About Me

Hi! I am Christine Gierer, jewelry maker, online marketer, and founder of Handmade Results.

I won’t beat around the bush. I have an impatient “life is short attitude”.

I’d much rather do my time wasting elsewhere… In goofing off, going to the park with my kids, and enjoy freedom and flexibility in my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I love working. I love making money doing what I love. I just don’t want work to be ALL that I do.

I bet you’d love to live your life that way too. I mean, who wouldn’t?!? Work part time, doing what you love, and having the time, freedom, and money to chose your life not have it dictate to you.

That’s what I share on this site. Information, guides, and courses about handmade jewelry marketing faster, better, with greater results, and The information on this site? This means you’ll learn how to build your handmade jewelry business in a very specific way.

You’ll…

• Spend Less Time
• Expend Less Effort
• Get Greater Quantifiable Results

…So you can have what money can buy: the freedom to enjoy it!

For over 4 years I’ve been making a great part-time income through niche marketing and jewelry information marketing and I’ve learned that it’s not only what you know, it’s what you do with what you know.

Here’s my thing. Life is short. Anyone can teach you how to market yourself and give over your life to your computer or networking or the millions of other activities you need to do as a workaholic style business owner.

I share guides and courses that aim not only to show you how to market, but how to do it in …

• Less time
• With less effort
• For greater quantifiable results

…So you can spend time on what really matters in life – whether it’s being home with your young kids (as I do) spending more time on hobbies and friendships, travelling to far off place, or just so you can trash that job you hate. Maybe you don’t even care about all that and just want more time to relax and enjoy the extra freedom your business strategy and income has bought you.

My main jewelry related projects: I am creator and chief cook and bottle washer of  the jewelry marketing blog you’re reading right now, along with the courses and guides sold here.  I also run a jewelry making information website called How-to-Make-Jewelry.com.

How Handmade Results Came to Be

The story of how this site came to be is kind of interesting. Here’s what happened:

I have a newsletter called “I’m Making Jewelry in my Jam Jams“. I was putting together the newsletter for September 2009, and I had previously promised to answer the biggest, most often asked question I get from readers. That question turned out to be, “I want to sell my jewelry. How do I get started?”…

That started a whole roller coaster of events. I wrote a newsletter article called “Is Etsy Stealing Your Money?” It was kinda controversial and got the biggest response ever to any of my newsletters. People had a lot to say, and most of it was agreement, but not everybody…

There was one brave lady who took me to task on what I said, and that prompted me to do a followup on that first Etsy newsletter article. It turned out to be the longest newsletter article ever, but got even more response than the first.

How All This Online Jewelry Business Talk Turned Into a Jewelry Marketing Course

With all this Etsy talk, I started remembering how awful it was when I first came online and started selling my jewelry. There was no useful information anywhere. Yes, there was information, but it was all useless for jewelry sellers in my opinion. As you know, selling crafts and selling handcrafted jewelry are two different things.

I’m getting ahead of myself in the story though. Let’s back up to 2006…

My Background in Jewelry Marketing and Internet Based Business

Here’s where I was a few years ago…

I heard over and over from friends, family, even strangers on the street from time to time – as I’m sure you’ve heard over and over again, “Wow! This is beautiful! You made this??? You should sell these!”

Imagine me back in 2006. My jewelry making addiction was a force to be reckoned with and I needed money to buy beads darn it!

I had sold the odd piece through word of mouth in my local neighborhood and among friends and family but nothing like a real business.

So, naive little me, home with a baby and a toddler and NOT wanting to have to go back to work – ever – if possible, started looking at options. I was going to run a handmade jewelry business. Hooray! I thought, “How hard could it be”?

Ha! Famous last words!

My First Online Jewelry Marketing Attempts

The Pretty Website With No Traffic

You might commiserate with me here. This phase was the “beautiful website that got no traffic”. I had taught myself how to photograph and photoshop properly and I got lots of kudos from friends and family. I might as well been trying to make orange out of lemons as far as it got me.

The Etsy Shop With Few Sales

Next, I opened an Etsy Shop and tried to promote the heck out of it – just like they tell you to. I had some small success, but not much.

Blogging

I tried blogging on Blogger to try to send traffic to my Etsy shop. I actually did get a lot of traffic from this endeavor…But all my web traffic came from fellow jewelry makers, jewelry artists or jewelry enthusiasts looking for ideas!

