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July Membership TAFA now has 146 members, 23 who are still not posted. Some of you who are not posted joined way back in February and March. I would really like to get all of you up on the site, so if you need help, please let me know how I can make this process easier for you. I have had to take a break from growing the membership in the last couple of weeks to get caught up on my other responsibilities and it will take me a couple more weeks before I can focus on it again. However, we have a committed date for the Hand/Eye article which will now run on September 2nd. If you are not familiar with Hand/Eye, visit their site. They are a wonderful online magazine which publishes weekly articles on both traditional and contemporary crafts. They have a huge focus on textiles and fiber art, so their viewers are also our people. We have agreed to do a complimentary feature on each other for the month of September. TAFA will be featured on their landing page and they will have a sticky post at the top of our landing page for the same time. I am hoping that this will be the springing board that TAFA needs to really get out there. I believe that in order to get the traffic we need to have to really make a difference for all of us, we still need to grow the membership to at least 250 members. If all of you made a special effort to bring in a couple of peers, we would get there very quickly. Bonnie Samuel, one of our members, has embarked on a marketing campaign for TAFA. She started today with a blog post today and will continue with follow up efforts. Read her post. That is a wonderful gift that Bonnie is giving all of us! Leave her a comment on her post showing your appreciation! The membership fee is going up to $48 on September 1st. I spend an average of two hours per member helping them get their info together for their member posts and answering questions. I expect to raise it again to $60 sometime next year and then leave it at that for a long time. The blogger platform we are using has worked really well so far, but we will reach a point where we will need a professional website that has more tools than Blogger can offer. That will cost quite a bit of money and I would also like to reach the point where I can hire someone to help me. So, if you know people that have been sitting on the fence about joining TAFA, that is a carrot you can use to encourage them. I will not ever charge renewal fees. Members who wish to support the site financially can become sponsors. Sponsors get an ad on the sidebar and several of you have already shown your support in this way. I really appreciate it and hope that others will also follow suit. The next step in marketing TAFA will be to get it listed as a resource or organization on link lists. I also want to start getting it in places where designers and corporate buyers look to find art. Many of you have high ticket items and need those kinds of buyers. If you know of any places that TAFA should be, send me the link. Right now I cannot afford any memberships or ads, but I will keep a folder for these resources and as we become more financially stable, start to invest in them. September begins the busy season for those of us who have gift items for sale, so I intend to advertise that aspect of TAFA on Project Wonderful, Facebook and other places. I also started a series on my blog called "TAFA Members Talk". This came out of that questionnaire that I sent out awhile ago. It's one more opportunity to get the word out there about you, giving a personal insight to who is behind the business. I would love to have more of you participate in this. Email me if you need me to come up with some questions for you or just send me an article about you and your work. I think people are interested in knowing more about how you work, what inspires you, what your journey has been so far. Are you also blogging? Interview some of your peers on TAFA or talk about what inspires you there. If you have not visited TAFA lately, do take a look. I am in awe of our combined talent, range of products and the dedication all of our members have shown in reaching the places they are at. We come from so many different backgrounds and really interpret the business of fiber art and textiles in refreshing ways. Sponsor Points Remember that you can earn sponsor spots (ads on the sidebar) by bringing in new members. Ten members=1 year of advertising on the sidebar ($100 value). Here is the tally so far: Ann Brauer 1 Beryl Moody 1 Betty Busby 1 Diana Bracy 3 Diane Evans 1 Dye Diana Dye 1 Emoke Emoke 1 Gerrie Congdon 1 Jane Porter 1 John Hopper 2 Kreinik Manufacturing 1 Ruth Henriquez 1 Sherryl Buchler 1 Studio Santeena 1 Sue Reno 2 Terri Stegmiller 1 Ulrika Leander 1 The rest of the members were brought in by yours truly and by our facebook fan page and internet searches. Site Stats Last time google analytics was down and I didn't have the numbers. Here is the latest total, including May and June:
