New Ways to Use Etsy Coupons

Recently Etsy made some improvements to their coupons codes. The new features are:

• Thank you coupons. You can set one of your coupons to be automatically sent by email to your customers when they order (this option can be set on an existing coupon as well as a new one).
• Fixed amount coupons. If you want to offer $5 off purchases you can now do that with this coupon setting.
• Minimum purchase for coupons. You can set a coupon to only be valid for purchases over a set amount e.g. 10% off orders over $25.

These new features make coupon codes even more flexible. Personally I'm thrilled to have the thank you coupons emailed, I think that will make customers more likely to use them than the printed coupons I currently send. I also see some great potential for the other features, I think a set discount like $5 off might be more appealing than a percentage and having the minimum purchase means someone can't use that $5 off coupon to buy just a $5 item. Here are some ideas from Etsy on using coupon codes.

How do you think you might use the new coupon code features? Leave a comment.

Preventing Burn Out

Running your own handmade business is great, you can work in your PJs, your boss always agrees with you, and you get to have fun at work. Most of the time.

Day in and day out creating the same jewelry, bags, soaps, etc. can wear you down. The stress of keeping up with everything can lead to burn out. I hit that point at the beginning of this summer. After preparing for, and selling at, a big event (which went great) I didn't want to even look at clay again for a while. After a self imposed vacation from making jewelry I feel much better than I have in a while. I think I may make time for doing the same again after the holiday season. So here are my tips for avoiding burn out while still keeping the creative juices flowing:

• Explore a new or different medium. I spent a whole month drawing and painting, neither of these things is new for me but I hadn't done much recently.
• Make time for yourself. Go running, take long hot baths, get a massage, etc. just focus totally on yourself for a while instead of your business (or partner, or kids).
• Learn something new that is unrelated to your business. Take a class or watch a lecture series on iTunesU.
• Visit a museum.
• Watch Project Runway.
• Take your camera on a walk and photograph anything that look interesting, resist the urge to look at the photos until you get home.
• Go to a concert.

These are just a few ideas. What do you do to avoid burn out?

Easy DIY Jewelry Displays

I just updated my page on making jewelry displays for craft shows with instructions on making a plain cork bulletin board into a nice display board using fabric. The page also has instructions for display trays made with old picture frames, using fishbowls for a display, and ideas for re-purposing and recycling objects as displays.

Successfully Promoting a Sale

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday at hand here are my tips to running a successful sale. Feel free to reply with your own ideas.

ON ETSY OR OTHER SHOP
1. Edit your shop banner to announce the sale. This can be fancy or just adding a line of text in an eye catching color.
2. Also add text describing your sale to your shop announcement AND your Etsy profile
3. Edit your profile image to announce the sale as well.
4. Post in teams announcing your sale (make sure the team rules allow it first)
5. Add relevant tags for your sale, especially any official tags like "Black Friday Etsy"
6. Edit item titles to reflect the sale and put sale information at the very top of your item descriptions, I recommend edit express at craftopolis.com/ to make the process faster


OFF ETSY
1: Blog it, several times. I recommend once a few weeks out, again a week or 3-4 days prior, then finally on the day of the sale.
2: Post it on Facebook as an Event with all the details of the sale then share the event on your Facebook page. Again several time leading up to the sale.
3: Tweet the sale with a link to your shop, again several mentions prior to the sale and while your running the sale. Careful not to flood your feed with announcement tweets, every few hours is good.
4: If you have an email newsletter, send an email to your list announcing the sale
5: Post to deal sites like bigcrumbs.com
6: Run an ad on Google Adwords or Project Wonderful
7. Etsy on Sale automatically shares on their front page sales set up through the site.

Quick Note on Etsy Search Ads

Search Ads on Etsy started this morning. The grand experiment has begun and I hope it's a grand success as well.

I've put together a tutorial lens on Squidoo all about Search Ads including a lot of how to set them up and my personal thoughts on choosing keywords and evaluating your ad results (seriously, I put a lot of thought into the evaluation section and I think it's a good method for a more objective evaluation).

Since Search Ads have only begun this is a work in progress and it will be refined over the coming weeks.

Note: I was hoping so be busy evaluating the first day and posting live updated on @HandmadeBizBlog and @Noadi on Twitter but I've had a minor emergency involving a smoking light socket and will be dealing with repairs going on in my living room today. Updates will be sporadic.

