I rarely go away from my usual weekly postings on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays without good reason. Today’s reason for posting is an exceptionally good one.

I’m sure by now that most everyone has heard of the devastating earthquake that has happened in Japan, and of the many aftershocks that have occurred after also in high magnitudes. And we also all know that Blythe, while originating in the USA, has a certain Japanese connection about her. Many in the dolly community have wanted to find a way to help, many in the dolly community have managed to find a way to help.

This image was created by Gaia (Bambina Carabina).

Many people have been putting up raffles of dolls that they own, or raffles for custom packages or reroots. And it’s all for a fantastic cause. There’s been many raffles being held and some have ended very quickly after beginning, so I’ve had trouble keeping up with all of the raffles and auctions that have been happening. Luckily there’s a better way to find out about these great fundraising efforts, through Flickr.

There’s a Flickr group called Dolly Community Unite for Japan and people have been putting information about their own raffles and auctions where the proceeds will be going towards an aide organization that is helping Japan.

Please, please, please consider donating money towards one of the many good raffles currently happening in the dolly community (most tickets seem to be around $5 or $10).

If you’re not interested in buying a raffle ticket, here’s a list of (legitimate) aide organizations that are helping to collect donations for aide efforts:

• Japanese Red Cross
• American Red Cross
• Canadian Red Cross
• Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (American website)
• Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (Canadian website)
• Médecins Sans Frontières (International website)

Please be aware that there are a lot of organizations that are currently taking donations but not all of them will be using that money specifically in Japan. Do your research to see if where your money will end up is where you want it to go and also check before donating that the site you’re donating to is a legitimate organization! Doctors Without Borders is one of the organizations is already in Japan helping (they state on their website that money donation goes to where it’s needed most, and they help in all situations, even ones that are not getting media time).

Regardless of if you’ll be selling things in the Blythe/community or not, it’s always fun to be able to network with people and make friends. Not all of us are lucky enough to live in cities with a large Blythe community, so we turn to the internet. My discovery of Blythe began on the internet, I somehow stumbled onto one of the Blythe forums and learned all about these big-eyed dolls.

A great way to make new friends is to join a forum or a Livejournal community. If you’re a member of  Flickr, you can join one of the many Blythe-related groups there as well. Networking is all about getting to know other people and making yourself known as well, so you should be willing to make your presence known and share a little about yourself as well (such as your doll photos!).

Not everyone can have a big presence everywhere, so don’t try to stretch yourself too thin. If you want to focus on making friends on one forum, that’s great. It’s a lot easier to spend  most of your time posting in one place than trying to spend similar amounts of time posting in several other places as well – plus it’s also rather time consuming as well. It does help people ‘know’ of you better if you stick with the same username everywhere – so if your username is BlytheGirl2011 on Forum A and on Forum B, it helps people notice that “Oh hey, I know that person!”.

Chances are, given the size of the doll community, you’re bound to run into people that you know on various forums, Flickr and even Twitter and blogs. Having the same avatar does help, but not everyone seems to do that as often as they have the same username.

It’s always more fun to be in a hobby with other people! You might even find that you have some things in common with people, besides loving and having Blythe dolls.

Some forums to consider:

• Blythe Kingdom
• This is Blythe
• We Play With Dolls

There’s a lot of different sites where you can go and sell the things that you’ve made, that’s the beauty of the internet. You don’t need to know how to code anything yourself (although that would be an asset) and all you need to do is ensure that you input the correct payment information so you can receive the funds and make sure you ship things out in a timely manner. But with so many different site options, how can you tell which one is right for you?

I take a look at four popular options available online for your online selling needs and show the pro’s and con’s of each option. Some of them are free (!) while others have paid accounts and some just have the same price structure for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you know how to customize or code because not all of them even allow for customization, but they all have something in common: all four of the sites I’m talking about to you are sites where you can set up your own online shop.

Artfire
Artfire is a little bit newer than Etsy, which can be a good or a bad thing. Good thing is that there is less competition. The bad thing is that less people know about it. There is a ‘free/basic’ account and you can also pay to upgrade. Artfire does not have fees associated with making a listing or making a sale. Their “pro” account is $9.95 USD/mo (at the time of writing – this is mentioned on their site as a promotional price from the regular price of $20/mo) which includes more freedom in how you can run your online shop. With a paid-upgrade, you can get more images/listing, more customization abilities and the ability to create things like coupon/discount codes. If you don’t opt for their paid account, you can list things on Artfire for free, but you do have limitations as to what you can do with your account. The great thing is that there is a free account option, the bad thing is that there are limitations to free accounts (as always). Pro account price may be too expensive for some if you are unable to generate enough sales to cover the cost of your products and the cost of your shop.

