I offer cribbage board drilling templates for sale. They are made of 3/16" or 1/4" thick plastic cloned off my existing metal templates or made from scratch using my template maker. In a sudden and unexpected surge of interest in cribbage board templates, I've sold 3 templates this week and I am working on a 4th custom template as per a customer's request. I figured if I sold one template a year, that would be cool.
If I had one pet peeve in this universe, it would be craftspeople who make and sell cribbage boards with sloppy, misaligned hole patterns. We as humans, simply cannot drill several hundred very tiny holes in perfect alignment. I don't buy the argument that it makes the board look more authentic, more hand-made.
My wife wonders if I'm hurting my own cribbage board business by selling templates and I don't think so. There are an estimated 2 million people who play cribbage on a regular basis. To date, I've sold 8 templates.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Clawing My Way Up the Search Engines
Like the hundreds of millions of other people selling "stuff" in Cyberspace, my website suffers from the common malady of not being noticed. In order to be noticed on the Web, you have to be on the first page or second page of Google or Yahoo search results.
So then the question arises, how do people find my website? About half the time, it's from other Websites who have graciously provide a link to my site. And the other half of the time, people come to the website base on a link provided by the Search Engines from Google and Yahoo. When someone searches on the words "cribbage boards" on Yahoo, my website shows up on page 1 of the results. On google, I'm still stuck in the never world of page 2 of the search results.
On average, I get about 7 unique visitors a day or around 210 visitors a month. I'm still not convinced that a website is the best way to sell my cribbage boards. The couple of times I've sold cribbage boards at a local craft show have shown me that people like to touch and feel cribbage and chess boards, and thus my boards sell well at the local craft show.
In general, it takes about 500-700 unique visits to generate one cribbage board sale. The results are about the same on etsy.com, although buyers seem more focused when buying off of etsy.com, since it's a website dedicated to all type of handmade and hand-crafted items.
So then the question arises, how do people find my website? About half the time, it's from other Websites who have graciously provide a link to my site. And the other half of the time, people come to the website base on a link provided by the Search Engines from Google and Yahoo. When someone searches on the words "cribbage boards" on Yahoo, my website shows up on page 1 of the results. On google, I'm still stuck in the never world of page 2 of the search results.
On average, I get about 7 unique visitors a day or around 210 visitors a month. I'm still not convinced that a website is the best way to sell my cribbage boards. The couple of times I've sold cribbage boards at a local craft show have shown me that people like to touch and feel cribbage and chess boards, and thus my boards sell well at the local craft show.
In general, it takes about 500-700 unique visits to generate one cribbage board sale. The results are about the same on etsy.com, although buyers seem more focused when buying off of etsy.com, since it's a website dedicated to all type of handmade and hand-crafted items.
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