It Will Never be a "Level Playing Field"

It's an unpleasant fact of life that things aren't always fair. As a small handmade business you have to compete with bigger businesses with bigger budgets and lower prices, more successful and experienced small businesses, and sheer diversity of products available on the market. It can be frustrating and depressing at times.

There's also nothing you can do about it.

What you can do something about is your own business. You can take better photos, write better descriptions, promote your business more, write a blog, build a fanbase on facebook, and all the other things I've written blog posts about. You can only control you. As we get closer to the busy holiday shopping season it's important to remember this and to focus on those things we can do instead of getting sidetracked by the things we have no control over.

Etsy Relevancy and How to Get Noticed

I put off writing this article for a couple weeks to see how relevancy is working and work out what I think works and doesn't work. First of all I want everyone who hasn't read it yet to go read my posts SEO and Your Customers and Being Seen is Not Enough for some more background on my thoughts on how your writing effects your customers and why ranking well in search shouldn't be your only goal.  

This article is going to have a lot of images so I'm posting them scaled down, click to enlarge if you're having trouble reading them.

Determining Relevancy
Factors Etsy uses in determining relevancy according to their article on the subject.
Titles - In particular Etsy is weighting the words at the beginning of a title more than the words at the end. In particular the first 3 words are the most important.

Tags - Tags in this case also include the categories you pick when you list an item. I'm not positive on this but my own experiments seem to imply that those tags weight a little higher than the ones you type in. Keep in mind that Materials do not count as tags and are not factored into search (I tested this, using a material listed that I am not using as a tag and it did not show up in the search at all) so if the material is an important selling point of the item you must have it in the tags.

Recency - This is how newly listed or renewed your item is. In the past all of Etsy's searches defaulted to just the most recent, now it is just one factor in the search. This means you don't need to renew items all the time to be higher in the search but it's probably still a good idea to have items spread out in how recently they have been listed. If you previously renewed multiple items every day you can now just renew an item or two that are close to expiring. This of course is going to save you money in listing fees that you can better use on other advertising.

Attributes - These new options for recipient, occasion, and style. Etsy has stated that they will be used in search eventually but right now they do not factor into search (as proven by the fact that "unisex adult jewelry" has almost no results). So until these attributes are included in the search if they are an important selling point for your item they must be included in tags.

From my own experiments this is how I think the level of importance for relevancy goes:

1. First 3 words of the title
2. Categories (possibly the same or nearly the same weight as #1)
3. Tags 
4. Remaining words in the title (possibly the same or nearly the same weight as #3)
5. Recency

I haven't been able to determine the exact weight of these factors but let's for the sake of simplicity give them point values (I am sure the algorithm is more complex than this but it gives you the idea):

• First 3 words = 4 pts
• Category = 3pts
• Tags = 2pts
• Other title words = 1pts

Okay so if I search "Octopus Necklace" we would have:

(Category -> Necklace)+(First 3 words -> Octopus)+(Tag -> Octopus)+(Title words -> Necklace) = 4+3+2+1 = 10

but if I searched "Octopus Pendant" I would instead have

(First 3 words -> Octopus)+(Tag -> Pendant)+(Tag -> Octopus) = 4+2+2 = 6. 

Thus I would expect that even though there are far fewer results for "Octopus Pendant" than "Octopus Necklace" that I would rank lower in the search results for "Octopus Pendant" (and I do, in fact when I just ran this search "Octopus Pendant" didn't return one of my items until page 16 while the same necklace was near the top of page 2 for "Octopus Necklace"). So where does recency play into this? I think Etsy uses recency to rank items that otherwise have "equal" scores with the newer one being higher ranked than the older one.

Improving your Relevancy
In many ways improving relevancy is the same as improving your onsite SEO (one of the reasons I've had to make very few changes in order to rank well in relevancy). Use good keywords that shoppers are going to think of in search, if you need a little help use a keyword tool like Google Keyword Tool. Also use the keyword tool to make sure the words and phrases you come up with are ones that people search for while still being closely related to what your product is.

Make sure you use all your tag spaces and select all 3 categories if you can. Don't waste any tag spaces. For example if your items colors have name variations (for example a deep purple could be tagged both "purple" and "plum") and you have a space to fill use the color variation. If you item has a number of different names for the style make for you use them (for example a woman's tank top could also be tagged with "camisole").