As you can see, we are growing steadily. I expect numbers to increase quite a bit in the Fall as people go back to spending more time online. The key for me, is to figure out ways to keep people on the site so that they keep exploring more of the member profiles. I just installed the LinkWithin Widget and that has helped a lot. It shows three thumbnails of other members at the end of each member post. The only thing that I don't like about it is that it crops images to a square and seems to pick from the first two images, the banner and picture of the person, so some of the images are weird looking. But, most look great and will definitely drive more viewers to posts that might otherwise get overlooked. Facebook continues to be our core following. Our fan page is vibrant, interesting and receives good comments from its viewers. I just read an article a couple of days ago that taught me a lot of new ways to tweak your personal and fan pages. It's clear and really worth reading: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-101-business-guide/ About half of our members are on facebook. Our private group there gets a bit neglected because the posts do not show up in people's news feeds, so we forget to check. New members, do introduce yourselves there and hopefully someone will welcome you besides me! I'm having a problem with a widget I set up for our logo. Members who want to have the TAFA logo on their personal or fan pages should be able to use this app to install a box on their sidebar. But, I can't get it to work. I can add on a developer so if someone has those skills and would like to help me with it, I would deeply appreciate it. You have to have an account on facebook to do it. Flickr I cannot emphasize enough how important it is got get your images on Flickr! Those of you who have not set up slide shows there will be amazed at how much traffic Flickr will generate for your website. Having a slide show also adds depth to your member profile. It gives viewers more examples of your work without them having to leave the site. And, join our group there: TAFA Flickr Group All images go into our slide shows on the site and I've also created vignettes for the side bar that pull images based on the tags. Tagging appropriately is very important. Look at the labels that we use on TAFA (Places and Themes, middle column) and make sure to use some of those. I'm making the vignettes based on the most used tags. I don't really like how the widgets that I found shrink the images, so if you know of a nicer one, let me know. Etsy Almost half of our members are also Etsy sellers. Etsy offers a great, inexpensive platform for a shopping cart and built in buying public. Although most of that crowd is probably on the younger, indie side who don't have disposable income, serious buyers also shop there. I created an Etsy page for our members and it truly is lovely. Next time you go to TAFA, make sure you check it out! We are in the process of setting up an Etsy team and have received enthusiastic support and interest from members. I admit that this has not moved forward because I haven't been able to focus on it very much lately. I don't have ac and it's been almost 100 degrees here for weeks. It's been really debilitating to me. I finally got a unit, but it didn't work well to cool my work area, so it's in the living room. At least I have one place I can go to when I can't stand it anymore. Am I whining? Well, I just feel bad that we haven't moved forward on this. We have set up a google group and have quite a bit written down, but I want to tighten it up before we get the rest of you Etsy people on board. I'm sorry this is taking so long! I probably will not be able to focus on it until around September 10th, so bear with me. Video Page Have you looked at your video page? Only a few of you sent me your codes and I know many more of you have great videos that would interest people. You can send me up to three videos. I don't have the time to look up all of your codes and profiles to find them, so help me with this by sending the code so I can copy and paste it in. It's one more way to keep viewers on the site and promote your member profile. Long Term Goals I wanted to share with you some of my vision for TAFA. As the membership has developed and I have had more of a sense about where our people are at and what their needs are, I have become clearer on what the potential is for our site. TAFA's main goal is to help you reach a larger audience for your business. But, many of us are struggling because we lack capital or time to really focus on growing our businesses, especially in this awful economy. I see no relief in sight, so we have to hunker down and just keep at it. The germs of a plan are starting to form in my mind. This will not happen for at least a year. TAFA needs to be stable as a site, both financially and within its membership. But, I see the potential for developing a not-for-profit arm down the road which offers assistance to its members through grants, loans, residencies, exchanges and so on. Need a new loom? Need to get away for a month to focus on your work? Need capital for research? There are many models out there that I want to explore. We would need to tap into grant money or find angel investors who like what we are doing. I can see working with other organizations that are already providing assistance, like Aid to Artisans, or creating liaisons with other groups who have similar needs. Keep this in mind and if you read something or have ideas, I will keep them in a folder until we are ready to look at this more closely. I am especially interested in alternative lending models like the Grameen Bank or other initiatives that have worked well in developing countries. Who knows what doors can open for us in the future? Several members have also mentioned how much they would enjoy