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 may have been raised in Ontario, but I was born in rural Saskatchewan and I am, therefore, very familiar with the teenage dairy pastime of cow-tipping. When Ascender Rises Above left me a note to say I was the most recent recipient of some blog-tipping on her part I was worried, to say the least. Even to those who have never heard of cow-tipping must agree it cannot be a pleasant experience for the poor cow, so I held my breath, steeled myself and followed the link.

To my delighted surprise I found the experience to be much less unsettling than would a overturned cow. Blog-tipping is closer to hat-tipping than cow-tipping. Ascender makes it a habit of giving a “shout out” and awarding a Thinking Blogger award to three blogs each month that have caught her eye and I was fortunate enough to be one of them. As Ascender explains, according to Business Blogwire, “Blogtipping is where you publish a blog post in which you link to three blogs that make you think.” Apparently, you also get a link in Business Blogwire if you let them know about it.

The rules for blogtipping and a thinking blogger award are (summarized): 1. When you get tagged, write a post with links to 3 blogs that make you think 2. Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to this post so that people can easily find the origin of the blog that you enjoy. Easy enough, here we go:

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So, with my new fancy-dancy woodburning system, I have been working on a few projects.
The box above is based off of an idea from Colin (a real, live IRISHMAN!) who suggested the offset cross. I was complaining that the cross centered made it look like a bible, and I like the way this one looks traditional and contemporary at the same time.

And here is a fun thing I burned up last night: 

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My friend and fellow Etsy seller Uli (Owner of Sparkles and Fuzz Etsy Store) recently shared her story of the wonderful recipe book prepared for Mother’s Day by the children and staff at her daycare. Each child dictated a favorite recipe and the instructions were recorded word-for-word and collected into a little recipe book. Here is the submission by her Daughter…

How to make Chocolate Chip Cookies

(as recorded and transcribed by her daycare teachers)

I think they sugar in them. Definitely chocolate chips, sometimes she puts Smarties in it. She uses butter. She puts brown sugar in the dough. She uses two eggs in it. She mixes them up with a mixing pan. She puts chocolate chips in it. She takes the bowl off the mixer, I’ll call it that cuz I don’t know what its name is. She puts them on a pan, then puts them in the oven. The balls of dough are this BIG. Then you flatten them up or all the smarties or chocolate chips will fall out or they will break apart. The temperature is really suppose to be 500 degrees, I thin, if my mom put them in the oven for 40 minutes they would like burn so I would think about 5 minutes. She lets them cool down then lets me taste them.