Try Some Moxie for your Marketing - You'll like it

Moxie Tonic has great tips for improving your overall Etsy marketing strategy. SEO and tagging is important, yes.

But what are you doing to bring in customers who are loyal to you?

• Are you connected on social media?
• Do you blog?
• Do you participate in forums?
• Do you send an email newsletter?

Keeping on top of everything in that list is nearly impossible if you want to have anytime left over to actually create your products. So how do you balance it all?

You do it with an email list.

You see the more exposure someone has to you, the more likely they will become a buyer, and even better, a repeat buyer! It takes a lot of work to go out and find fans of your work - Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, and on and on and on.

If you're smart, you'll bring them in, and make sure you have a way to contact them once they've showed interest. Ask a buyer or former buyer to jion your email newsletter list and there's one less person you have to go out and hnt down. Keep growing your email list and you will build a loyal following that will start to do your marketing for you - they will tweet for you, like for you and forward to their friends.

The bigger your list, the more word of mouth marketing they can do for you, the more quality and prepared your custmers are. So the more time you ahve to create. And it's a good thing too - with all those happy subscribers, your sales are going through the roof!

Feminist - as bad as a four letter word?

I did it.  I finally came out of the closet.  I told a friend I a a feminist.  And do you know what - she laughed right in my face!

Granted, on the surface it's a pretty unbelievable assertion.  After all, look at my credentials:

• I'm a young mother of two boys
• I stay at home to raise them full-time
• My husband is the primary breadwinner
• I can occasionally be found bent over a toilet, scrubbing the heck out of it.

Not exactly the poster-child for NOW.

But for me, feminism is about choice.  Because of feminism I have the choice to vote, the choice to get an education, the choice to run for public office, work in medicine, or I can choose to stay at home.

I once read an essay that said true feminists had to be lesbians.  The author argued that a French soldier would never fight all day in the resistance only to go home and sleep with a Nazi.  The analogy was - any married woman was essentially doing the same thing.

It's probably the only essay I can recall from my college days.  It represents a form of feminism that has swung so far from the daily life of the average woman who loves equality between the sexes but also loves her husband, children and the opportunity to become whatever she wants.

On of my favorite champions of reasonable feminism, Leonard Pitts, recently addressed the subject.  He says that years of negative association has landed the term "feminist...in syntactical purgatory."  Women who espouse its principles shun identification as a feminist.

I certainly don't want to return to the way things were before feminism.  Back to the days (and I'm quoting Pitts again) "...of casual beatings, Of casual rape.  Of words like 'old maid' and spinster'....Of going to school to find a man.  Of getting an allowance and needing a husband's permission.  Of taking all your spirit, all your dreams, all your ambition, aspiration, creativity, and pounding them down until they fit in a space no larger than a casserole dish."

Because of feminism, my life is better, and so is yours.  Because of feminism we are free to pursue our dreams.  So I'll say it again, hopefully this time without the laughter.

I am a feminist.