having member retreats that would offer seminars on business topics. I know that I would love to meet all of you personally, but the logistics of bringing an international group together seem far-fetched at this point. However, I can imagine using technology to simulate some of this, so that is something we will also have to dream up. One thing that I thought was fascinating: A new member who does not speak English well and I communicated using Google Translator. It was funny at times, but such a great tool! We really live in a special time where technology can bridge divides that have separated us for centuries! Member Input Several members had something to share with the rest of you: Linda Friedman: The very process of becoming a TAFA member gave me the impetus to get cracking with social networking and because of this and the superb TAFA website, contacts have geometrically increased and so have sales. Your mentoring through the application process provided me with tools that I was sadly lacking and I am now better equipped to branch out throughout the web. During the 3 hours of the Long Beach International Quilt Show that I manned the Quilts on the Wall table, I found that I was sitting with a dynamic woman who had just the night before found my work as a result of the TAFA page. One never knows how far reaching such an effort can be. Marion Coleman: Marion Coleman had two pieces accepted in the "Once
Upon A Time" exhibit being held September 4-October 29 at McMinn County Living
Heritage Museum, Athens, TN. Comment Section Make sure that you subscribe for email notifications for comments left on your member profile. This way, you will know when people leave you a comment. Also, use that space to let people know of your news. Do you have a show coming up? A book being published? Try to keep it general so that it doesn't become dated. For example, if you have a page on your website that lists your shows, you could say something like, "Visit my blog for a list of current shows" and provide the link.
Well, that's it for this time around. I love our group, am very proud of TAFA and I hope that all of you will benefit from being a member! May you and yours be healthy, happy and secure. Rachel PS New members: Scroll on down for past news. I try not to keep repeating the same info.
May and June Membership TAFA has grown to 125 members (16 not posted yet). The diversity and range of work is truly wonderful! Welcome to all of you have joined recently. Please read the past newsletters below so that you know what has happened in the past. I added a new page to this TAFA section, a Check List to help you with the different places we talk about on the web (Facebook, Flickr, etc.). This accompanies the Resources page, which I also updated. Please look at both as it has important information. I think most of you will find it helpful as I tried to zoom in on issues where there were a lot of questions or problems. Site Stats Google Analytics is not letting me control the dates at the time of this posting, so I'll try to come back to it later. June looks almost the same as April, if I am reading it correctly. I can't access May at all. We now have 61 subscribers on Feedburner, 87 following the site through Google Friend Connect, but by far the largest following we have is on our Facebook Fan Page, now numbering 766 fans. Excellent for such a short time there! 67 members (a little more than half) of our members have joined our facebook group. I have been adding albums of member photos by theme in our facebook fan page and people really seem to like that. Visit it if you have not looked at it yet. This is a public page which anyone can look at whether or not you are on facebook. You do have to be a fan in order to leave a comment. The work looks great grouped together like this! I will keep adding more from time to time. I've been linking the photos back to your member profiles on TAFA. Flickr We now have a TAFA Group on Flickr and have generated several slide shows with member's work. TAFA member, Arlee Barr, is co-administrating the group with me as she has been on Flickr for year and knows the ins and outs of how it works. Many thanks, Arlee! If you are on Flickr, please do join our group. See the Resources page for more info. Etsy I didn't expect this at all, but as TAFA has grown, so has our list of Etsy sellers. 45 of us have Etsy stores (about a third). So, we are exploring the idea of forming an Etsy Team to help promote our stores. I sent out an email to the members on Etsy and have received some excellent feedback. We will have a core group of members who will lead the Team, but will build it so that all Etsy members on TAFA are also represented. I will reward this core group with special placement on the site. Several of them have been active in other Etsy teams and thus come with excellent knowledge and experience. If you would like to be involved, email me with what you are interested in working on and what kind of a time commitment you could make. Click here to learn more about Etsy Teams. My goal with our Team is to become THE place to go on Etsy for the cream of the crop for fiber art and textiles. Well, I think that about does it for this time. I'll work on the stats another day. It's hotter than *$~+ here so I'm done for now. If you have not read the past newsletters, please scroll down as I am trying not to repeat information over and over. We are moving forward!