Write good descriptive titles with important words at the beginning. You don't have to sacrifice your cute item names either! For example if you are a baby clothing maker and you have a item currently called "Joshua" that is a blue corduroy jacket a title like this would have good relevancy: "Blue Baby Jacket "Joshua" in Soft Warm Corduroy for Age 16 Months". Now the title "Blue baby jacket corduroy 16 months" would be just as relevant for the keywords "blue", "baby", "jacket", "corduroy", and "16 months" but the first title has more consumer appeal. You have a 140 character limit for titles, that first title looks long but it's only 65 characters so don't be afraid to write longer descriptive titles if you need to.

Remember the "long tail" while a lot of people will search popular but general terms like "red dress" a person searching for "red polka dot retro dress" is more likely to be interested in and buy your item if it's a red polka dotted 40s inspired dress. This is why it's important to write descriptive titles and use all your tags, to make sure people using those long tail search terms find your items because they are more likely to buy.

Being Seen is Not Enough

Back around February I started making some changes to my Etsy listings. I started adding cute little stories the the start of every listing. It was a disaster.

My traffic didn't change, the number of visitors didn't change, my Google rankings stayed about the same but my sales tanked. For the first month or so I chalked it up to being a slow time of year but then one of my usually busy months was a lot slower than usual. I took the stories out of the beginning of the listings and put them further down the page, below the descriptions. Sale bounced back almost immediately.

The lesson here is this: just being seen is not enough. What is seen has to be compelling to people. In my case while the stories were fun visitors wanted to see information on my jewelry first. Lesson learned.

This is the reason I wrote the post last week SEO and Your Customers often a listing that looks good to search engines or looks good to you as a creative person doesn't look good to customers.

So what about the stories? I have plans for those, I want to do a series of cards with illustrations on the front and the stories on the back but for now they are being retired from my shop.

Also if you are working on editing your titles and descriptions I recommend Craftopolis' Edit Express to make it go faster. Unfortunately it doesn't have a batch tag editor though.

Handstitching the Long Tail

There's recently been a lot of stress in the Etsy community over the search being switched from Recency to Relevency. I'm not stressing. Why? Because the same things that help you in the Etsy relevancy search are also the things that help you in Google searches and if you've read this blog enough you know that I think Google is what you should be focusing on.

The first page of any Etsy search is 40 items, that means that you can't be on the first page of every search that would be relevant for your items. It's impossible. What you should be striving for is a well rounded listing that isn't trying to be at the top for only one or two searches, but a listing that ranks well if not at the very top for a wide range of related searches.

There's a concept called the "long tail" that is very important whenever you are talking about search engine rankings. The idea behind the long tail is that many search terms are only search for rarely but if you rank well for enough of these little searches you will get a lot of traffic. So stop worrying that you aren't on the first page for "dress" and start making sure you are titling, tagging, and writing descriptions so you will rank well for "blue cotton seashell print dress" in either Etsy or Google.

Wish all you want but Etsy, Google, and any other search engine is never going to tell you exactly what will put you at the top. The best you can do is write as relevant and accurate listings as you can that use good keywords that describe your items (and for Google build good backlinks). Don't pull your hair out trying to rank best for one narrow term in one search engine as your main way to get traffic, a broad approach to SEO and promotion will give you more consistent results that will protect you from major changes in just one area.  I would rather have 50 small traffic streams bringing me 5 visits each than one source sending me 250 visits because if one out of fifty disappears I'm not going to be devastated, I can just roll with the changes.

SEO and Your Customers

Users come first. That should be your number one rule whether you use Etsy, Artfire, or a self-hosted webstore. What this means is that while you should be using important keywords in your titles and descriptions, those are useless if your customers are turned off by the way your titles and descriptions are written or how your photos look they aren't going to buy no matter how well you rank in search.

This concept is called "conversions", you want the highest conversion rate you can get (for a web store that the % of visitors who make a purchase). If you have 5000 visitors a month with a conversion rate of 1% you are doing the same amount of business as a shop with 1000 visitors but a 5% conversion rate (50 sales per month). If you have 10,000 visitors a month but no one buys anything you might as well have had no visitors at all.

Here are three fictional titles for the same fictional product:
"Marvin the Robot"
"Soap robot lavender scented blue soy moisturizing handmade vegan"
"Marvin the Robot soap, moisturizing lavender scented soy soap"

The first is terrible, it doesn't even tell you what the item is. You can have creative names for your product, a memorable name may stick in a visitors head better than something descriptive but generic. However if the not having many clues, or misleading clues, about what the item is will hurt you as well. If visitors are clicking on "Marvin the Robot" expecting a toy or artwork not soap then that's not going to help your sales.

