Quick Inspiration: Contests and Catalogs

Battle of the Beads

Joining in beading contests can be a great way to ignite your imagination. When you’ve been stuck for new ideas, being given a theme to work with for a challenge can open up new design possibilities, and inspire you to use new color palettes, techniques or materials.

The Auntie’s Beads blog team recently announced an all new beading challenge for designers called Battle of the Beads. Anyone can submit an entry of a beaded creation made primarily with products from Auntie’s Beads.

The entries will be paired off to compete in a tournament style voting process, where readers can choose their favorite and send it off into the next round. The last two designs standing will compete against each other for the top prize - a $250 gift certificate for Auntie’s Beads! The runner up will also receive a gift certificate worth $100.

To enter your design, send in a 400 X 400 or larger JPEG image, along with your email address, name and materials list. To learn more about the contest, visit Battle of the Beads on the store blog. The deadline for entries is September 30th, 2010.

New Etsy Backlinks

Savvy Etsy sellers know that having plenty of quality links pointing to your shop is a great way to stay visible with search engines. And if those links are also associated with fantastic pictures of your product, that’s even better.

Many of Etsy’s Storque articles tell us that blogging can be a great way to create some of these backlinks, as well as establish an online persona that will create interest in our designs. We also use Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other social networking sites to spread the word about what we make.

With so many different sites to maintain, it’s hard to step back and get a good look at our Etsy business from all viewpoints. Luckily, that is all about to change.

An interesting new seller tool called SoopSee is making it easy for Etsy sellers to gather up all of their online activities into one place. With just a few simple clicks, you can import your blog RSS feed and all of your current Etsy listings into one place, plus provide contact information for any shop or venue that you sell from.

Your SoopSee profile is like a landing page for your business - a place to see everything that you do in one glance. The developers are hard at work, planning new features and sites to include, like Flickr. Anyone can start a SoopSee profile for free, or take advantage of some extra features with a pro account.

Have you been inspired by something new recently? Share a link with us in the comments!

Copyright 2010 Inspirational Beading
Auntie's Beads and SoopSee