All the best to each of you, Rachel
March and April Membership We are now at 98 members! 31 of our members are still not posted as they have not submitted their forms. Please get these done as soon as possible. You will find the form on the Welcome! button above. 53 of our members have joined our private member group on Facebook, so just over half have an active presence there. Now that we have a substantial group on TAFA, those of you who joined early on should take a look at your member profile and see if any changes need to be made. You will see that those who have added flickr, videos, and other apps have more substance to their posts than those who only have their bio and photos. I have gone through and revised the form, the Welcome page and resources with more tips on how to get the best presence in your profile. Do review these pages so that you are aware of what is on them. Name change I purchased a domain name for TAFA. It is now www.tafalist.com. I did it through Blogger and it's only $10 a year, so those of you who would like to get the blogspot out of your blog, might consider also purchasing a domain name. Unfortunately, it does not carry over to the pages, so you will see the blogspot in the address of the other ones. All of you know that Blogger now allows you to add extra pages? I've added a membership, classifieds and sponsor page to TAFA. Classifieds Last time I told all of you that I am giving each of you a free classified ad for three months. You can have a photo and 50 words for free. Take a look at what others have done to give you an idea of how it looks. http://tafalist.blogspot.com/p/classifieds.html Right now, I don't have a deadline on when you need to turn these in. But, it would be nice to have the page look full and vibrant, so if you have something you want to promote, do send it in. Site stats It's a little tricky to keep track of the site now with the new domain name. But, here goes: March
April
March
April
So, the total is the addition of the two months between the two urls. Unique visitors for March were 1,648 and for April they were 1,840. Both numbers show some growth from our first month, but I would like to see it go much higher in the next two months. Feedburner: We have 47 subscribers who receive TAFA by email. That means that they get an email every time we add a new member. Facebook: Our TAFA fan page really started growing in the last couple of weeks. We now have 597 people who "like" it. Facebook recently changed "fans" to "like", an awkward move in my opinion. So, what are these people now? Likers? Anyway, those of you who are there really should take advantage of the interest and load photos and extra stuff on there to draw people to your fan pages. This is a public page, so non-facebook people can look at it: Click to see the TAFA fan page. You will see that the TAFA members are added on as favorites (box in the left sidebar) and that the posts are automatic posts from their blogs. There is also a tab for discussions. Invest in this page and you will surely make some new connections! I also ran a couple of paid ads for TAFA for several days on facebook and will do that again when funds allow. Sponsor Credits: You should be aware that if you get 10 members to join TAFA, you earn a sponsor spot on the right sidebar for a year. You can also purchase these spots for $10/month or $100 a year. To date the following members have earned credits:
Let's all try to grow the site! I would like to see TAFA become one of the top resources on textiles and fiber art, where people go for material for their blogs, to look for new artists and product, and for networking on every level. Together, we can do it!
Member Feedback: I asked members to send in comments about their experience so far. Beryl Moody reported on our group: "I got a note from Rachel yesterday asking if I had noticed increased traffic on my selling sites since I joined TAFA. I have noticed some additional views at my 1KM site, however the big winner was the Flickr collection I linked to from TAFA. It has accumulated over 1400 views in the last couple of weeks. Somebody's... looking:-) Thanks, Rachel for a terrific site to showcase my work."