The second is better but a visitor is going to see it as either boring at best and spammy at worst. Why? because it's just a list of attributes of the product. People react to language in certain ways and if words don't read like a meaningful statement people aren't going to perceive it as valuable. Try reading your titles out loud and see how they sound.

The third title strikes the right balance. It both is descriptive, telling you a lot about the product (that it is a robot shaped soap, made of soy, moisturizes the skin, and is lavender scented) while also giving you product personality. If you don't know about the importance of telling a story about your business please go read All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin he describes the concept far better than I can but the gist of it is that people respond far more to being told a good authentic story than they do just being given the bare facts.

I used titles in this example because Etsy's new CEO just released an update on improvements to relevancy search and how to make titles better for search. I applaud the Etsy team for making much needed improvements to the search engine but I think it gave people the wrong idea. Ranking higher in search will not do any good if your customers aren't enticed by what they see.

Keep an Open Mind

I'm currently working on a wholesale jewelry order however it's not one of my standard designs. Not even close in fact. My usually jewelry designs are sea creatures not food however I was contacted about doing a large number of vegetable earrings. One of my twitter friends who also makes jewelry (but not in polymer clay) wanted some pieces to sell at a local festival that was geared towards it's theme. We worked out a price per piece and I've been busy creating them. If I was to keep rigidly to my usual jewelry themes I would have missed this chance for a pretty good order. I don't plan to expand my own lines to food or anything of that nature but for a custom wholesale order? Absolutely.

Quarterly Sprucing Up

I've written before about how important it is to keep reevaluating what you are doing and keeping your business fresh. I like to go through my shop every 3 months and make sure everything it as good as it can be and see if anything needs changing. I generally do this at the end of March, June, September, and December (after the holiday rush). Well I got a little behind so I'm just now working on freshening up my Etsy shop.

Here's what I did:

• Made sure all listings had up to date information and tags.
• Moved the short little stories for my cephalopod jewelry to after the main description instead of before.
• Added new custom order listings.
• Changed some categories. I completely got rid of the "Clearance" section, changed "Gifts and More" to "Seasonal Gifts" and added an "Everything Else" category (right now it just has my decorated tins which were moved out of "Gifts and More" but will have other stuff soon).

 Of course I've also been working on other things, more videos of my products for my YouTube Channel, updating the Noadi.net website, updating my Squidoo lenses, getting my presence on Google+, and updating and ordering new business cards.

So what could you do right now to freshen up your online presence?

Survey Your Fans

If you have a good network of twitter followers, facebook fans, or email list subcribers you can use them to research ideas. I did this recently using SurveyMonkey to create a simple survey asking people to rate some photos of my jewelry. SurveyMonkey's basic service is free and it's very simple to use. I created my survey then posted the link to it on twitter, my facebook fan page, and my blog.

I was considering switching from the blue backdrop I've been using for over a year to white because it's often recommended to use a neutral color for the background of product photos, either white, black, or gray. Now I don't have a gray backdrop and I make some jewelry which is black so that wouldn't have enough contrast for those items so I tried white. I originally chose blue because I make sea creatures so the blue invokes water and the sea.

So I put the 4 images above in a survey and asked people in my network to take it and rate each photo on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being strongly dislike and 5 being strongly like). The results surprised me. I personally like the blue better and was hoping it would come out on top but I was surprised by how much more other people preferred it. When the two blue photos were averaged together they had a score of 4.17 while the white photos got a score of 3.87. Even more telling was that the necklace with the coral prop on blue scored 4.22 and on the display bust it only scored 4.11. Even for the white background the coral prop scored 4.0 over 3.74 for the display bust.

I'm going into detail on my results here for a reason, even though I created the survey to tell me which background color people liked best it also told me that I should be using the photos with the coral prop for my main image and not the display bust which I had been using. Sometimes you get results that tell you more than you had expected and that is the value of using these sorts of surveys. So give it a shot. Do you have 3 different banners for your shop and don't know which to use? Do you want to know if people are more interested in t-shirts for toddlers with kittens or puppies on them? If you want to entice more people to take your survey offer a coupon code for those who complete it (simply add a last page to the survey with no questions and just text that includes the coupon and a link to your shop).

Video Roundup: Marketing and Branding

The I ♥ Art folks in Baltimore and Portland have been producing some great videos. First up is Baltimore with a workshop on Web Marketing which is available on YouTube and embedded below.



Next is Portland with a two-part video workshop on Speed Branding. Part 1 and Part 2 are hosted on Etsy's livestream account. NOTE: Part 1 had some audio problems so sound doesn't start until about 9 minutes in but it doesn't actually affect the presentation itself.