Frustration and Irritation

I was being “hearted” like crazy by people on Etsy, but I saw very few sales. I was getting really frustrated with all the effort I was putting in. I was spending hours and hours crafting descriptions, taking photos, joining “Street Teams”, and re-listing…

What was I doing wrong?

So I went on the Etsy forums and tried to figure out what I was doing wrong way back in 2007. I told them about my work from home goal and that I wanted to have enough time to spend time with my kids which is why I was wanting to stay at home in the first place. And people YELLED at me.

They told me if I wasn’t willing to spend the 60 to 80 hours a week they were spending on their business, for at least 3 years before expecting a profit, then maybe Etsy just wasn’t for me.

Can you believe that? In my book, any business model that shows you no results for at least three years is a bad one. The whole starving artist thing might sound romantic, and maybe it makes people feel like they are martyrs to their craft, but I think it’s ridiculous.

photo by avlxyz

As I read once on someone else’s site(forgive me – can’t remember where!), “I like Ramen noodles but I sure don’t want to live on them.”

Jewelry Business Success and Lessons Learned

Those days are gone now but I’m so grateful for them becuase they led me to do what I’m doing now – making a living from making jewelry online. Here’s what happened next…

After dumping my internet jewelry selling dream, I just couldn’t let the whole thing go. I wanted to stay home and I wanted beads, and I was not going to let the internet beat me. I was going to make it work. I knew it was possible, because I saw other people doing it. I’d just have to do what they did, and I’d get similar results, right?

In 2007, I abandoned everything I thought I knew and started looking at everything through fresh eyes. Like a nut, I obsessively researched marketing, took internet marketing courses, and analyzed what others were doing.

This didn’t happen overnight of course. It took a lot of time, patience, focus, and I learned through doing.

(And about Etsy? If I knew what I know now, I could have made it work with Etsy. I just didn’t know the rules).

I started building How-to-Make-Jewelry.com in October 2007. I knew next to nothing about HTML, search engines, writing, and how websites were built.

Here was my traffic the first month:

I learned as I went, learned how to do market research and target my content to what people were actively searching for.

Within 5 months of starting, I had built up my traffic to over 7,000 visitors per month.

Was it a fluke? I implemented more simple strategies, kept up with my website maintenance and starting monetizing my traffic. If I were focusing on tangible goods, this is the point at which I would have started adding them. Since I didn’t have any, I sold other people’s items instead.

I started making money.

Less than a year building How-to-Make-Jewelry.com, I was in the top 1% of websites on the internet.

Among million of websites.

By August 2008 I was getting 21,580 unique visitors per month.

In December of 2008 I saw 27,252 unique visitors.

In March 2009 I received 38,578 unique visitors

And most recently, these are my website statistics:

As you can see, in February 2010, I had 72,347 visitors.

(In August of last year I had over 112,000! I was away most of that month. Maybe my website actually does better when I’m not around…)

The Biggest Marketing Lesson Learned

It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. The internet has it’s own peculiar rules that apply whether you are selling vacuum cleaners, information, or handmade jewelry. When you know the rules, and how work within the confines of those rules, the rest is easy.

If you’re reading this because you want to learn more about marketing your jewelry online, you’re probably thinking of all sorts of reasons why jewelry is different. Sure, jewelry has it’s own peculiarities. But if you don’t have a foundation in the laws of internet marketing, you’ll never even get a chance to share your own unique vision.

The Decision to Share Internet Marketing Information with Handmade Jewelry Sellers

I love teaching, and I love coaching. In my past life before kids I was a mental health counsellor and I loved it. After I made the sat-home-with-my-kids decision, I went through all sorts of ups and downs looking for a way to stay home full time and work from home too.

I also love online marketing and researching, and my experience trying to sell jewelry online really demonstrated how much misinformation there is out there. Now, as the internet is becoming more mature, and social networking is changing the face of the internet it seems like the time waste possibiliteis are bigger than ever.

The gap between what works and what jewelry makers are actually doing with their computer time is huge so that’s why having a resource that is internet marketing based is so important now more than ever.

I challenge you to take a look at how you spend your time. Are your online jewelry marketing efforts getting you where you want to go? I’m not talking about three years from now. I’m talking about seeing real results from real targeted strategies. I think it’s a shame that people think they need to starve and work other jobs when they can live their dreams now. Especially when it’s so simple when you take online jewelry marketing and home jewelry business strategy step by step.

Best,

Christine Gierer

P.S. If you’re nodding your head, but feeling overwhelmed about where to start, try reading my Results Report to learn how to get started improving your jewelry marketing strategy today.