicky button. There is also a  premium service available, but I have no idea what it adds since I am quite happy with all the fun stuff on the free version. They do have an affiliate program, so when you sign up and display your GetClicky thing-banner-button-whatever, you get credit for each time it is clicked and that person signs up (so click on mine, or the link in this post and sign up!!). I’m not sure what the credit is for yet. Maybe it’s just cash. Oh Boy, I’m gonna be rich.

I forgot to show you all my new Moo Cards…

I also grabbed a cute little leather holder that holds 25 cards to carry around with me for times when a random “Well, hey, let me give you my card!” situation turns up.

And don’t forget that you can make your Moo mini-cards (and full size cards and stickers and postcards and…) right from your Etsy listings instead of through Flickr.

Never seen a Moo card before? They’re little half-size, unique business cards based on pictures you provide. Here, read about ‘em on the Moo website.

To ensure that your Etsy items are showing up in relevant product searches, you must periodically upload your items to Google Base. I didn’t know about this, but I have been hearing a lot about it on the Etsy forums, so I did some digging and found this on the Let’s Ets website:

Google Base is a service that lets you tell Google about the items you have for sale. After your items have been loaded in, they will appear above the normal search results for relevant Google searches. Our GoogleBase formatter takes item details from your Etsy store and converts them into a format that Google understands.

So, the info we upload will be included when someone makes a Google Product Search (www.google.com/products):

Or above a regular search as a “teaser:”

Let’s walk through the process for doing this using the handy formatter provided by Let’s Ets:

1. Go to www.letsets.com
2. In the “Google Base Formatter” box, enter your Etsy username and click “Fetch My Items”
3. Scroll down to “Step Two” under your item list and click “Download Bulk File” to download this list as an XML file. A window will Pop-up asking you to open or save this file. Chose “Save to Disk” and chose where on your computer you would like to save it. If you have your computer set to download directly to your desktop, then you will not be given the option to save anywhere and the file will be ready for you on your desktop. If you are given a choice of where to save your file, make sure it is being saved as an XML file (.xml). It should automatically save as an XML file named after your username. For example, mine would be sixthandelm.xml
4. Go to www.google.com/base
5. If you do not used GoogleBase before, go to the right side of the screen and choose “Data Feed” from the options available (“One Time,” “Data Feed” or “API”)
6. Sign in with your Google Account, or create a new one if you do not have one yet. If you have a Gmail, blogger, or Picasa account (or a few others) you already have a Google account.
7. Accept the Terms of Service, if you agree with them
8. Fill in whatever profile items you want, such as your website, and click “Next”
9. It will take you to the next step automatically if this is your first upload, but if not, you will have to click on the “My Items” tab and chose your Data Feed, or “New Data Feed” if you didn’t get one made yet.
10. Set up your Data Feed: Chose the Country (we will need to use United States since our file has the items listed in USD) and chose “Products” for item type. Product items will need to be updated every 30 days (or earlier if your items change quickly) or they will expire. Chose GoogleBase for the feed type and enter the name of the file in the “Name of Feed” space (For mine I would put sixthandelm.xml). Click “Register Data Feed” at the bottom of the page.
11. On the next page you will see in the middle column Manual:upload file – Click on the upload file link. Browse to your saved XML file and click “Upload and Process.” The status column will change to “Processing,” which will take a few minutes to a few hours to finish. You cannot use the scheduler, listed above the manual upload link since Etsy’s RSS feed does not give images (or prices, I think).
12. Once the feed has finished processing, the page (when you refresh) will show either “Success” or “Failed” (or a Partial Success message). If the upload was successful, you can now click on the “My Items” tab and view your active items. If it has failed, but sure to click the details link next to “Failed” to find out why. Help can be found in the GoogleBase help, or by searching the Etsy forum for “GoogleBase Errors” to see problems other sellers has come up against.
13. When you want to repeat the upload, in 30 days (or less) you can keep the same file name and data field name and GoogleBase will just replace the old data, saving the number of clicks for each item as it recognizes that the new upload is a renew of any repeat items.

All Done!!

I made some Twitter buttons with the old and the new birdy thing for you to use on your blog if you want. To use, just copy the code below the icon you would like to use, replacing the text in bold to your actual Twitter username. If it’s not working, you can always right-click save the images, upload to your blog server and use that way. Enjoy!

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-new-250px.jpg”/></a>

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-new-125.jpg”/></a>

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-250px.jpg”/></a>

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-125px.jpg”/></a>

(My Project Wonderful Ad)

Yes, “Project Wonderful” sounds like the spawn of a Disney mascot and the Make-A-Wish-Foundation, but it is in actuality a two-way ad network where you can either post or host ads on blogs all over the blogosphere. Yeah, I just used that word. Blogosphere. Whatcha gonna do about it?

Signing up to host an ad box means submitting your site and then populating your ad box with ads you approve, so you can pick only other artists if you want, or designers, or Etsy stores, for example. To avoid the embarrasing “YOUR AD HERE” that proclaims to the world that no one thinks you important enough to advertise on yet, you can start the bidding at $0.00, which should fit in anyone’s budget (if it doesn’t you’re doing the budget wrong) and fill up the spots until someone starts to bid for the spots in higher increments. And you can either withdraw the money you generate, or use the profits to bid on ad spots for you on sites in turn.

I just started my ad boxes, so they are still going for anywhere from $0.01 to $0.50 per day an ad. That’s not bad at all - 1 cent a day means 30 cents for a whole month of advertising. If you want to get in on the action before the bidding gets high (because, let’s face it, it will because I am awesome) then click on the link below either of the two 5×1 ad boxes in the sidebar and check out Project Wonderful for yourself.