By: Julie L. Cleveland
In the last year, I have had to rebuild and revamp four retail websites where I sell my finished jewelry and handmade beads, and my pattern shops for counted cross stitch and seed bead loom patterns. All of these sites required major overhauls in both SEO and programming the shopping carts. In addition, I changed to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) platform to control my databases. Each site had well over 400 items, and one site had over 900 items on it, so this was no small undertaking. In the meantime, I lost revenue due to the fact that I broke all my backlinks when I fired Godaddy as my host provider, and since these sites were all over seven years old, that was a significant loss. My tax returns reflected that loss.
Now that everything is finished, I am in search of new places to advertise. I already have print ads and some long-term blog sponsorships, but since the sites are fresh and new, I wanted to seek out fresh blog faces. In particular, I am working on boosting the rankings and sales on my www.x-stitch-patterns.com site where I have my own personal pattern designs in PDF format. That means that I am looking for a targeted audience.
I know I need the blog to do this:
- To connect with people who are crafty
- To connect with people who have time to create
- To connect with people who look for things to do
- To connect with people who have a minimal amount of disposable income
- To connect with women in a large age group
I want the blog to have this:
- Long-term growth plans
- Large number of following
- Steady posts
- Continual updates
- Interaction between posts and readers
- A sidebar for advertising
After spending over two hours searching for blogs that would fit my criteria, I discovered that there is no one central place to go to pick and choose my advertising platform. Places like https://www.projectwonderful.com/ and https://app.passionfruitads.com/ are apparently no more viable places to select blog sponsorship. Many of the blogs have now started to handle their own advertising, which is fine with me, but it doesn’t help me find a place to advertise that will give me the best return for my money.
With all the talk of monetizing blogs, apparently, this has not hit the crafty community because I have money to spend and no place to place an ad. That makes me sad. Maybe my next project should be to create a place to match up advertisers with blogs and sell sponsorship space on the side!
Enjoy
Julie and Blu
