Selling Online Also Means Enlarging Your Social Footprint

If you are just starting to market and sell your artwork online or you've already been working at it for a while, it is worth to you to consider expanding your online presence continually. The more shops your work is in, the more networking you're doing, the larger your social footprint is online.

Do you have a Facebook presence?
Do you have a Twitter presence?
Do you have a Flickr presence?
Do you have a Blog?

In addition to expanding your social network, multiply the shops your work is in. These shops are built in ways that even those with few computer skills can sell their artwork successfully.

Use the same name for your shops which is your business name and you will find that all roads lead to Rome - Rome being you and your wonderful creations.

At first I thought it would be difficult to keep so many shops online and manage them all efficiently. But because all these sites are made extremely user-friendly, I found that it is actually quite easy once you have the following:

1. Have your listing done with pictures and use the same info in all your shops.
2. In your note to the customers let them know when you will have their item shipped. Make sure that you allot enough time for yourself to finish the task. As long as you tell them ahead of time, you can take up to a couple of weeks to ship the item to them.
3. Create a calendar where you keep track of your tasks. It helps a lot when I feel overwhelmed with orders.

Whatever you decide to do, in the end we all want our work to sell. The best way to do it is to have a presence in multiple shops where your customers are looking to make their next purchase.

In the meantime I'll just keep posting new items in my artfire shop FOR FREE :)
This a recent shop where I have been offering my work for sale.

I hope you consider opening your own shop on Artfire. Click below to go there and get your shop now. Let me know how I can help and I will be glad to do it.

Register on ArtFire.com

International Women's Day - March 8.

I wish you a wonderful International Women's Day today.

I grew up celebrating this day with my family and friends.

According to http://www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp
IWD is now an official holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. The tradition sees men honouring their mothers, wives, girlfriends, colleagues, etc with flowers and small gifts. In some countries IWD has the equivalent status of Mother's Day where children give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.

While this is accurate, my take on this holiday has been that men celebrated and the women worked preparing the festive foods and cleaning before and after the party. When I told my Mom about what I thought, she added that after dining and drinking with their friends, the men usually chilled in front of the TV and required more attention at bedtime. "It is a lot to ask in return for a bouquet of flowers and a cheap bottle of perfume," my sister added.

Don't take me wrong. This is a holiday worth remembering and celebrating the bravery that the 15,000 women who marched then, in 1908, through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. Those women and the millions of women who followed and have been fighting for human rights all over the world.

In Soviet Union, however, this holiday became a reason to advance itself politically while the real human cause remained behind and is still on the backburner in most countries that celebrate this day openly. So, let's not have the day off on March 8 and give meaningless gifts to the women in our lives. Let's work on March 8th to advance the rights of women and all humans all over the world.

LilianaBead Tutorials Available Now

I've been a teacher for many years now.
I taught public speaking, rhetoric at several universities and colleges, but my passion for the last several years has been lampworking.

I love to teach glass, heat, gravity and design in part because the students in those classes really want to be there - that makes all the difference sometimes :) I think of the lampworking process as communication. The communication between

• your urge to create and the powerful medium you're creating with
• your desire to learn a skill and the ways of the medium to teach you those skills
• ways of interpreting the clues of the process and translating those into design
• glass and heat and gravity
• and much more

So far I've created two tutorials to share some of the knowledge I've accumulated and formulated over the years. My teaching style is reflected in these tutorials in that I am quite informal in my interaction with glass while paying close attention to observations I make during the process and systematizing those. Each step is an instruction followed by numerous clues that you should watch for in order to make that long-term investment.

The tutorials contain pictures of each step in the process. In my Basic Horizon Tutorial I took the pictures myself - a long and tedious process. In my second tutorial, LilianaBead Apple Core Design - Starting with the Center - Part One, I was aided by my friend, an accomplished photographer and artist, Marie (www.mariecraigphoto.com). You will find wonderful photos accompanying each step of this tutorial.

My intention is to keep creating tutorials of my designs as I believe in my heart that sharing knowledge and making it available to others is very important. My preferred way to share knowledge is by teaching in a classroom environment. I will be teaching two workshops this year at Snow Farm. Please my website for more info and/or browse the Snow Farm Catalog (you can access it by clicking the pic on your upper right).

Happy Martisor Day!

March 1st. Growing up in Moldova we celebrated this day by giving "Martisor" - a symbol of Spring - to our friends, teachers and family. Memories of teachers wearing dozens and dozens of them all over the left side of their chests on that day make me smile.

We wore this white and red amulet for nine days and then hung it on a fruit tree for prosperity and peace. The more people wore such amulets - there were many kinds available commercially and a lot of us made them ourselves out of yarn, silk threads - the better the chances of spring coming soon and bringing joy with a new cycle of life.

On this day I would like to give you all an imaginary Martisor which I hope brings you health, spiritual wealth, love and peace, and prosperity.

To learn more about Martisor and its 8,000-year tradition go to Wikipedia! :)