Managing Goals

So you have some business goals for the new year. How are you going to keep yourself on track to complete them? Here are a few ideas for managing your goals.

Time: Say your goal is to blog 3 times a week but you're good at forgetting. Google Calender to set up recurring event reminders that are sent to your email a set time before you want it done (e.g. 2 hours).

Sales: Tim Adams of Handmadeology has created a free sales goal tracking spreadsheet. It's aimed at Etsy sellers but will work whatever venue (or multiple venues) you use.

Shop: Overhaul your shop for 2011 with this article from Handmade Spark that compile a great list of ideas for improving your shop and sales for the new year.

The Holidays and Branding

The holiday season (I'll save my defense of using that phrase for another post) is a time of rampant consumer joy in the US and most businesses want to take advantage of it. Many B&M stores deck the aisles with lights, trees, and Santas, and many online retailers do the same to their sites. Now I see nothing wrong with capitalizing on this to increase my business but I think you should do it in a way that preserves your brand imaging.

Here's an example from my shop this year. My usual banner:

My winter banner:

I kept the same blue background color, still the product images in overlapping circles, switched from a green cuttlefish in the logo to the same one in red, changed the text to white, replaced the watery swirls with snowflakes, and made sure to include one of my platypus ornaments prominently. When I changed my profile photo on Etsy I only made the minor change of adding some snowflakes and slightly reworking the cropping:

TO:

So while my shop now looks quite festive and wintery it's still quite clearly consistent with the visual branding my shop uses the rest of the year.

So go ahead and show off your seasonal items, change your banner, welcome Santa to your shop, but keep it clearly your shop not another random holiday site and stand out from the crowd.

New Etsy Team

I just created the Handmade Business Team on Etsy. It's a place for Etsy sellers to discuss business topics in a place other than the Etsy forums which have a tendency to get a bit off topic.

Video: Wholesaling and PR

This is another video from I ♥ Art Portland. Amanda Siska from Bread and Badger talks about wholesaling your products. It's an hour and twenty-four minutes long.


Level Up! Wholesale and PR from I Heart Art: Portland on Vimeo.

How Becoming a Mother Helped Me Make the Leap From Baby Bottles To Professional Artist

Jennifer Swift is a stay at home mom and artist living in Plymouth MN. She has been published in several national art publications, has an etsy shop, and is soon to be a published author. Her book, Creative Bloom: Wire and Fabric Projects and Inspirations (North Light) will be released this November. To read more of Jen’s writing visit her blog at http://blog.birdfromawire.com.

I know it's commonly thought that as mothers we have no time, no energy, and no need to push ourselves outside of our roles as mothers. It's not true, and I can attest to that. I tried to throw my whole self into being a mother when my son was born and ended up brainstorming marketing ideas, or innovative product design while breastfeeding. I pestered my employed friends with suggestions, and generally made a nuisance of myself. Then I joined a moms group and after a while signed on as their crafts person. The projects I would come up with usually meant 10-20 hours of elaborate prepping for a 15 min. project. It was at one of the meetings when they were talking about doing a cookie dough mix in a jar recipe that it came to me. I heard myself begging to have them let me hand embroider 20+ pieces of fabric to decorate the top of the mason jars. Now there was absolutely no need for elaborately embroidered covers for these jars. A little raffia and a printed out label were all they were going for. In the middle of this exchange I realized from the looks I was getting that I was going too far. But I needed to have something creative to do with myself or I'd go crazy. Really, it almost happened. Fortunately my mom and husband both realized I needed a hobby and my sanity was restored. They pushed me into knitting and from there I eventually moved to stitching, and from there to experimenting with wire and mini art quilts.

Yes, motherhood demands a lot of us, but if we don't keep some of that back for ourselves I believe we begin to feel lost. So I joined the ranks of mompreneurs and opened an etsy shop. Now, here is how I believe being a mother actually makes me a better artist and businesswoman. Once I became a mom I became much more assertive. Like a mother bear, if you mess with my family, I turn into someone the pre-mom me wouldn't even have recognized and that carries over into the other areas. I dared to start sending in magazine proposals and even a book proposal. I wouldn't have been able to assert myself like that before. I've also learned to make the most of the small moments. Pre-kid I would bemoan the fact that I didn't have enough time or energy after work to do anything substantive. Post- kid me thinks she was a whiner and you can find snatches in most any day to do something creative or to promote your business. Becoming a mother gives you multi-tasking skills like you wouldn't believe, and now I feel strange if I'm not working on several things at once.