Ann Brauer: "I have had one follow-up from TAFA--someone interested in
my work who says they will see me at the Smithsonian Craft Show--that would be
nice. I do plan on doing a classified--I am waiting until early
summer--right now I am straight out--but later will have more time and more
business. do love your site and your lovely way of doing business. I would
love more discussion on blogs--I know there have been some but I have so many
questions."
Cindy Grisdela: "Rachel--I hope I'm not too late, but I just wanted to let you know I've seen traffic on my blog nearly double since I joined TAFA. Thanks!"
Patty Benson: "I've been trying to think of something to write but
can't think of anything! My brain is too full. I don't know if I've had any
referrals via TAFA yet....it doesn't seem like it when I look at my google
analytics. I think I'm going to just try and post more via our group, the
tafa fan page and my fan page. I have got more fans though which is so
great!"
Jane Thornley: "Hi, Rachael, I get about 8 referrals a month so far. Not bad for a start." Jacque Davis: "Good morning Rachel,
As always I appreciate your commitment to the TAFA list. I have had
one link to my website from TAFA." ***** I am going to create a page for member comments so that anytime someone sends me something I can post it there and the rest of you can see it. I am very interested in hearing from you on whether TAFA helps bring you business, so do let me know if you see anything or if you have any concerns. I have also decided to do the member newsletter every two months as it is so time consuming. If there is any news worth sharing with the group, I will send out a short email to everyone, but I definitely don't want to crowd your email boxes with excessive emails. I think that is it for this time. Please feel free to email me with questions, comments, concerns, etc. We are still very young, but coming along nicely.
All the best to each of you,
Rachel
February Membership TAFA went live on February 1st. We now have 57 members, an excellent number for such a short time! I have spent almost the whole month going through link lists and inviting people to join. I started out with art quilts and Etsy because those are two communities where I already have a lot of connections. In the next couple of months, I will continue to focus on membership growth, especially because I would like to increase the diversity of the membership to include a wider range of people and work represented. For example, I went through a whole list of basket makers and was not able to get anyone to come on board. Until there is a wider variety of mediums and businesses represented, I think TAFA will look like an art quilt site. I have kept a folder in my email program for potential members and there are about 70 others there who have either committed to join in the future or who are thinking about it. However, we still have 25 members who have not sent me their info. Please people! Let's get your profiles up! Quite a few of you joined right at the beginning and I still haven't received anything. I know that there are many people traveling right now and some are preparing for shows, but let's at least get a skeletal version of your profile done and then you can fill it in later. Each of you brings your unique specialty to the mix and I would really love to have you up with the rest of us. Site stats I set TAFA up on Google Analytics right away, so we have accurate stats on how traffic has been on the site from the beginning. The numbers are impressive! We've had 1.599 unique visitors in one month. Each has spent an average of four minutes on the site, which means that they are clicking around and reading the profiles. The membership page received over 500 visits. I think that people are watching and waiting to see if this is going to fly or die. The feedback I have gotten via emails and from friends is that they love the way the site looks, are impressed with the quality of the membership and enjoy the blog roll. Here are some specifics on what traffic looked like for February: Traffic Sources (the number next to it tells you how many came from that source:
Thanks to all of you who are adding TAFA on to your blogs! It works! And, it benefits everyone. The stumble upon was interesting because it happened before I added the icons at the bottom of each post. In fact, that's what motivated me to add a stumble icon on its own. Page Views We had 4,536 unique page views!!! Excellent! Sue Reno must be our most famous person because she got a whoppin' 129 page views! Congrats, Sue! The next most popular views (over 45 views):
Some of this reflects when people joined and who has the TAFA links on their blogs. Analytics also shows that the tags (Themes and Places) are being used. I was wondering if that would be useful and I think it will be used, more and more, as we get more members. I also have TAFA on feedburner and there are 26 subscribers to email updates. We have 40 followers via google connect and 104 fans on our facebook fan page. All of this looks very good to me. My blog is two years old and took forever to reach these numbers.
