GCU Community Newsletter #10 – July 7, 2011

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday weekend, ate some great food, celebrated with good friends, and watched some spectacular fireworks! Because there was no newsletter last week, I’ve got quite a recap for you, so let’s get started.

Hidden Gems: Support Our Troops - artist My Cupcake

Our Artist Interview with Sue Baumbardner gave us a peek into her life and work. The hard-working Doreen Erhardt’s weekly column A Dash of Inspiration – a Cup of Creativity brought us The Beauty of Silhouette Photography and Time Exposure Photography.

Our Design Spotlight was on Cindy Johns and Priscilla Starling. The Critique Clinic ran over the holiday weekend, so we had three days with more submissions and a whole lot of fun (and helpful advice).

I gave you a Rainbow Connection with the official colors of the American Flag (Old Glory Red and Old Glory Blue with HEX numbers). Nuts & Bolts brought you tips on choosing the right image for the right card.

Finally, our Lightning Round: KITTIES was the cat’s meow – 21 participating blogs and lots of cool posts about cool cats.

I’d like to remind you that ANY ARTIST can comment on a blog. Why should you bother? Because it’s a great opportunity for you to promote your store! Just include your GCU store’s URL in your signature.

Until next time, don’t forget to pass the love around!

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Please, Sir, May I Have Some More: Orphan Categories

An orphan category is a very sad thing. It sits there, unloved, forlorn, part of Greeting Card Universe and yet, because it has no or few cards in it, very much an outsider. But why should you care?

Because orphan categories are an OPPORTUNITY.

Hidden Gems: Thinking of You - artist Alisha K. Ard

Here’s why: the major categories (like Birthday, for example) have tons of cards in them. Tons. And more added every day. Unless you manage by luck to get onto the golden first five pages of search results, or you aggressively self-promote, any cards you put into those categories will likely be in the back. The way back. Meaning it will rarely be seen, and even more rarely ever sell, no matter how good the design or clever the idea.

Orphan categories can give your sales a kick in the pants. Using my example above, let’s look at the Birthday category. As of this writing, there are more than 8,000 cards in Birthday >> General. This is probably not going to be your best choice if you’re deciding to create some birthday designs. Let’s dig a little further.

Going down the list of sub-categories, I see some with less than 100 cards. That’s good. Much less competition. For example, For Roommate has 6, while In Remembrance only 45 cards. See where I’m going? Orphan categories are usually niche categories that serve a very specific part of the market.

Granted, you probably won’t see huge sales, but if you sprinkle your cards throughout as many orphan categories as you can, you will see steady sales, and those can really add up over time.

So begin your search for orphan categories and make designs specifically for them…those little orphans will be much happier, and so will your bottom line.

Next time, I’ll be giving tips on how to leverage your designs to make them go further and earn even more!

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Tanya (Moonie) at Moonlake Designs has made a small collection of high quality photographs available to any artist who wants to use them. See her Forum post for all the details.

Google’s new +1 button will have some effect on their search engine rankings. How does it work? Similar to Facebook’s “like” button.

If you have a Google public profile (very easy to set up), you’ll see a very faded +1 button next to the URLs of your search results. Clicking it will make the button solid blue, and you’ll see a line beneath that reads “You +1’d this site publicly.” According to Google, this creates relevance for a site as you can see friends who have recommended that site, and make recommendations yourself. If you want to know more about it, check this little video and also this FAQ.

Hidden Gems: Thinking of You - artist Bobbie Allen

Greeting Card Universe has added a +1 button to the card details page. So in addition to “liking” an artist’s design, you can also +1 it. How cool is that? I’ve also +1’d GCU’s homepage, the official GCU blog, and a couple of GCU artists’ stores by just searching for their name or store name on Google. 🙂

The Greeting Card Universe fan page on Facebook now posts the daily Design of the Day? If you haven’t “liked” the page, what are you waiting for?

There is a GCU artists’ group on Facebook? We encourage you to join, post cards for your fellow artists to admire, share news, and have fun!

DID YOU KNOW you can “like” this newsletter or any post on the GCU Community blog, or include them in your social bookmarks? Or Google +1 them! Just click the title of the post, which takes you to the permanent link page. At the bottom of the page you’ll see buttons for social sites like Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.

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The next Newsletter will be published on July 14, 2011