I've also learned a lot about the completely underrated discipline of "sucking it up". As a mother you have to suck it up all the time. Planned on having a bath after dinner but your two-year-old now needs one instead? You suck it up. As an artist/business owner there is a lot of my job that I don't enjoy doing- like listing art. I love selling it but hate how tedious the process of writing descriptions, taking photographs, editing photographs, and going through the whole listing process is. Before, just the thought of that process would have paralyzed me. Although I just want to make stuff and sell stuff, I've learned that to be successful at that, there's a whole lot more I need to make myself pay attention to. So while other moms at the library are walking out with the latest bestseller or parenting guide, I'm struggling with a stack of books on guerilla marketing, social media, as well as several Dr. Seuss.

It's a different experience but one I wouldn't trade for anything. Being a mother and an artist, and a small business owner all go hand in hand sometimes in unexpected ways and it's such a joy when they intermingle. I listen to crafty podcasts while cooking dinner, I read marketing before bed, I blog with PBS kids playing in the background. Unexpectedly, the artist thing has come in very handy as a mother too. My son has the coolest handmade Halloween costumes, and when they need a mom to do a craft for a school party I'm there with t-shirts I hand-doodled robots on for the kids to color.

I know I'm not alone. There are moms I talk to every week who are realizing that they need to do more with their lives than just mother. Doing something creative or outside the mom realm gives them a sense of identity that might otherwise have become lost. They feel a little guilty about it, so I get to encourage them by telling them my truth. Which is that because I allow myself to create and plan a business and have aspirations for my art I'm actually better at being a mother. I'm not wrapping up my dreams and foisting them on my son. I don't live and die by his latest milestone achievement or lack thereof. I obsess less and enjoy it more. I hope they believe me.

A Relaxed Mind

My name is Marie Young. I believe everyone has a creative spark, but sometimes life pees on it. I write
a blog “Creative Sprinkle,” to help people reignite their spark. I find exploring the broader topic of
creativity helps me design for my online shop, Young Creative.

“A relaxed mind is a creative mind.”

This is my favorite quote on creativity. It is attributed to Yogi Bhajan, but I’m ashamed to admit that I
discovered it in a fortune cookie.
While I love this quote, “relaxed” is not my natural state of being. I am one of those task-oriented
people who work extremely well under a deadline. A relaxed mind was a foreign concept to me until
recently.

Those of you running a creative business while balancing a home life probably identify with the image
of a superwoman, flying from one cry for help to another, accomplishing amazing feats. It is a proud
banner to wear, yet it is also an exhausting one.

No question, we all have to get things done. The problem comes in when we live every day in high
production mode. A frenzied mind has a harder time coming up with fresh ideas. It is also far more
prone to burn-out.

There are two paths I routinely walk to find my relaxed mind: one that purges the mind and one that
stimulates it.

Purge the Mind
This where you take a break and clear your head, the closer to burn-out you are the longer the break
may need to be. Here are some of my favorite mind-purging activities.

1. Meditate: This can be as simple as sitting in your garden or staring into a fire. Start with 5

minutes and gradually increase the time.

2. Take a walk: Concentrate on your surroundings. If you mind wanders back to your to-do-list

gently redirect it.

3. Capture thoughts: Find a trusted way of capturing ideas and to-do-list items, so you can get

them down on paper and give your brain a break.

4. Clean: Physical clutter adds to mental clutter. Put on some lively music and clear those cluttered

thoughts away.

5. Fast: Take a short fast from social media and other mental energy zappers. Set aside social

media free times to give your brain a rest.
Simulate the Mind
Once your mind is calm, it becomes a powerful receptacle for new ideas. Stimulating your mind can help
you see things in a new light.

1. Seek new inspiration: Men’s ties provide great inspiration for my jewelry. Does something

outside of your specialty catch your eye? Is there something there that you can adapt?

2. Stimulate the senses: Essential oils are a good source for mental stimulation. A couple drops of

peppermint oil in a bowl of water near my workspace does wonders.

3. Take a mini retreat: When you feel open to some major brainstorming, arrange some dedicated

time for it. Sit in your special place and allow yourself to dream, sketch, and jot things down. No
computer and no distractions.

All of these suggestions are simple in theory, but it will take some patience on your part before
you see results. Start small and slowly add one or two into your routine and build up from there.

What techniques do you use to purge or stimulate your mind?