Snippets of thoughts on Artfire:

• Basic accounts are free
• There are no fees associated with making a sale
• Pro accounts are $9.95 USD (current promotional price)
• There is less than a gazillion sellers on Artfire (in comparison with Etsy), but less than a gazillion sellers also translates to being less viewers on Artfire

Big Cartel
Big Cartel focuses on more than just handcrafted goods (like Artfire and Etsy) but also includes all branches of art, including music and various designers. Like Artfire, Big Cartel has a free/basic account option (only 5 listings at one time, 1 photo per listing, minimal customizing options) and goes up to various paid accounts from $9.99, $19.99 and $29.99 USD. The number of products you can list increase with each price tier, including the amount of control you have over customizations. The $29.99 USD allows for the most number of products listed at 300 (!) products and that’s apparently for a ‘small’ shop, the $9.99 USD option has a maximum of 25 listings. It allows for site-integration with your own blog that looks a lot more smooth that integration with the other options would be. I actually like how much customization options that you get with Big Cartel. The nice thing about Big Cartel is that there are no fees associated with any sales that you make.

Snippets of thoughts on Big Cartel:

• Basic accounts are free and can have up to 5 listings
• There are no fees associated with making a sale
• Pro accounts go from $9.99-29.99 USD
• Great options for customizations (with paid accounts), good options for integration

Etsy
Etsy is incredibly popular, which is both a good and a bad thing. A good thing is that it’s been tried over and over again by other crafters. The bad thing is that you need to be able to stand out among all the other crafters on Etsy in order to get sales (unless someone is specifically looking you up, in which case less effort is required). Etsy has a lot of page views per day, a lot of visitors, a lot of shops and a lot of activity going on their forums. There are a lot of resources available on Etsy for first-time or veteran online sellers. People discuss techniques as well as sourcing out materials or promotional tips on the forums.

You are charged on a per-item, per-listing basis and a percentage is deducted from each sale after you make one, based on the listing price. Each listing lasts for 4 months. Costs for listing are billed to you via a valid credit card or a Paypal account. Crafters under the age of 18 are permitted to have an Etsy shop provided that the actual store owner is their parent or legal guardian.

Snippets of thoughts on Etsy:

• To list one item, it costs $0.20 USD
• Each listing can last up to 4 months before it expires (unless someone buys it before 4 months is up)
• There is a 3.5% fee per sale that you make on Etsy
• There’s about a gazillion* other Etsy sellers on Etsy to compete with.

* May be an exaggeration, but it seems that way.

Storenvy
I haven’t found very many sites that use Storenvy yet, but it seems like a fun and interesting option. According to their website, a store is completely free. There are no limits to the number of products that you can list for sale, there are no fees associated with any sale that you make (beyond what Paypal themselves take). They also have full customization, for those who are code-savvy and have a lot of free features. For those wondering, Storenvy makes their money from their affiliate/sister site, which prints custom t-shirts for people who want to sell shirts via Storenvy. There is a social media feel to the website, which was one of the goals of Storenvy – people can ‘like’/heart your products and write comments directly about your shop and products on your profile (which doesn’t appear on your storefront).

Snippets of thoughts on Storenvy:

• Only one account level and it’s free
• There are no fees associated with making a sale
• Great options for customization (and by the looks of things, you can make it look just like the rest of your site!)
• Social media feel to the whole site with the liking and followers options.

– – – – –

For those that are current online shop owners and selling your Blythe/dolly clothing or shoes or pullrings or anything else that you can think of: what online shopping site do you use? What do you like or dislike about it?

Whichever host you decided to use during Part 2 of Doll Blogging: Names & Hosts, you should learn some basics in HTML!

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and it is what is used online for writing coding. While I won’t be going everything there is to know about coding, I feel that most bloggers should know the basics for it. Even if you feel as if you can rely on text editors all the time, it’s still a good idea to know the basics and to understand how to write your own basic coding for your blog entries. I’m splitting up this article into a few different sections: text, images and links.

