It’s amazing how exhausted you can be after spending the entire day sitting down, but trust me I’m exhausted. There is so much useful information here at Craftcation, that I think my brain has begun to go into overload. All I can do is take good notes and give myself time to process this valuable information and what it means for my shop, Sarah Kate Creations, over the next week. Today was a full day, which means five lectures/workshops and one happy hour mixer.
My first class yesterday was The Bottom Line: Profit and Loss. This class was about figuring out if your method of sales was really making you money and how to make sure that you include all your expenses. It focused on craft fairs and calculating expenses involved. Fair expenses include: Booth Cost ($30 – $600), Travel, Promotional Items, Inventory, and oddly, Sales (credit card fees).
Next I had the crafty workshop, Textile Surface Design with Morgan Culture. This class was hands on and educational. I got to experiment with four different ways of altering textiles; block printing, discharge printing, using spray dyes, and silkscreening.
After I learned about the many different ways you could alter your textiles I spent an hour in Se Reed’s SEO and Analytics class. This class was extremely informative and Se is a great speaker.
Helpful Hints:
Buy a domain name, NOW! It should have the name of your product in it, even if this means that it is not necessarily the name of your store.
Spiders crawl across the internet making lists and annexing things on web pages this information is then put into the index that Google in its search engine.
“Liking” a Facebook page doesn’t go towards your Google search engine ranking.
You should have one keyword for each page or blog post and say that word at least three times.
Keyword density doesn’t matter.
Tags don’t matter as much as the keyword in the script.
Keywords can also be phrases.
Don’t use irrelevant keywords they may work against you. Be specific!
I also checked out Gustavo Arellano’s DIY PR workshop and learned about the dying journalism industry and why press packages are dead (well almost). Gustavo went a little deeper than I needed so I stepped out and caught the tail end of the Display and Merchandising lecture. This lecture was very informative and focused on the importance of creating a story with your booth or store display.
The next lecture that I went to was RadMegan’s Blog photography class where the secrets to great photos was revealed to us through problems and solutions.
Problem #1: Distractions around your item. Solution: Depth of field, either with your lens or on a photo editing software later.
Problem #2: Staging issues where your background isn’t quite right. Solution: Crop it.
Problem #3: Lighting Issues. Solution: Use natural light whenever possible, cloudy day outside light is the best. when using natural light bulbs diffuse the light with wax paper or a white trash bag.
Problem #4: Contrast. Solution: change location or edit later in a photo editing software.
Problem #5: Boring angle. Solution: change your angle! Try one of these, from above or below, from the side, or low and straight.
Problem #6: People are using your photos without giving you any credit. Solution: Watermark your photos. Watermarking is when your name is added to the corner of the photo in a light font.
Problem # 7: Model Vs. Vanity. Solution: Only use models for scale, fit, or context.
Problem #8: Tutorial Magic, not really a problem, but more of a solution for taking photos for blog tutorials. Solution: Add text and directions directly to photos. Show step by step montages when you don’t want to give away all your secrets.
Problem #9: Composition or visual clutter. Solution: Create a visual flow with the rule of thirds.
Problem #10: Color. Solution: Hold your item around the room experimenting with different colored and textured backgrounds.
This was my last lecture of the day, but my day at Craftcation wasn’t over. After going up to my room for a quick minute of recuperation I went down to the hotel lobby for happy hour mixer and mingled with some fabulous crafters. What a great way to end a day full of inspiration.
To see my post about Friday follow this link.
Sarah Kate Creations 
I took the display and merchandising class, too. So informative! Every class I’ve taken has given me more than I expected, I wish I could take them all!!!