Our facebook group has 25 of our members signed up. I am totally in love with our group! Our combined knowledge and experience makes the group invaluable. And, everybody seems so good natured (except for me, when I get tired...), helpful and friendly. It's really wonderful. Of course, my face is plastered all over the place, but I hope that as people become more comfortable and take more leadership, I won't have to do all the answering. I know a lot about some things, but in other areas, my experience is very limited. I have never been in any big shows, am self taught, and haven't really paid attention to whatever big waves go through our fiber art and textile community. I've worked with textiles for 20 years so I know a little about a lot. Now we will have people who know their areas of expertise in depth and that will open the door to many mentoring opportunities. We can all learn from each other.
Sponsor Spots If you look at the right sidebar, you will see that there are a few featured members. Those spots are either earned or paid for. The income generated from this goes to promoting the site. Right now there is $105 in the kitty that I can spend on promoting the site. Any suggestions? Are there any groups that TAFA should join or should I take a couple of classifieds out? I would really like input from you on where I should look to promote the site. Sherryl Buchler, Jane Porter and John Hopper each have brought one member to TAFA. I keep track, so when you reach 10, you can have a sponsor spot for one year!
Classified Ads I am going to add a page to TAFA for classified ads. I have had to turn away several people because their photos, sites, or product were not good enough for the site, so I felt bad and was trying to think of a way of including them. Plus, I am spending so much time on this that I need to try to generate a bit more income from it. I'm going to keep the ads very affordable and they will be open to the community at large, but will have to be subject to approval. As a thank you to all of you, I am giving each of you an ad for free. Do you have a show coming up, a class that you are teaching, something for sale (sewing machine, etc.), or anything else you would like to advertise? You can have 50 words plus a photo for free for 3 months. Include the link of where you want people to go. I would like to have some content before the page goes live, so if you have something you want to include, please send it ASAP. This freebie is valid until March 15th. Other Instead of sending out emails, I decided to use my website to host newsletters and other TAFA info. That way, I don't have to keep repeating myself to every new member. You will get a monthly newsletter reviewing the past month in the first week of the following month. Plus, I can add updates here, too. I've moved the welcome letter over here, so those of you who have not sent in your info, can come here if you need a copy. Click for the welcome page. Please read the general page I made for TAFA (you can send that info to potential members and the resources page. Click for general page. Click for Resources. I am so pleased with how TAFA is developing and this has only been possible because of YOU! Most of you do not know me personally and it has been a huge vote of confidence for you to come on board to something that did not have a proven track record. I thank you for investing your time and money and for sharing my vision for TAFA's potential. Know that I am dedicating as much time and energy as I can to make this successful. There is very little that gives me such satisfaction as seeing a peer succeed in their business. (All right... a perfect zucchini from my garden is also a big thrill!) Seriously, I believe that art and craft abilities hold a central place in our world. They connect us to people from different cultures, where we can use the language of skill where our words may fail us. They connect us to earth and to the cycles of life. They teach us to explore, to challenge ideas of what is normal or acceptable. And, they are undervalued and despised by our mainstream culture. Helping keep these abilities, traditions, and sensitivities alive is one of my core missions in life. (Along with growing zucchinis...) (Oh, by now most of you know that I have a weird sense of humor. Please bear with me! It's a genetic condition...) This took several hours to put together and I am pooped. Know that I would like your feedback, ideas, dreams, and suggestions. Those of you who are not on facebook also have a voice. (You just won't have as much fun...) I will do what I can to keep everybody happy here. Already, a couple of members have suggested a group show. It's an idea and it could happen down the road. These things take money and planning. We start by dreaming possibilities, sharing experiences, evaluating potential and assessing how anything will benefit the group as a whole. For now, we gather these ideas and let them germinate. I wish each of you all the best. May all of your personal dreams and aspirations come true! Rachel
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