Text

To make your text bold:

<strong>text to make bold here</strong>

To make your text italicized:

<em>text to make italicized here</em>

To make your text crossed out:

<span style=”text-decoration: line-through;”>text to make crossed out here</span>

To make your text underlined:

<span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>text to make underlined here</span>

To make your text smaller:

<small>text to make small here</small>

Images

Let’s take this image for example (http://blythelife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/html-sampleimage.jpg):

In order for any image to show up on your blog, you need this code:

<img src=”URL” />

To make the image above show up, the coding looked like this:

<img src=”http://blythelife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/html-sampleimage.jpg” />

Links

Linking text to a website address:

<a href=”URL”>text to show up here</a>

If you wanted to link to BlytheLife.com’s URL (http://blythelife.com) the coding would look like this:

<a href=”http://blythelife.com”>BlytheLife.com</a>

Linking text to an email address:

<a href=”mailto:emailaddress”>text to show up here</a>

If you wanted to link to BlytheLife’s email address (blythelife@gmail.com), the coding would look like this:

<a href=”mailto:blythelife@gmail.com”>email BlytheLife.com</a>

Linking an image to a website address:

<a href=”URL”><img src=”IMAGE URL” /></a>

If you wanted to link to an image (eg. blythe.jpg) and link it to BlytheLife.com, the coding would look like this:

<a href=”http://blythelife.com”><img src=”blythe.jpg” /></a>

If you haven’t already, be sure to read part one (The Introduction) and part two (Names & Hosts). In two weeks, on March 21, 2011, Part 4 (Themes, Templates & Designs) will be posted.

• Part 1: The Introduction
• Part 2: Names & Hosts
• Part 3: HTML
• Part 4: Themes, Templates & Design (March 21, 2011)
• Part 5: Promoting Your Site (April 4, 2011)

I’ve talked about participating in organized/group swaps before, but a great way to get something new is to find someone to do a personal swap with! You will need to be able to offer up something of equal or seemingly equal value, of course, because that’s the way that swaps work. But done right, a personal swap can be very rewarding to both parties.

What the cost is to you:

• Things that you already own (and therefore expenses have already been paid for)
• Things that you can make (and make customized for your swap buddy) – Keep costs low by using what you have available
• Cost of postage (with or without tracking and insurance – be sure to discuss how your swap partner will be sending your things to you!)

I know, it’s great! You could be getting a few great new clothing items or a few pairs of shoes without having money needing to trade hands (beyond shipping costs). But you first need to find someone to swap with. Who should you consider?

• Someone who runs an Etsy/Artfire shop if you happen to run one as well (makes the trade value easier to figure out)
• Someone that you have talked to in the past (eg. online friend)
• Someone that you’ve met in person before (like at a Blythe Meet)

When initiating the idea of having a personal swap with someone, remember to be polite and courteous! The worst that someone can say is no and don’t be offended if they do – it may be because they don’t think that they have the time to devote to going through their dolly things or time to craft or they have other priorities to deal with first. It does help if you’ve spoken to them before, or they at least know who you are! Don’t just become friends with someone for the purpose of wanting to trade things with them – it can be a little perk that comes up later, but no one wants to be friends with someone who just wants things from them.

I find that personal swaps are a great way to get something new or “new” while honing my own crafting skills without hoarding everything that I make for myself (and my dolls are thankful too that they get to wear something made by someone else!).

The Personal Swap Do’s Round-Up:

• Be polite and courteous when asking someone if they want to do a swap with you.
• Try to match the swap items with them (by number of items and/or overall perceived monetary value).
• Discuss shipping details ahead of time – if you both decide to use tracking, then pay for tracking.
• Let your swap partner know when you’ve received your package.

The Personal Swap Dont’s Round-Up:

• Don’t be cheap! While it may be fun to get new things for not a whole lot of money, it’s not fun for your swap partner if you don’t actually send them something that would be fun for them. So don’t send things with rips or tears or stains unless you’ve mentioned it to them first (and they’re okay with it!).
• Don’t ignore the agreement between the two of you. If you said you would ship by a certain date, you should follow that. If you said you would ship with insurance and tracking, then do so.
• Don’t forget to let them know when you’ve shipped out the package, they may not be home when the package arrives otherwise or not even know to expect one.
• Don’t feel pressured into going through with the swap. If neither of you have sent your packages yet and there’s suddenly a reason why you cannot fulfill your swap package (either by emergency or conflicts), let your swap partner know! Communicate at all times to let them know.