Weekly Inspiration

Borboleta amarela, originally uploaded by Juh Vivá.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.

Showing Related Etsy Items on your Wordpress Site or Blog

This trick is something I just set up on my own site and is specific to blogs and sites running self-hosted Wordpress. Unfortunately I don't have an alternative for other platforms or wordpress.com hosted blogs. However if you have wordpress installed on your own hosting read on for a very cool trick to get more people to click from your site to your etsy shop.

I've been using a widget here on this blog called LinkWithin for quite a long time, at the bottom of each post it links to related posts here on the blog. I thought that it would be great to have something like this on my website but linking to my Etsy items. I searched through a lot of related post wordpress plugins before finally finding one that will pull items from an external site. The plugin is called nrelate and it lets you pull related posts not just from your blog but from any site in your blogroll. I have the links I want displayed in a separate link list and only my Etsy shop in the blogroll. I set the plugin to show 0 posts from site and 5 from my blogroll and now I have Etsy items beneath every posts on my site.

Weekly Inspiration

Three Roses Ring, originally uploaded by KitandCaboodle.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.

Video: Walkthrough my Photo Studio

I know a lot of people prefer to shoot their product photos in natural light. I however don't have much luck with this for a couple reasons A) I live in Maine where 6 months of the year days are very short and dark and B) I'm a night owl so even in the summer I'm more likely to be shooting my pictures at night. So I have a light tent setup that I use for taking my photos. This short video shows how I have my photo studio set up.

This is my photo equipment:

• Panasonic Lumix FZ35 Camera - This is the only expensive part of my photo setup, it's a higher end point and shoot camera. It has full manual controls plus a ton of preset controls for lighting, shutter speed, aperture, etc. but isn't quite as nice (and expensive) as a Digital SLR. You really should get the best camera you can afford, it makes a big difference.
• 16 inch Light Tent - Bought on Ebay for about $20, I also have a large 36 inch one but I use it rarely. The tent came with the blue backdrop I use (and also white and black which are better for most items).
• 2 Desk Lamps - Your basic variety that can be found at any Walmart, Staples, etc. each with a daylight compact florescent bulb. The lamps is less important than the light bulbs used, you want daylight bulbs because the color temperature is a more pure while than most indoor bulbs (which are yellower).
• Reflectors - Made of cardboard covered with aluminum foil.
• Various props - Jewelry display bust, piece of coral, etc.

Weekly Inspiration

Set of 4 Retro Napkin Rings..., originally uploaded by Arzu Musa.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.

Weekly Inspiration

It's been a while since there's been a studio inspiration so here's a really lovely one.

Untitled, originally uploaded by la vida compartida... {RosaMaría}.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.

Video: Improve Your Writing

Etsy recently broadcast the Etsy Success Symposium Writing Workshop. This is good stuff regardless of where you sell so give it a view.

Watch live streaming video from etsy at livestream.com