So, about six months ago I opened my etsy shop, and business is pretty slow. I sell a lot by word of mouth, but for some reason, I can't get etsy to really take off. I'm in need of a new, fresh perspective. If you don't mind, can you take a look at my sight and offer suggestions? How are my prices? Pictures? Should I offer more sets? of 2 or 3 or 4? What TYPE of cards do I need (or need more of)?  What would YOU be looking for?

Any observations are welcome. Thanks in advance!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/periwinklecards

I'm not a good judge of things like this.  But maybe with the holidays coming your Christmas Cards might pick up. 

Hi Sarah! It's been really slow for me too.  You have really cute stuff, your pictures are good, I think your shop looks fine.  I know I've seen you in the Etsy forums before, so you have probably seen a lot of people complaining about how slow it is there too.  I don't know what to tell you- I have seen such varied advice about how to bring in business, but none of it is anythign I can really do, since I have a day job, kids, etc.  and don't have the time to blog, Twitter, and Facebook constantly.  I blog, but don't have much of an audience.  I did do a Facebook fan page for my shop, but haven't done much of it, and 3 of my 6 fans are men I've never heard of, so I think they clicked on my page by mistake, lol!  I did open a Flickr account but haven't had a chance to do much with that.  There are a bunch of Etsy-related groups on Flickr, and if you join a group you can upload pics to them, and you may get some traffic that way.  You just have to be careful with Flickr, because it's not supposed to be used for commercial purposes, so you can't link to your shop anywhere but in your Flickr profile.  Still, I've heard of people getting sales that way- if someone sees something they want bad enough, they'll check out your profile and track down your shop that way.

Not that I'm an expert on Etsy, having only been there a little longer than you have, but I think it has gotten so large, and some of the categories are SO saturated, that it is really hard to be successful there if you are just relying on searches to bring you customers (Etsy or Google searches).  It is pretty discouraging to go to Etsy and put in a search for your type of product and get thousands of results.  I have tried that business of renewing often, and it has done nothing for me.

Do you do anything other than cards, or thought about diversifying your product line?  I see comments about this in the forums often, so I've been working on expanding to other products.  So far I have magnets in addition to my bookmarks, and I have some other ideas that I'm working on.  Maybe think about other types of paper craft products you could offer: note cards?  Invitations?  Wedding/party place cards?  Gift tags?  Bookmarks?  (just don't compete with mine, lol!)  Maybe offer sets, such as matching card and gift tags,  invitations and thank you cards, etc.

Well, you're in good company, that's for sure.  I am still hoping that things pick up for the holidays.  So far, I haven't seen any increase in traffic.  However, I do check the Alchemy requests, and am starting to see a lot of requests for holiday gifts popping up there, so hopefully that means that people are starting to think about shopping in general.

In the meantime, you should pop over to the PBS Swappers yahoo group- haven't seen you around there!  The swaps are pretty fun, and some of the weekly challenges too.

Good luck!