I made a decision yesterday. I’m shutting down my jewelry website. I’m not quitting, but the website is probably on the 1,000,000,000th page of Google results, and I’m just not getting any business. I’m going to put everything up on Etsy, and let people know that if they want to custom order anything that we can do so.
What brought this on? My domain name expires next week. And I don’t see any point in paying $25 for a domain name that doesn’t bring in any money. And it hasn’t for about 5 years. The first two years were fantastic. I got so much business from wedding message boards that I could hardly keep up. But when my daughter was born, I had to take a break from it all, right in the middle of wedding season. I lost my momentum, and therefore lost my word-of-mouth advertising. The next year, I advertised in a BC wedding magazine. That ad brought me one customer, who only ordered one set of jewelry. And you don’t even want to know how much it cost me.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. My best friend hosts my site for me, so I’m not paying for hosting, but I see no point in paying for a domain name if I am not making any money.
Etsy, here I come!
Hello!
I’m so sorry to hear that business has not been good for you lately
I’m actually one of the brides you did custom work for in ‘02 and I got sooooo many compliments on your beautiful work. A little while back, I took up beading to make rosaries and other prayer beads and I’m using up extra beads to make jewelry. I hope you have some luck on Etsy! I’m listed there as well, although I don’t really advertise through the regular Etsy channels… I just link to it from my site so I don’t have to build the shopping cart et al myself.
See you on the Etsy side!