All of my life I’ve worked to have my own business that makes money and employs me so that I could have an income. All of the years spent doing it have been without the kinds of funding that would allow me to advertise, to do proper marketing, to have a real business location or studio space in which to sell my work, to display my products or to provide services in my field to the public.
And, for many years, I’ve believed that to make a business that could employ me was an honorable, good way to do things – and an American way to get things done. But, without real business funding underwriting the costs of getting traction in the marketplace – it is not happening in a profitable way for me and hasn’t despite my best efforts over a long period of time.
I had read a book long ago that said it was possible to put time and effort into making a business work and that it could work, even without a huge influx of proper funding. Now, I’m not so sure whether it was ever possible for that to work. The idea from that book was about putting a personal investment of small amounts of money, lots of time and lots of effort over a long period of time to build a business on a slight sloping upwards path ever onward, ever forward trajectory. It doesn’t seem to work that way having done it. And, it isn’t enough to work it while simply believing it could work nor enough to simply keep working at it.
As my competition can put facebook ads and a large budget for google adwords, do a variety of other marketing efforts including paying for help – my business cannot. I quickly run out of the adwords budget a few days into the month and then no hits or customers or views are happening thereafter. It doesn’t work.
How do I tell you what is happening? Does it ever work? Could it work? If I had the money to advertise properly would it work? If I had someone who makes their money by getting the licenses for the designs by commission, could it work? If I hired a marketing firm, could it work?
There are a few less than 25,000 products on my Zazzle CricketDiane store with my designs on them, but in total – there are over 86,000 – most of which cannot be seen on my store there any longer but are still in the marketplace as active links which can be bought if someone finds them on an affiliate site or on one of my social media pages or blogs. That encompasses several thousand designs across the entire spectrum of products from coffee mugs to tshirts, placemats and dishtowels, water bottles, key chains and gifts, posters and canvas art prints.
They do sell, but slowly and it takes a tremendous amount of time doing blogs, social media and creating new products, new designs and new artwork – and now videos, to be able to get the public to see them. Each month, I’m spending $60 a month on google adwords and within about the first ten days of the month, that budget is gone, leaving the rest of the month without coverage or advertising. It does bring buyers though and puts the gifts I’ve created in front of people at the time they are thinking about buying something and that is a good thing about it.
– cricketdiane, 05-13-2018
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About CricketDiane –
I’ve been creating nearly every day since I was a kid and that is over 50 years. I’ve created in numerous ways in a range that moves from art to problem-solving to inventing, creating music, sculpting and painting to writing and doing various computer / online based projects.
“It is better to make the effort to move forward and release the flow of ideas to work with them and do things creatively, create things and invent and write and make – I definitely know that by experience.” – cricketdiane, 2018
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You can find more of my art and designs here –
CricketDiane and Cricket House Studios Store on Zazzle
and other blog writings by me here –
https://cricketdiane.wordpress.com/
https://cricketdiane.com/
On YouTube –
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The website for Cricket House Studios Art and Design is found here –
http://www.crickethousestudios.com/
And see my current efforts on GoFundMe to make a board game I created into a video game that I’m working on right now – (NOT active right now – re-analyzing this effort)
The Scared Donkey Mine Money Game by CricketDiane on GoFundMe
Thanks for checking us out!
The Cricket House Studios Team and CricketDiane
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